I have not blogged for a while - I have been drowning, not waving, as I prepared the final report for my OSI International Policy Fellowship and put in place proposals for the projects that will carry forward the work started in the Fellowship programme (more on both of these in the next week or so).

Looking back over these last months, I realise that there have been some promising indications that things are moving on the African continent as university leaders tackle the challenge of the knowledge divide. A recent event that I attended was was convened as an International Planning Meeting of the Inter-Academy Panel on International Issues (IAP). Organised by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and the US National Academy of Science (NAS), it brought together delegates from the African Academies of Science in Pretoria in May for an intensive one-day workshop on 'Promoting Access to and use of Digital Knowledge Resources in Countries with Developing and Transitional Economies: The Role of Science Academies in Africa'.

Speaking for the host academy, Professor Wieland Gevers, Chair of the Publishing Committee of ASSAf, outlined the new role that is emerging for African Academies. This is the provision of evidence-based policy advice on research and the higher education sector. The focus is to build strong academies that would be effective partners for government, providing expert advice to governments from an independent perspective.. Many African academies focused on publishing, Gevers said. ASSAf recognized the overwhelming importance in developing countries of growing indigenous publishing. In its 5 years of existence ASSAf has conducted a major research project on scholarly publication in South Africa on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology, culminating in a set of strong recommendations for the development of open access journals and repositories. Government was indicating its willingness, he said (very soon) to ask the academy to oversee the implementation of a national system of inter-operable repositories as well as a system of journals and other scholarly publishing paid for by government - on the basis of Chile. The ASSAf proposal is that a proportion of the subsidy paid to universities for authorship journal articles and other scholarly publications be top-sliced to support the publication of national journals. The Academy is raising funding to set up an editors' forum that would help to enhance the quality of locally-produced journals and would promote the idea of open access publishing through the green and gold routes as a way of growing and strengthening high quality research output from South Africa.

Quite a spat has broken out in open Access circles about whether it would be better to take the 'green route' to open access mandating open repositories, or more effective to go for the 'gold route' of developing open access journals. Stevan Harnad was infuriated by Jan Velterop's statement that 'the "cure" of open access publishing is to be preferred to the "palliative" of self-archiving' and has written an angry reponse. I have followed with interest the preceding, more considered, debate in Velterop's blog, The Parachute and Harnad's Open Access Archivangelism, because I am, like Velterop, a publisher by background and appreciate his intelligent ability to balance the need for access and the realities of publishing and because I admire Harnad's intellect and passion for the cause of Open Access.

The debate made me step back and rethink my approach to green and gold (the colours of our national sports teams, by the way) in this major gold-producing country. The 'green' route seems to have become the accepted orthodoxy as was evidenced n the Bangalore workshop late last year, which produced the Bangalore Open Access Policy for Developing Nations. This makes sense, as it is quick and easy way of providing access to scholarship published in international journals that is otherwise often inaccessible in its country of origin. This means a win-win for the universities that push for publication in accredited journals for the sake of personal and institutional prestige. I have noted that there is also a considerable emphasis among the funding agencies on the need for repositories as the first and best way of providing access to developing country research.

However, the debate between Harnad and Velterop has made me think that, when it comes to the very particular case of Africa, should we not make the growth of open access journals our first priority? In a perverse way, Africa's potential to leap the technology divide and adopt more radical transformational of scholarly dissemination could be helped by its very low profile in the existing publishing systems. In a world in which the use of ICTs is drastically altering modes of knowledge dissemination, and in which scholarly publishing looks to be thoroughly shaken up, there is a paradoxical advantage in the marginalisation of African scholarly publishing. This is due to the fact that Africa has a very limited investment in the traditional print-based scholarly publication system and this frees policy-makers to engage with new trends in ways that their more privileged counterparts min the North may be constrained from doing.

Down here in the southern hemisphere, the sun is shining and the south-easter is funnelling down the mountain. The 2007 university summer term has begun and absurdly young students are thronging campus; the President has delivered a carefully-modulated State of the Nation address; and the Finance Minister has spelled out a budget that shows South Africa significantly in the black. In short, the real working year is only just beginning. So it is perhaps time, in a series of postings, to do a my own State of the Nation overview of where South Africa stands at the start of 2007 in relation to my area of interest - the dissemination and publication of African scholarship.

First, a background sketch. I hold an International Policy Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (Budapest) investigating policy for the dissemination of African scholarship. The project aims to map the complex and often contradictory policy environment that frames research publication in South Africa and other African countries. These policies tend to work in two directions: one for the leveraging of research to deliver national development goals – to which the South African government appears to be ready to allocate substantial resources - the other for the recognition and reward of scholarly publication. In particular, the project researches the question of whether countries like South Africa and its African neighbours can start to turn around the global knowledge divide and raise the reach and visibility of African research using electronic media and the Open Access publishing approaches currently taking hold across the world.

If one looks at the current state of research publication in African countries, what stands out most strongly is the persistent marginalisation of African knowledge - particularly of scholarship about Africa, produced in Africa. Globally, research dissemination takes place within a system that has been in place for around the last 100 years, which has come to be dominated by increasingly commercialised (and increasingly expensive) journals and by scholarly books produced primarily in the USA and Europe in a globally unbalanced 'publish or perish' scholarly market. For example, to cite but one statistic – in 2000, South Africa, which far exceeds any other African country in the ISI journal rankings, had just 0,5% of the articles in the combined ISI databases and 0.15% of the most cited papers (see the SA Academy of Science Report on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa 2006) . Could we really say that this is a fair and accurate evaluation of the global weight and value of the research carried out in this country?

Around 65 delegates met in a mild and sunny Leiden in early September, as guests of the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden, to discuss the the North-South divide and scholarly communication in Africa in the digital era.This was a follow-up to an initial conference on the topic in Dakar two years ago. The differences between the two conferences were telling: while the 2004 event consisted largely of informative and explanatory papers, laying the ground for an understanding of the terrain, this time there was a much more confident interrogation of the assumptions that underlie international scholarly communications systems and the power relations at play in the scholarly community. The papers were of a very high standard and the conference teased out many key issues facing African scholarly publishing, bringing delegates up short against of the major challenges that face the continent, yet not descending into the abyss of Afro-pessimism that so often characterises meetings of this kind.

Appropriately, given the venue, collaboration and partnership were very much on the agenda. As Adebayo Olukoshi said in his opening speech, global knowledge dissemination is characterised by asymmetries from previous systems of knowledge production. The conference was designed to address these asymmetries, he said, with the aim of developing strategies for using CODESRIA's CODICE documentation centre to help leapfrog institutional practice across the continent. In this context, CODICE is seen as a pioneer centre on the African continent for the development of digital media and online resources in the social sciences. The main lines of discussions that emerged at the conference were cogently summarised in this opening speech - the inequalities inherent in the scholarly system and the marginalisation of African knowledge in that system; the problematic yet ultimately liberatory role of technology; the need for leapfrogging disadvantage; and the vital importance of collaboration and resource sharing.

Open Access publication seemed to have ready acceptance across the board as the most enabling dissemination model for African scholarship, offering greater citation impact, greater efficiency and, most important, more democratic access to knowledge. Given that a number of speakers identified distribution problems as the major barrier to research dissemination, the potential for Open Access digital distribution was doubly attractive, leading to an increase in impact factor of between 56% and 227%, according to Marlon Domingues of the ASC.

The conference agreed that Codesria should propose the creation of an African citation index as a way of addressing the inequalitites that characterise the marginalisation of African publication.