On July 7-11, 2008, a delegation from the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf) visited BIREME In Sao Paulo, Brazil. The ASSAF delegation was there to review the potential for the adoption of the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) model as a platform to manage scientific publication in South Africa. Given that there is a wider African Academies of Science project to boost scholarly publishing across Africa, this could be a spearhead for a future regional open access network. (For background, see my blog of 30 April.)

This was an important visit. SciELO is a model of successful regional collaboration to raise the profile of a developing economy region's research publication in the face of an inequitable global system. Given that Thomson Scientific is reported to be looking at the question of regional journals right now, it is worth looking at a bit of history. A similar exercise happened in 1982, at which the status of 'peripheral' or 'Third World' journals was discussed. As Jean-Claude Guèdon describes the result in a recent publication, given the task of reviewing how to deal with a national perspective on contributions to world science, the national perspective was 'ultimately dismissed, presumably as a provincial exercise of no interest to the rest of the world. Without justification or analysis, a distinction between “local publications” and “mainstream” or “world science” as if it were evidence”.

We live with the results of this perverse interpretation of scientific universalism' as Guèdon describes it, as we all know.

BIREME has produced a detailed newsletter on this visit in which Wieland Gevers is quoted on South Africa's position in this regard:

According to Wieland Gevers, among the 225 South African scientific journals, over one hundred have never had an article cited. “South Africa occupies a paradoxical position in the context of scientific publication: it is simultaneously a giant within the African context and a dwarf in the international arena”, defined Gevers. He also added that “we are talking about a country that has nine Nobel Prize winners, and four are related to scientific fields, including Allan MacLeod Cormack ... -the co-inventor of CAT scanning...

We watch the outcome of this initiative with great interest. SciELO could be a powerful partner. Guèdon describes it as probably the most  successful regional/international initiative - it includes Portugal and Spain as well as Latin American countries – which has the potential, he argues, 'to play a formidable role in this battle to remove the divide barriers or, at least, lower them' . He argues for 'strong international collaboration with well-targeted countries to build a base for the reform of scientific power in a credible way. These countries are quite easy to identify and have already been mentioned before: they include China and India. Africa must be included because it is suffering the most from the knowledge divide that has been constantly decried, criticised and attacked in this text.'

More background from the BIREME newsletter:

SciELO has had a successful performance in Latin America and the Caribbean, and is an outstanding reference in the process of research, evaluation and adoption of a solution for national scientific communication...The first portal - SciELO Brazil collection - started operating publicly in 1998. Since then, the SciELO project has developed and is present in eight countries, adding up to over 550 titles of certified journals and more than 180 thousand full-text articles available free online (open access), including original articles, review articles, editorials and other types of communication...

ASSAf showed interest to put into practice a pilot experience with an initial group of five South African publications in order to test the functionalities of the SciELO platform. The BIREME was invited to make a technical visit to South Africa in September 2008 to demonstrate the system to the members of the Academy Advisory Board.

Guédon, J., 2007. Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science. In Ferreira, Sueli Mara S.P. and Targino, Maria das Graças, Eds. Como gerir e qualificar revistas científicas. Available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00012156/ [Accessed August 3, 2008].

We met for our meals on a shaded terrace under palms and spreading tropical trees in the centre of the enormous campus of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and held our discussions in their senate room, distinguished home to many of India's leading scientists. Coming from India, China, Brazil and Africa, the UK and US, we were the guests of the Indian Academy of Science, the IISC and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and had met to discuss South-South relationships in the development of Open Access research dissemination.

The workshop was an important further step in a growing movement of South-South alliances. What emerged most strongly at the Africa-centred conference in Leiden a few months ago was the question, 'Whose knowledge, for what purpose for whom?' The issue there was the tendency for development rhetoric to focus on the supply of knowledge to the developing world rather than the production of knowledge in and from the African continent. This time, in India, the assertion of the rights of developing nations went a step further. Right at the beginning of the workshop, in one of the introductory addresses, Prof N Balakrishnan, the Associate Director of the Indian Institute of Science, said, 'What we need to do is change the “developing country” rhetoric to a world perspective.' Put another way – when I emailed Gordon Graham, of the LOGOS journal, one of the wisest people I know from the publishing industry, he wrote back, 'Do tell me more about the workshop. What a combination. India, China, Brazil and Africa constitute about two thirds of humanity.' They are both right – what this workshop reminded us is that we in the developing world are the norm - with all our challenges - not the privileged and powerful who call the shots in scholarly publishing. Alma Swan raised the same issue in another way, echoing something that was said in Leiden: that we have a problem with the common expression of the international/local dichotomy. Why should developing country issues be considered 'local' when these apply to the greater proportion of the global population, while , for example, we bow down to the 'international' status of the comparatively narrowly-focused ISI indexed journals?

Lawrence Liang, of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, gave us the message in another way. In a typically virtuoso and mind-stretching keynote address, in which he charted different meanings of ownership, in different languages and cultures. He invited us to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property. In that world, he said, those who have most freedom are those who own the most IP. Property in the English sense, he said, the conflation of 'self' and 'own' resting on exclusion, is something not common to other languages. In Indian, apnapen is not a matter of owning, or property , but of closeness. Ownership in this sense has the obligation of care and the opposite of care is brutality, like the 'war' on piracy that is currently being waged – passport control in a borderless world, Liang argued.

At the iCommons Summit in Rio, Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil gave a lyrical account of his world view, as well as – unusually for a Minister - singing us a few choruses. One of the things he said was, “ I am still cultivating this strange and provocative taste of bringing together ideas that seemed to be bound to be eternally separate. just like parabolic and camara. I like to see the world echoing just like the head of a berimbau. I like to connect the differences.” (In the interests of global confusion - the English text of this speech can be found on the Australian Creative Commons site.)

So, in the interests of making the world echo, and of putting a different spin on the challenge posed at iCommons for developing countries, to leapfrog from the 19^th to the 21^st century, I would like to make a link between pre-colonial history in my part of the world and the iCommons discussion of the 21^st century networked society. Perhaps the 21^st century networked world has something to learn from 18^th century southern Africa.

Judy Breck, in her Golden Swamp virtual learning blog, describes the networked society in relation to the lateral, nodal structure envisaged for the iCommons. This has been greeted with perplexity by some. In a 2002 article in the Journal of Social History,¹ Clifton Crais (whose book² on pre-colonial Eastern Cape history I co-published at Wits University Press in 1992) describes how social reality of the people living there was remade by the colonists of the 19^th century. The idea that these societies were territorially-defined, top-down chieftainships was an invention of the colonial officials trying to make sense of the social and political order in the only language they knew – that of the nation state. What Crais describes could have a number of intriguing parallels with those battling to understand a networked iCommmons:

Political power tended to be localized, boundaries fluid and vague, and the authority of chiefs highly variable. The political landscape was both homogeneous and kaleidoscopic, with widely dispersed material and symbolic resources and constantly changing political domains. Even at moments of relative stasis domains of authority very frequently overlapped. Political identities were multiple, with the fluidity of identities generally increasing with geographical distance from any given center of power.

....The absence of any unequal distribution of economic goods, trade, or population mitigated against the centralization of power. Second, military technology and strategy were widely democratic. Third, there were multiple nodes and overlapping domains of authority.

I also enjoy the parallels when it comes to the nature of leadership:

Europeans and especially early colonial officials very often found African polities to be exasperating and scarcely intelligible. One thing seemed reasonably comprehensible, that is most easily translatable into their own political epistemologies: that there were some men of elevated status who wore and laid claim to the skins of leopards and lions. These men often practiced polygyny, lived in larger communities, usually possessed more livestock than others, and were referred to and used the title "inkosi," but beyond that seemingly little differentiated chiefs from most everyone else. ...

Leopard and lion skins might be an appealing garb for the plenary panel at next year's summit, although I am not so sure of the polygyny aspect. But seriously, where is the historian or anthropologist who could take this analogy further for us...

At the iCommons Summit in Rio in late June, copyright scholar James Boyle, author of some remarkably incisive critiques of copyright conventions, put it in a nutshell - “We have a scientific publishing system', he said, 'that is massively dysfunctional and really, really broken.' If that is the case in the USA, how much more so in South Africa, where scholarly publishing of any description struggles to survive in what is a really, really marginal market? We need to ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are capable of taking up the challenge put out by our Brazilian hosts at the conference, to take a leap from the 19^th century to the 21^st, thinking of ourselves in the developing world as capable of being in the front line of new approaches. Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian Minister of Culture, said in his opening address: “The player who today loses can become the winner. Everything changes, all the time. And only those who understand change can conquer victory, or yet, victories, which are always partial. '

So what are the new developments that emerged at the Summit, at least in relation to scholarly publishing? It is now well established that Open Access publishing increases citation rates, sometimes dramatically, particularly in developing countries. For example, Subbiah Arunachalam said that going OA had radically increased the impact and reach of a number of Indian journals, with the Journal of Public Medicine now getting over 1 million hits a year. OA, he said, is a way of getting local and relevant knowledge disseminated, too, as it can also dissipate local boundaries.

But now Open Access journal publishing is moving into version 2.0 at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS ONE has a number of radical new features, built,around an understanding of the potential that can be unleashed if one takes full advantage of what the networked environment can offer. It will be launched later this year, as an inclusive peer reviewed publication that blurs the boundaries between the different scientific fields. Rather than regarding a journal article as being 'some form of absolute truth', PLOS One will be set up for ongoing debate and discussion and will also allow for interactive development of online papers, building on conclusions and strengthening data. Most strikingly, it will allow for publication within weeks of acceptance, with open and continuous peer review happening in the open, after publication.

There is enormous discussion going on around journals and scholarly publishing and there might well be batter alternatives to the way we do things. With the Academy of Science's major review of journal publishing in South Africa newly published, is it not time to open up the discussion here?