UCT, as a good research university, likes to compete in worldrankings, endorsing its  high international profile. Well, we havecreamed another competition, in relative terms, but Inevertheless have some unsolicited advice on how we can improve ourranking even further to power our way into the 'PremierLeague' top 200 of this particular competition.

We are talking about the Webometricsworld ranking of university websites, which has just released its2008 rankings (thanks to PeterSuber's Open Access News for bringing this to my attention). UCTcomes in at number 385 out of over 14,000 universities. Not bad atall - it puts us at the topof Africa and gets us in ahead of all but two Latin Americanuniversities and all Indian universities (where Bangalore comes in at605). Not unexpectedly, the top 8 African universities are from SouthAfrica, with Stellenbosch second at 654 and Rhodes third at 722.UNISA, surprisingly comes in quite low - 8th, at 1,499. DUT is thelowest rated South African university at 8,735.

So, congratulations to UCT and its web developers. But can I begrudging and suggest that we should do better? We need to get intothe world top 200 - the Premier League, among the big Asian, US andEuropean players (and yes, that is the order). After all, UCT pridesitself on its far-sightedness in ICT development and has created theCentre for Educational Technologyfor the development of ICT use for teaching and learning - somethingthat turned out in a recent online discussion forum in the eMerge2008 online conference to be the envy of many of our colleaguesin other universities. 

To get a hint on how to do better, one needs to look at thecriteria for evaluation. This is what the Webometrics site says aboutits criteria:

The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Webpublication, not to rank institutions. Supporting Open Accessinitiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and toother academic material are our primary targets. However webindicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are notbased on number of visits or page design but global performance andvisibility of the universities.

As other rankings focusedonly on a few relevant aspects, specially research results, webindicators based ranking reflects better the whole picture, as manyother activities of professors and researchers are showed by theirweb presence.

The Web covers not onlyonly formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarlycommunication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the highstandards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reachmuch larger potential audiences, offering access to scientificknowledge to researchers and institutions located in developingcountries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, politicalor cultural stakeholders) in their own community.

The Webometrics rankinghas a larger coverage than other similar rankings. The ranking is notonly focused on research results but also in other indicators whichmay reflect better the global quality of the scholar and researchinstitutions worldwide.

The site includes a very useful ten-pointlist of good web practice for university sites. But it is clearwhat UCT needs to do to improve its rankings, and that is to put itsscholars' research output online, to make it accessible and searchable and increasethe 'global performance and visibility of its research'. Note thatthe ranking includes not only formal journals and repositories, butalso 'informal scholarly communication'. The SocialResponsiveness programme in the UCT Planning Office isdemonstrating that we produce a lot of that, too, although we do notrecord it properly. Putting the not inconsiderable output of UCT'sstudent and staff community programmes would serve a dual purpose ofincreasing the reach and impact of these vital resourcesand increasing the university's research profile.

So how about a drive to put UCT's considerable research output online(including its very substantial contribution to communitydevelopment) and see if we can shine even better in anotherinternational ranking? And yes, this does apply also to all those S&T departments North of Jammie steps. 

This weekend, from 14-17 June the Cape Town Book Fair takes over the Cape Town International Convention Centre, so this blog is about a new book, Stealing Empire, by Adam Haupt, published by the HSRC Press. Last year  close on 50,000 visitors attended, giving the lie to the idea that South Africans don't read and are not attracted to books. As Dave Chislett said today in his new blog - the Chiz- on The Times newspaper's blog site, the problem is not that people don't read - witness the high circulation of popular newspapers -  but rather that publishers do not publish for them, nor bookshops target readers beyond the safe urban middle class. 

In celebration of the Book Fair, today I am therefore pointing to a book by a UCT colleague and partner in the PALM project, Adam Haupt, that does not target the popular readership Dave is talking about, but explores some of the issues of global media dominance that is part of the proplem. Published by the HSRC Press, this is a scholarly title, but provides an incisive and lively account of the ways in which global coroporate media interests dominate and appropriate 'aspects of youth, race, gender, cultural expression and technology for their own enrichment - much to the detriment of all society.' However the real appeal of the book is not only the study of how this appropriation works, but also of how, in a country like South Africa countercultures like that of the hip-hop activists in the Cape Flats of Cape Town in turn use new media and IP subversion to appropriate their own space. The book explores the MP3 revolution and Napster and digital sampling in hip-hop and explores alternatives to proprietary approaches to the production of culture and knowledge. This is a theorised account of dominant culture and subversion, drawing largely on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire. This use of theory, said UCT deputy-Vice-Chancellor at the launch a few weeks ago, is in itself an act of appropriation and subversion. We in the developing world, Martin argued, are not supposed to theorise; rather, we are required to provide the raw materials for the theorists of the North. 

The extra treat is that you can listen to a podcast on the book that includes discussion of the book and material from what was a very lively launch. The book is published by the HSRC Press, which launched the book at the Book Lounge in Cape Town, with perfromances from Burni,of the Cape Town feminist hip-hop group, Godessa and Caco the Noble Savage, a hip-hop activist with a wonderfully ironic take on the impact of globalisation that is the subject of the book. Being able to listen to the artists that Adam is talking about provides an added dimenstion to the reading of the book -a must-read accompanied by a must-listen. 

Given that this is an HSRC Press book, it is available full text online for free download. Print copies are available for sale in South Africa and in many other countries through print-on-demand distribution arrangements. So enjoy the Book Fair, but read Adam's book, too to get a critical perspectiveof the forces at play

Adam will be speaking in a panel at the Book Fair on Saturday afternoon - “Holding us together or pulling us apart?” The role of the South African Media in the creation and mutation of identities." 

The UCT campus is slowly coming to life as the summer season winds to a close and children head reluctantly back to school. To wake us up properly, the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education was officially launched today, appropriately at the start of the new school year. 

The Cape Town Declaration was drafted by a meeting convened in Cape Town in September, bringing together a group of comitted people from across the world at the offices of the Shuttleworth Foundation which convened the gathering along with the Open Society Institute. (For more on the process of drafting the Declaration, see my September blog).

To read and sign the Declaration, go to http://www.capetowndeclaration.org

Of particular relevance to us in the developing world is the fact that the Declaration articulates the development of open education resources as a matter of particpation and not just of access, describing open education as a democratic collaborative environment with global particpation. The opening passage reads:

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.  

The Declaration also stresses that Open Education is not a matter of content alone, but that this openness needs to encompass the collaborative potential offered by technology and should also include and understand the processes of education:

However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

This is explicitly acknoweldged in the Press Release:

"Open sourcing education doesn't just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant," said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/ ).  "Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability.  The same kind of success is possible for open education."

Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning materials. It opens the door to small scale, local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.

"Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open education," said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. "Countries like South Africa need to start producing and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing possible."

 The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages and the growing list of signatories includes:  Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel, President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include: Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning; Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth Foundation.

Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks has made a remarkable impact in the short time since it was published. Larry Lessig hailed it as probably the most important book of the decade. Benkler's keynote at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik was therefore awaited with considerable anticipation by many of us who know his work.

I covered his keynote address at the iCommons Summit:
In a densely argued paper, Benkler persuaded Commoners that where we are – the Commons movement - is not a passing fashion but a basic reality and part of a transitional trend in social, economic and political affairs. In the traditional media, where massive investment is required to obtain a voice, power is centralised in the hands of the large corporations, making it all to easy for the voices of ordinary citizens to be silenced.

But mass dissemination of information is now possible through decentralised peer-to-peer and collaborative networks, creating space for effective resistance by ordinary citizens against attempts to force silence through censorship or to bury corruption.
The importance of Benkler's argument is that he takes the debate about collaborative modes of knowledge production deeper than the cultural context in which these issues are usually set, arguing that the Commons poses a fundamental challenge to the accepted proprietary theories of how economics and politics work. The growth of non-proprietary, collaborative ways of working offers opportunities for addressing human welfare and development, away from the power dynamics of big business and political hegemonies.

Read on in the iCommons blog, where I report that what emerged in Benkler's talk was, first of all, an analysis of the ethical dimesnions of the Commons and, secondly, a dense bu fascinating account of how peer production and his picture of a world in which the tensions between the proprietary and non-proprietary modes of production could lead to the development of a new version of the political economy.

South African academics are encouraged by national policy for publication reward to publish in accredited journals, with overseas journals considered the most prestigious. Leaving aside for a moment any critique of this policy, how can the successful authors ensure that the knowledge they have generated is not priced right out of the market for their colleagues and fellow-citizens? This is a real issue, given that the subscription prices of the big commercial journals have risen at about double the rate of inflation in the last decade. Even large and well-endowed universities are struggling to keep up their subscriptions to the leading journals (let alone all 24,000 journals out there), so it is no surprise that South African universities don't subscribe to a number of the journals in which their academics publish.

This came home to me when a colleague, Dick Ng'ambi, emailed to his department the other day 'Maybe Eve Gray has a point. I've just received this alert from Springer alerting me on the electronic publication of my article. The cost of accessing this article is US$30 otherwise UCT has to pay (subscribe) to read its own output - are we being short changed?' The Springer announcement reads: We are very pleased to be the first to congratulate you on the electronic publication of your article "Influence of Individual Learning Styles in Online Interaction: a Case for Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ)" published in "IFIP International Federation for Information Processing". If your institution has access to this journal, you may view your paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34731-8_14 (you may need to copy and paste the URL into your browser).
Well, UCT does not have a subscription, so how do Dick and his colleagues get to read his article, short of paying $30 a view (the price of a thick hardback book in this part of the world, or around 15 hamburgers on the 'hamburger index')?

There are in fact some practical things that academic authors can do to ensure that they have maximum access to their own publications. The most important would be to publish for preference in an Open Access journal if there is one in your field. (And yes, they ARE peer-reviewed and there are high quality publications among the 2,000-odd OA journals, as well as one OA author who has recently won a Nobel Prize.) Next, it is advantageous to secure the right to archive a preprint or postprint of an article on your personal or institutional website. A preprint is the article in the form submitted to the journal, before peer reviewing. A postprint is the article revised according to peer reviewers' recommendations, but without the journal's editing and typesetting.) What is clear from research conducted on the impact of archiving, is that the availability of a pre-or postprint increases the downloads of the journal article and can have a significant effect on the citation levels of your work. It also means that yourarticle can be made available to your colleagues, or more generally, depending on the policy of the publisher.

What local authors do not all seem to know is that most journal publishers - some 90% of them - including the major ones, do allow this practice. In Dick's case, Springer allows for both pre-and postprint archiving.

So how do you handle this if you are submitting or publishing an article? To check the policy of the journal you are thinking of publishing with, go the the Sherpa/Romeo website, where you can search on journals and publishers to establish their policies. The next step is to use one of the toolkits available through the Science Commons Rio Framework on Open Science (blogged in an earlier blog), which includes links to the Copyright Toolbox produced through a joint UK/Netherlands university collaboration. Then negotiate a contract with as much access as you can, using the sample clauses set out in the toolkits, which by now must be pretty familiar to the journal publishers, seeing that they were created by major university bodies. These include retaining copyright (if you can get away with it) or at least being able to archive your article in some form and being allowed to use your own article in teaching and further research.

The really important thing, though, is that we need to lobby for policies in South Africa for the creation and mandating of research repositories in our universities. This is vital, given the increased access to and impact for our research that this could achieve. But more about that in another blog....