I was given pause for thought last week when, in a University of Cape Town  Centre for Higher Education Development seminar on research ethics, Kevin Williams, of the Higher and Adult Education and Development Unit (HEASDU) mentioned that some of his respondents to an investigation of the ethics involved in higher education practitioner research had expressed doubts about the real intentions of researchers interviewing them. Were these researchers really interested in the importance of the research they were conducting, or was their main concern to get material that could be worked into journal articles and chapters in books, for promotion purposes? This might have been something of an aside in Kevin's talk, but it struck a chord and made me think that there might indeed be an ethical dimension in our obsession with journal article counts and accredited publications.

I have had the question in mind as I have scanned a number of recent publications on the renewal of higher education in Africa and have noted with concern the persistence of the use of counts of journal articles published in ISI journals as the standard and sometimes the only measure for the status of African research in the world. In other words, in a continent in which the goal of public investment in research is explicitly to contribute to national growth and development, the measure of success all too often applied is the production of a lot of journal articles in foreign publications targeted at other scholars in the field. This is hardly a metric that is going to tell us anything about what our scholars are really contributing to the resolution of the considerable problems that challenge the continent.

The surge of  interest in African higher education is good part owing to the publication by the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) of a series of reports on the state of higher education in the SADC region, summarised in Towards a Common Future: Higher Education in the SADC Region. Drawing in part from this, Sci-Dev.net has published a series of articles on developments in African higher education. And the World Bank, backtracking from its damaging dismissal of higher education as a funding priority in the 1980s, in 2008 published Accelerating Catch-up: Tertiary Education for Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa1.

The message in all of these reports has a not very equal measure of good and bad news. The good news is that there is a concerted effort to turn around the deficits in African higher education, damaged by 20 years of funding neglect, on top of a poor colonial inheritance.

The bad news is that African higher education remains in poor shape, in need of radical infusions of funding and visionary planning. It is all too easy to forget that when the wave of independence rolled across Africa from the 1960s, there were very few universities outside of South Africa, and as  universities were rapidly developed in newly independent countries, these were based on the colonial model, designed to produce a governing and professional elite and to reinforce what were accepted as 'international' values.

This is only one of the reasons why I am concerned with the insistence on ISI journal article counts as the measure of research excellence. This is par excellence a colonial measure, designed to value research according to how it conforms to criteria set by a commercial conglomerate in the metropolis/the USA to define what is 'mainstream'.  Africa, on the other hand, is about as far off in the periphery as one can get and, not unpredictably, does not score well in this index. What is often ignored that is that the value system that underpins this particular measure is competitiveness of universities and individual scholars  in the the not very level playing field of the global knowledge economy, where commercial enterprise and copyrights and patents are seen as the ways to make a difference.

There is no doubt that as long as this remains an accepted standard of excellence by the most powerful players in the global scholarly community, African scholars will have to go on playing this game. And this is an ethical issue. As Obama calls for shared values and the power of ideals over cynicism, power politics and greed, perhaps the way in which Africa can say 'Yes we can!' is in learning to value the knowledge it produces by its own standards. In those SADC countries in which 89% of scholars responded that their research interests coincided with national development targets, how can we develop measures for 'Africa's share of world science' that measure this rather than participation in someone else's science endeavours?

How can we re-cast the idea of what is 'international' – as Paul Zeleza has said, how do we learn to globalise our research and localise US research? Most importantly, how do we revalue the hierachies of 'applied' and 'basic' research to develop ways of valuing what we in Africa are really good at: high level and high quality research that responds to and learns from society? How do we get support for the more effective and more extensive production of research outputs that  this kind of research is already producing and that demonstrate genuine contributions to national and regional development?

What is certain is that if African universities were to provide open access for the considerable volume of publications already posted online by development research units and ensure that these are easliy accessible, this in itself could boost the contribution of African universities to development goals. 

1. I am not including the url to the World Bank publication, by the way, because of its confused approach to its intellectual property rights management. I would have thought that the World Bank would want its African readership, in particular, to read this publication. But, although it exists as an e-book, that version is 'available to subscribers only'. Otherwise you can buy it in print. Does the World Bank really want to make money from African countries by selling its publications, or restrict access to a text that is readily available in PDF format and costs nothing to distribute? The e-book is copyrighted with an 'all rights reserved' licence, that nevertheless states that '[t]he International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank encourages dissemination of its work and will normally grant permission to reproduce portions of the work promptly.'  Which being translated means that you need to apply  to the US Copyright Clearance Centre for permission to photocopy or reprint 'any part of this work'.  You have to either write a letter or telephone – no email address available. Could someone please send an ambassador to the World Bank publisher to explain how Creative Commons licences work?

On Obama's inauguration day, I thought I was going to be in the wrong place.

I was banking on seeing the speech live. But instead I was at a celebration for  a very good policy research organisation – one of the many in South Africa that take it for granted that what research is about is making a difference and that their research publications should be made available free online for everybody. It is one of those very South African research organisations that have became a source of high quality research interventions to inform development in a democratic South Africa.  

The occasion was the launch as  an Institute  of  PLAAS - the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.  The acronym is wonderful – for non-South Africans, you need to know that 'plaas' is 'farm' in Afrikaans and that is the language of the rural workers in the Western Cape who are a primary focus of  PLAAS's research. The venue was the pool terrace of a hotel near the sea, at a spot where Robben Island is just a short way across the bay, a reminder perhaps of the Mandela inheritance that Obama might draw on.

I arrived at the venue with the Inauguration very much in mind, thinking through how things might change for us with a new US President. Obama's is a very different face in the now gloriously inappositely-named White House, with special meaning for Africa. In the background, the sound effect is the thundering crunch of falling masonry as the mad world of global business falls apart. From the southern tip of Africa, the question is not only how Obama will do as President, particularly in relation to Africa, but also whether the economic crash is going to be hard enough to give him space to help usher in a different and less exploitative world order.

In his interview at Google, while still a candidate, Obama had given us a glimpse of  his vision for a more open way of government, a world in which access to knowledge and information is a guarantee of democratic participation and good governance. 'If you give people good information,' he said, 'they will make good decisions'. Giving good information and making it accessible to the people who need it is what  PLAAS and other research groupings like it do pretty well.
 
In my naïve way, I believe that this kind of research is in truth the globally competitive cutting edge strength of the South African research endeavour, rather than the journal indexes, journal article counts and the tallying up of citation counts that is used as the metric for valuing South African research. The engaged research carried out by organisations like PLAAS features the combination of high quality and cutting edge basic research with real engagement with the community. As Subbiah Arunachalam would say, scholarly communications need to flow from scholar to scholar, from scholar to farmer, from farmer to farmer and from farmer to scholar. That is one of the things that makes for really good research.

But organisations like PLAAS do face problems in our current research policy environment. This   emerged in the speech of Ben Cousins, the Director of PLAAS He said two things that struck me particularly on US inauguration night. One was that, although the Institute publishes a high volume of quality research in print and on its website and makes sure that this reaches government policy-makers and other stakeholders, PLAAS's researchers are under relentless pressure from the university to publish more and more journal articles in 'accredited' (i.e. indexed) journals in order to attract government publication subsidies. Policy research papers and research reports on development-focused research don't count.

The other piece of information Ben gave us was that the government appears to have taken a strangely wrong-headed direction – as he sees it - in its land rights reform policy and is planning  an empowerment programme that aims to create black empowerment through the sponsoring of large-scale corporate farmers who could operate in a globally competitive market.  

In both of these cases, the values at play are those of  the world that seems to be failing, of the large corporations, with profits and competitiveness as the driving forces. That is all too clear in the land rights reform proposals. However, not all academics recognise that it is this very same global business world that owns and directs the hallowed traditions of journal publication and citation counts that dominate how scholarship is disseminated and how it is valued in South Africa.  After all,  the journals that are most highly rated tend to be those in the hands of large commercial publishers. And the way these are indexed – and hence valued – is in the hands of a single US conglomerate. Thomson Reuters owns the ISI journal indexing system that is treated with such reverence in South African academe and it is Thomson Reuters and no-one else that decides who wins and who loses in this particular game, which journals make the cut and which don't.

What is happening in South African research therefore is that the commercially-driven values of global competitivenesss in exactly the world order that Obama is challenging dominate the academic reward system, marginalising the value-driven research that aims to make a difference, contributing to  national development in precisely the way government says it wants its research investment to deliver.

It turned out that there was a television screen in the venue, so it was with the supporters of PLAAS that I listened to the inauguration speech. There was less of relevance than in his interview at Google, where he talked of the need to provide open access to all aspects of policy making, making medical policy through a consultative process, but 'not letting the pharmaceutical companies buy the table' and expressing the perspective he has as the grandson of a woman living without running water or electricity in rural Kenya. But in the inaugural speech, he did talk of the restoration of 'those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.' These things are also the values of research centres like PLAAS and not of the global journal publishing system that has grown up in the last 60 years, giving us s remarkably inequitable knowledge regime, where far too much of the really important research that we do is consigned to the margins.

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].

On 27 and 28 September, the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) convened a high-level two-day workshop on access to research data. The workshop was designed to address what South Africa's response should be in relation to the OECD Declaration, Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Publicly Funded Research. A hint as to why this workshop was being convened now came from a press cutting included in the conference pack, reporting that South Africa is being considered as an additional member of the OECD, something that would be a major boost to the country if it were to come about. Another reason was mentioned by Owen Njamela, from the Chief Directorate, R&D Investments at the DST: that in the last few months the DST has announced a considerable increase in its strategic R&D targets for the next decade as a way of increasing the country's international competitiveness. This means that the number of postgraduate degrees and the levels of research output will need to grow radically in the next decade. It was good to see these targets being linked to open approaches to knowledge and information sharing, in contrast to the restrictive and lock-down approach of the Draft Bill on IPR for Publicly Funded Research published for comment a few months ago (see my blog entry of 13 July 2007). What the workshop was after, Njamela said, was to establish what it would take to create a really effective data sharing system in South Africa.

Because I see this as an important event, I am going to blog in this post the key outcomes, decisions and forward planning that hat emerged from the workshop and then provide, here and on the OpeningScholarship project blog additional postings on the keynote speeches and the presentations from local speakers, as well as some South African case studies. Keynote speeches were by Paul Uhlir of the US National Academies of Science and CODATA, Bernard Minter, Chair of the World Data Centre System at ICSU and Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego and Beatriz Torres, Programme Officer from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

The key understanding that emerged from the workshop was that, although there are a number of legitimate limitations on openness when it comes to research data – such as official secrets, personal privacy and the proprietary rights of private sector research – the default option, as spelled out by the OECD Guidelines, should be for open access and restrictions should be the exception and not the rule, only invoked with good reason. This is particularly important when data has been developed from publicly funded research. While locking up data in proprietary systems increases the fragmentation and cost and can become a barrier to the conduct of science, the keynote speakers argued that open access makes data available for use across disciplines and countries, allows for automated knowledge discovery, improves the potential for verification and accuracy and facilitates North-South and South-South transfer.

There are strategic reasons for ensuring that research data is properly disseminated and curated in South Africa. As the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa made clear, South Africa needs to increase its research visibility, needs to grow its output of high-quality publications and attract a younger cohort of scholars. And, as the ASSAf programme grows the output of local journals, I argued tin my presentation that there need to be links between scholarly publications and underlying data sets if the maximum benefits are to be gained from research investment. Looking forward, the trends are towards greater interactivity between scientific journal articles and the underlying data, for collaboratories and virtual workspaces, for the additional layers of interpretation that can be offered by semantically-rich XML documents, and for automated analysis, abstraction and correlation of data. Open Access makes this much easier.

An important issue for South Africa is the need to retain and grow the numbers of young researchers. The current system of evaluating scholars through their output of journal articles and the citation impact of these articles provides a disincentive for researchers who have grown up in a digital world, who expect rapid results in a collaborative global community of scholars and who recognise the need for high-speed supercomputing to access and analyse the vast and growing amount of data now available. Some participants felt that policy-makers are limping behind the development of new research approaches and that South Africa needed to become more forward-looking in its research policies – in fact the keynote speakers challenged South Africa to leap the technology gap to take its place at the forefront of developments.

Action plan

At the end of the workshop, Owen Njamela from the Chief Directorate, R&D Investments in the DST proposed an action plan, based on the recommendations of a series of presentations and workshop sessions. The Department would:

• Explore the recommendation made by the workshop participants for an audit of skills, curricula, databases, and systems.

• Draft a narrative report from the meeting into a draft policy document/ guidelines for data management, access and reuse.

• Undertake internal departmental consultation to ensure awareness by all departments and the executive of the DST and to identify human capital.

• Consultation with other departments – Director-General forums and research forums within government and in the industry cluster system. (There is a framework of bilateral cooperation with other departments, Njamela said and it is also important to include government departments with their own science councils, like Mintek in the Department of Mining.)

• Consultation with universities/science councils (concurrent)

• Presentation of a policy to Cabinet (June 2008, when the government considers policy priorities).

• Funding considerations proposed to National Treasury

• Implementation (2008 financial year). There might be institutions active ahead of that implementation.

My Policy Paper for the OSI International Policy Fellowship concludes with a number of policy recommendations, at international, national and institutional level. Here is a brief summary of these recommendations:

Summary of policy recommendations

There is a need for advocacy to promote the importance of effective and broad-based research dissemination as a way of achieving greater impact for African research, nationally, regionally and globally. Such advocacy would argue for the recognition of a wider range of publications, addressed not only to scholars, but aimed at the broader community. Alongside this, advocacy is needed to spell out the advantages of Open Access - particularly in the developing world context - in increasing research impact and reach.

Advocacy campaigns would need to be accompanied by the development of effective case studies to provide working examples of how research dissemination can be transformed and what impact this transformation is having.

Access and participation: At an international level, policy initiatives that address the global knowledge divide need to move from an approach driven by the idea of access - in other words the idea that developing world problems would be solved by providing greater access to global knowledge resources - to a recognition of the need for greater participation by African countries in knowledge production. This would also require international policy documents to move beyond narrowly-focused proprietary and commercially-driven metrics for the evaluation of research performance to recognition of the importance of non-proprietary, collaborative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination.

Access to publicly funded research: An important strand of such a policy environment would be the creation of policies supporting Open Access to publicly funded research, along the lines proposed by the OECD Declaration and the Salvador and Bangalore Declarations.

The WIPO Development Agenda: This programme (which is now showing signs of being accepted for implementation[1]) if implemented, could deliver a less punitive and more open international IP dispensation, offering more equitable access to knowledge and more flexible regimes for the fostering of innovation and creativity in developing countries.

Regional collaboration: Regional collaborative initiatives for the advancement of scholarly communications, such as SciELO are recommended, as is the development of an African citation index.

Intellectual Property Law: Greater openness for research dissemination could be achieved without the need for changes in IP law. However, there is a need to address the inconsistencies in South African IP legislation in relation to Fair Dealing and special provisions for educational and library use. It would be desirable to investigate the question of territorial rights and their impact on the cost of imported books.

Access to research from Public Funding: Policies for Access to Research from Public Funding could provide mandates for the deposit of research publications in institutional repositories, for national harvesting, opening up the availability of research knowledge.

Support for Open Access research publication: As recommended by the Academy of Science of South Africa, there needs to be financial and logistical support for scholarly publication at a national level. This could include the provision of funding derived from top-slicing a small percentage of the Department of Education remuneration for research publication in accredited journals. An alternative listing and indexing system for journals could contribute to raising quality standards while at the same time ensuring the national relevance of journals. Support for Open Access publication would increase visibility and impact.

Support for a wider range of publications: However, support for research dissemination needs to go beyond the traditional focus on journal articles if research publication is really to impact on national development goals. At national level, a more positive rating for publication in books and conference proceedings is needed as well as the recognition of the importance of other, less traditional publications, such as research reports and popularisations. Electronic publication needs clearer recognition.

Social impact measures: There is a need to initiate research into the development of social impact criteria as opposed to the current, proprietary and commercially-focused metrics.

Institutional policies

Academic reward and promotions: If research publication is to be development-focused and not only geared to international prestige, then institutions would need to address a wider range of criteria for academic reward and promotion, more closely geared to the development-focused goals of national higher education research and innovation policies.

Integrated communications management: There would be a good deal to be gained if institutions were to take an integrated approach to scholarly communications and the use of digital media. This could include policies for the creation and management of institutional Open Access repositories; support for the management of the contracts signed by academic authors; and addressing the publishing needs of the institution and providing support for research dissemination and publication. In other words, the institutions would endorse the centrality of research dissemination and publication, as well as access to research knowledge.