2009 might turn out to be the year in which the tipping point has been reached in scholarly publishing. There is an increasing tide of criticism of conventional, commercially-driven journal publishing and its systems for evaluating and ranking scholars and universities.  For example in a scathing article published in Times Higher Education last month Sir John Sulston, chairman of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and Nobel prizewinner in the physiology or medicine category in 2002 is quoted as saying  ‘[Journal metrics] are the disease of our times.’

But it is a crystal-clear spring day in Cape Town today, so let’s opt for the good news. And that is that Harvard and four other leading universities in the US are leveraging considerable strategic benefit from adopting open access.  Harvard has launched DASH,

its open access repository; a group of 5 leading universities, including Harvard, have launched a Compact for Open Access Publication; and, in support of this Compact, Harvard has developed  HOPE - its policy for the management of for funding support for open access publication.  This is a policy that could well serve as a model for universities wanting to tackle this issue.  

From a South African perspective, do our leading research universities, which currently compete fiercely to get journal articles into the journal indexes in order to corner a place in international university rankings, need to start rethinking their strategies to concentrate more on providing access to their scholarship? And given that South African universities are in even greater need of getting readership for their research and suffer much more than the well-endowed US institutions from ever-escalating subscription costs, should we not be more active in our support for open access authorship?  
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The New York Times has published an article about the use of ghost writers from drug companies to produce journal articles that then go out under the names of academics in US universities. This is yet another example of problems in the ethical standards of the big journal publishers and the morality in pockets of the global scholarly prestige system.

 Senator moves to block medical ghostwriting

A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.

Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Read the rest of the article here

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.

Icame back from a meeting of the Academyof Science (ASSAF) Committee on Scholarly Publishing in SouthAfrica (CSPiSA) last week feeling bouyed up and looking forward to aperiod of rapid developments in Open Access scholarly publishing inSouth Africa. We were told that the Department of Science and Technology(DST) has now dedicated a substantial three-year budget to fundthe implementation of ASSAF's recommendations for the development ofscholarly publication in South Africa. This is important stuff – aforward-looking government department investing in a major way in thedevelopment of scholarly publication, linking this to the country'sstrategic science and technology growth objectives and offeringsupport for what is in many ways a visionary Open Access programmethat is expected to deliver considerable progress in the next threeyears.

TheASSAF Report on Scholarly Publishing in SA wasan important milestone in the development of a coherent and effectivescholarly publishing environment in SA. As reported in earlierblogs, the Report was commissioned by the DST and produced what wasprobably the most coherent account of the state of scholarlyjournal publishing in South Africa, concluding with a set of 10recommendations which included strong support for the development ofa 'gold route' Open Access approach to journal publishing in SouthAfrica.

Thecentral vision of the report is for quality-controlled and governmentsupported publication of open access journals of a sufficient qualityto deliver local impact and international recognition. Qualitycontrol is to be through a peer review process carried out across thedifferent discuplines in collaboration with the National JournalEditors' Forum. Financial support for open access journalpublication, it proposed, would be by way of the dedication of asmall percentage of the revenue paid to journals through theDepartmentof Education (DoE) publication grant system, for the purpose ofpaying per-article author charges through the institution where theauthor is based.

Backingthis up is a recommendation for the creation of a national technicaland promotional platform for hosting and profiling the best SouthAfrican journals, possibly along the lines of SciELO in LatinAmerica. It is envisaged that the national platform would hostselected journals that would profile the best of South Africanresearch.

Itseems that the DST's motivation in offering this support is linked toits 10-yearplan for human capital development,which proposes a radical growth in the level of postgraduate degrees,publications and innovation levels in higher education. The ASSAfscholarly publication programme is thus seen as a key to the processof raising the bar for the quality and output of research in thecountry and leveraging upwards the profile of the country in theinternational research rankings, while at the same time improving thepositive impact of research on economic growth and socialdevelopment.

OpenAccess has been recommended not only in response to the need forincreased accessibility but also for higher levels of internationalvisibility and citation counts to profile South African research inthe conventional international rankings. While the focus of thisprogramme is fairly conventional, focusing primarily on peer reviewedscholarly journals that could perform well in the internationalcitation rankings, this is a major step forward simply because itputs publication of South African research in South Africa in thespotlight and, through links with the African Academies of Science, connects this to a broader effort to raise publication levels on thecontinent. (The creation of an African citation index is one of therecommendations in the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in SouthAfrica.) And, even more important, this intervention at lastrecognises that scholarly publishers need support if South Africaresearch is to be properly disseminated.

We understand thatthe DST accepts that this model may require long term subsidisationfor Open Access journal support and this support is perceived as partof a national service project to build capacity and serve everyscholar. To me, as a publisher, this is of central importance. In theOpeningScholarshipproject at the Universityof Cape Town, for example, we have discovered that theuniversity tracks the authorship of articles (with the purpose ofsecuring the grants that the DoE pays for publication in accreditedjournals), but that there is no tracking of publication – who isediting or publishing what and where. Publication efforts –editing, peer reviewing and producing scholarly and otherpublications – are therefore invisible and, not surprisingly Ithink, under-supported. This is surely detrimental to theuniversity, as this is an opportunity lost to profile theconsiderable contribution that this leading research university makesto scholarship and development initiatives in the region.

CSPiSA'sdelivery of the activities that have been prioritised should startvery soon now: the rolling peer review of journals across differentsubject area will be carried out in collaboration with theJournal Editors' Forum(see myblog on theinaugural meeting of the Forum last year). The idea is that this willnot only be a quality evaluation process but will be designed toprovide the potential for the development of the knowledge and skillsthat could lead to quality improvement. Agreement on the compositionof the review panels is being sought and the first subject areas tobe reviewed should start rolling out soon.

Afurther intervention being undertaken over the next six months, thistime with DoE support, is the production of a Report on a StrategicApproach to Scholarly Book Publishing by a selected panel of experts,following a fact-finding investigation by CREST at the University ofStellenbosch. Provisional findings should be available forpresentation at the National Scholarly Journal Editors' Forum in Julyand it is hoped that the final report should be ready for release in November. Another important milestone, this, as book publication is seriously under-supported and under-valued in South African policy, in spite of the remarkable success of the open access social science research council publisher, the HSRC Press.

Let's see where we are this time next year. Much further down the road, I suspect.