I have a new posting on my Gray Area blog site - http://www.gray-area.co.za. It provides a link to the video of a speech by J-C Guedon at a workshop on scholarly communications in Africa, held in Cape Town in 2009, plus commentary. The speech is a shrewd dissection of the realities of the competitive ethos that drives so much of our academic recognition and reward system, as opposed to the establishment of quality standards for more effective African scholarly communications.

This video forms part of a website containing videos and commentaries from this very lively workshop. 

I have posted a blog on my Word Press Gray Area blog - http://www.gray-area.co.za - on Thomson Reuters' narrowly focused report on research in Africa. An attempt to comandeer analysis of research performance in Africa?

I have posted a new blog - after a long blogging absence - on my new Word Press site. I will cross-post until a forward has been put in place.

This blog post is on scholarly publishing as a neglected transformation issue and the statements that the Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, has made on this issue in the course of his speeches. Here it is:

With the Higher Education Transformation Summit taking place in Cape Town on 22 April, universities have been in a reflective phase, examining their success – or lack of it – in achieving post-apartheid transformation. The report card shows that we are achieving a great deal, but could try harder. There is still a way to go before all our students and academics feel they are in institutions that are really their home.

No-one seems to have noticed the elephant in the room. In all the discussions, I see very little attention being paid to the role that scholarly communication and publication plays in the transformation process. We talk about the demographic profiles of our universities, yet we do not seem to question the communication environment that students and staff are immersed in and the values that are reflected there.

Why is it, for example, that, as the Minister of Higher Education and Training , Blade Nzimande, complained at the UNESCO 29^th World Conference on Higher Education that 'there is a gender imbalance throughout higher education systems especially in leadership positions.' in his keynote address at the Transformation Summit, he picked up on the fact that the average age of academics continues to rise and that there has been a drop in the number of staff under the age of 30? Does the publishing system that is so central in determining who is promoted and rewarded play a role in these demographics? Is this an alien environment for the young scholars that the universities want so badly to attract? Do students and researchers find their own, African, world reflected adequately in the scholarly resources that they have access to? Are the values that our researchers hold reflected in the ways in which they are supported in publishing their research?

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A thoughtful and thought-provoking blog by Cameron Neylon, a bioscientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK tackles the question of values and motivations in scientific research and the question of public support for science, through government and taxpayers. His major topic is why and how he does research and why there should be public support for this activity. But most tellingly he tackles cogently the dislocation that has happened in the 21st century between motivated scientists, their methods of carrying out and reporting on their research and the public policies that recognize this research effort.  The picture Neylon  paints of his own research - methodology to study complex biological structures - is of a high technology, collaborative and multinational research environment, in which scientists build on each others’ work in an open environment.

This is germane to our South African context, in which government policy on reward and recognition systems for individual researchers and universities does not seem to recognise the ways in which research has changed in the knowledge economy and how social and development impact can be delivered these days. Witht the IPR ACt about to be enforced, this is even more of a burning issue for South African researchers.  (More)

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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