The Academic Commons blog is running a story about a collaborative project in brainstorming what a university could look like in a digital age. From the blog article:

The folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAChttp://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age." The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

It is framed by the following proposition:
"We are faced today by a pressing question: How do institutions--social, civic, educational--transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?"

This provocative and difficult question--What does a peer-to-peer learning institution look like and how does it differ from what we understand our traditional learning institutions to be?--is only part of what makes this project exciting.

This project looks as if it is bringing together a number of cutting edge players, so it is well worth visiting the blog and the site for the paper. It should certainly stimulate discussion about what a South African university could develop into. Given the diversity of our university communities and the very rapid rate of transformation we face, this kind of forward thinking could offer us a lot.

I blogged this post for the iCommons blog, happy to find an established author experimenting with new ways of promoting film rights, creating opportunities for smaller, independent film-makers. Perhaps we could experiment with something similar to generate more films from the work of South African writers.

Here is the first paragraph of the iCommons blog:

I scan the Open Access and Creative Commons blogs regularly for new developments, but it is gratifying when news of a new venture in commons thinking comes not from the open community, but from industry sources. I was interested, therefore, to see this piece from the Publishers Lunch Newsletter, a lively daily commentary on the publishing industry written by publisher Michael Cader. By the way, Publisher's Lunch is itself a very successful example of a mixed business model – it provides a free daily online newsletter and a longer and more detailed version in return for a very low subscription ($15 a month). Subscribers get access to a directory of literary agents, a rights trading market, and a database of book reviews. The site carries advertising, but I will give it a free advertisement - for anyone who wants the low-down on what goes on in this very secretive industry, from a lively voice, this is the place to go.

Read the rest here.

Quite a spat has broken out in open Access circles about whether it would be better to take the 'green route' to open access mandating open repositories, or more effective to go for the 'gold route' of developing open access journals. Stevan Harnad was infuriated by Jan Velterop's statement that 'the "cure" of open access publishing is to be preferred to the "palliative" of self-archiving' and has written an angry reponse. I have followed with interest the preceding, more considered, debate in Velterop's blog, The Parachute and Harnad's Open Access Archivangelism, because I am, like Velterop, a publisher by background and appreciate his intelligent ability to balance the need for access and the realities of publishing and because I admire Harnad's intellect and passion for the cause of Open Access.

The debate made me step back and rethink my approach to green and gold (the colours of our national sports teams, by the way) in this major gold-producing country. The 'green' route seems to have become the accepted orthodoxy as was evidenced n the Bangalore workshop late last year, which produced the Bangalore Open Access Policy for Developing Nations. This makes sense, as it is quick and easy way of providing access to scholarship published in international journals that is otherwise often inaccessible in its country of origin. This means a win-win for the universities that push for publication in accredited journals for the sake of personal and institutional prestige. I have noted that there is also a considerable emphasis among the funding agencies on the need for repositories as the first and best way of providing access to developing country research.

However, the debate between Harnad and Velterop has made me think that, when it comes to the very particular case of Africa, should we not make the growth of open access journals our first priority? In a perverse way, Africa's potential to leap the technology divide and adopt more radical transformational of scholarly dissemination could be helped by its very low profile in the existing publishing systems. In a world in which the use of ICTs is drastically altering modes of knowledge dissemination, and in which scholarly publishing looks to be thoroughly shaken up, there is a paradoxical advantage in the marginalisation of African scholarly publishing. This is due to the fact that Africa has a very limited investment in the traditional print-based scholarly publication system and this frees policy-makers to engage with new trends in ways that their more privileged counterparts min the North may be constrained from doing.

When I set out to explore the policyframework for scholarly publishing in South Africa, I did so with aburning question that I have carried over from my publishing career.Given the scenario that I sketched in my last posting, in whichAfrican voices are largely silenced by the conventions of globalscholarly publication, what I would be looking for would be nationalpolicies that would grow the output and effective dissemination ofAfrican research in and from Africa, for African development, in themost appropriate media and formats. A publisher's approach would beto look at the goals articulated in national higher education andresearch policy and then ask whether policy for researchdissemination is encouraging publications that support those goals.

What I found was that there is strangeclash of paradigms within the different policy documents and, morestarkly, between the policies of different government departments.Before I get too critical of these illogicalities, I need to stressthat South African policy is not unusual in this regard. Worldwide,discussion of research dissemination is a blind spot. As the authorsof an Australiangovernment report on research communication costs put it:'despite billions of dollars being spent by governments on R&Devery year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid tothe dissemination of the results of that research through scientificand scholarly publishing'.

Effective dissemination of highereducation research and the availability of that research knowledge tothe country that funds it - particularly in Africa - can be quiteliterally of life and death importance. Just think of the need forrapid responses to the AIDS pandemic, continually informed by thelatest research findings. Yet when the question of publication andeffective dissemination arises in the policy documents, it tends tobe in terms of a generally unchallenged set of presumptions aboutwhat constitutes effective research dissemination - articles inaccredited scholarly journals and registered patents. And, whileuniversities might spend large sums of money registering patents,there is a tacit assumption that publication is not something thatuniversities pay for. This is, in part, what JosephJ Esposito in a recent article on university presses in LOGOSand the Journal ofElectronic Publishing calls ' the free rider syndrome. Auniversity must provide for students and faculty and will activelyencourage faculty to publish, but a press can be stinted becausebecause it is always possible that a particular book will bepublished somewhere else.'

The major policy framework for highereducation research in South Africa is the research and innovationpolicy developed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).Starting with a backgroundreport commissioned from the IDRC in 1995, the departmentconsolidated these findings in a WhitePaper on Science and Technology in 1996 and then updated this inSouthAfrica's Research and Development Strategy in 2002. To summarisesomewhat brutally; the common theme across these policies is thatSouth African research must address national development needs andcontribute to employment and economic growth. The emphasis is on thevalue of collaborative and inter-disciplinary research in arapidly-changing technological environment. While attention is paidto the need to build the international reputation of South Africanresearch, this is balanced out by a developmental focus that insistson a responsiveness to national need

Down here in the southern hemisphere, the sun is shining and the south-easter is funnelling down the mountain. The 2007 university summer term has begun and absurdly young students are thronging campus; the President has delivered a carefully-modulated State of the Nation address; and the Finance Minister has spelled out a budget that shows South Africa significantly in the black. In short, the real working year is only just beginning. So it is perhaps time, in a series of postings, to do a my own State of the Nation overview of where South Africa stands at the start of 2007 in relation to my area of interest - the dissemination and publication of African scholarship.

First, a background sketch. I hold an International Policy Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (Budapest) investigating policy for the dissemination of African scholarship. The project aims to map the complex and often contradictory policy environment that frames research publication in South Africa and other African countries. These policies tend to work in two directions: one for the leveraging of research to deliver national development goals – to which the South African government appears to be ready to allocate substantial resources - the other for the recognition and reward of scholarly publication. In particular, the project researches the question of whether countries like South Africa and its African neighbours can start to turn around the global knowledge divide and raise the reach and visibility of African research using electronic media and the Open Access publishing approaches currently taking hold across the world.

If one looks at the current state of research publication in African countries, what stands out most strongly is the persistent marginalisation of African knowledge - particularly of scholarship about Africa, produced in Africa. Globally, research dissemination takes place within a system that has been in place for around the last 100 years, which has come to be dominated by increasingly commercialised (and increasingly expensive) journals and by scholarly books produced primarily in the USA and Europe in a globally unbalanced 'publish or perish' scholarly market. For example, to cite but one statistic – in 2000, South Africa, which far exceeds any other African country in the ISI journal rankings, had just 0,5% of the articles in the combined ISI databases and 0.15% of the most cited papers (see the SA Academy of Science Report on a Strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa 2006) . Could we really say that this is a fair and accurate evaluation of the global weight and value of the research carried out in this country?