The most startling news this week, picked up from Peter Suber's Open Access News and then in Slashdot draws attention to an article by Jim Giles in Nature: PR's pit bull takes on Open Access. In this article, which is available online (thanks are due to Nature), it emerges that the Association of American publishers and some of their members, including Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have apparently hired a PR agent to defend them against what they see as a threat to their livelihood from open access publishing. The devil, though, is in the detail - the detail of whom they have hired.

As Jim Giles writes:

The author of Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

I see that it has been a month since my last blog. Do I have to apologise? Perhaps only to colleagues in the North, as this has been, at least in part, time well spent on a lounger next to the pool, good book in hand, or hanging out in good restaurants (Cape Town does those rather well). Then we have to take care to drink a lot of wine to make space for the new harvest, which is happening around now. The one imperative at this time of year is to keep away from the tourist centres and give beaches a miss on the high holidays.

It perhaps takes a southern hemisphere perspective to realise quite how crazy the commercial Christmas scene is - at least as it is seen from down here near the Antarctic. Go into one of our air-conditioned shopping centres and there will be a giant Christmas tree, surrounded by snowscapes, elves and reindeers. Outside the temperature is 30 degrees. And then there is a Santa Claus of course, ho-ho-ing and greeting children from under the tree. Strange that – Saint Nicholas was a Turk from the Aegean, with a particular concern for young virgins - no snow or reindeers there. The rotund stomach and white beard came from Nordic folk culture and I gather that the red coat was a contribution from Coca Cola. Quite how that leads to the southern hemisphere pretending that this is a time of ice and snow down under is rather hard to fathom. So I put out my African rococo wire Christmas tree, made by a street trader in Johannesburg many years ago, hang it with beaded baubles and head for the pool with a glass of wine.

We should really switch New Year's day to the end of June – it is crazy to have to contemplate new year planning in the aftermath of festive season over-indulgence, with the temperature hovering in the upper thirties. Just another example of global imbalances.

Another good old northern hemisphere tradition has manifested itself this year, at the expense of a number of South Africans. In the olden days, the good people of Devon and Cornwall would light bonfires on the cliffs to mislead ships and lure them onto the rocks. They would then happily relieve the ship, its crew and passengers of any valuables and melt away into the countryside. So, to have a container ship wreck itself on the Devon coast without any interference was wonderful serendipity. We were then, thanks to modern communications, treated to the sight of a horde of looters smashing open containers washed ashore and staggering off with the property of a number of bemused and angry South Africans - French oak barrels (for this season's wine harvest), BMW motorcycles, even an aeroplane or two, some claim. Legitimate piracy? Neo-colonial pillage? It at least makes a change for us to be the ones who are pious and superior, tut-tutting about these primitive Brits.

Last week's issue of SA Booknews Online ran a profile of Karen Bruns, Marketing Manager of the HSRC Press. The HSRC Press is unusual: it is a successful African Open Access publisher - of books and research reports rather than journals - and it runs a savvy business model, publishing and selling high quality print versions of the publications that it places online free of charge. This profile highlights another, important but often overlooked, aspect of its operations: that it is run by a highly professional publishing team and that its publications are aggressively marketed so as to maximise the impact of the research that is being disseminated.

From the SA Booknews article:

As the Marketing Manager of HSRC Press, Karen Bruns has a fairly good idea of what is needed to achieve success in this line of business. Prior to joining the HSRC in 2002, she held a number of marketing management positions in the publishing and retail industries, developing marketing communications and public relations skills in focused business environments. These include oppositional publishers Ravan Press and David Philip Publishers from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, as well as for Juta & Co, a larger and more commercial company.

What makes HSRC a successful company?

"As far as we know, the HSRC Press is South Africa's only open access publisher. We think we might be the only open access publisher in Africa but as we haven't been able to verify that, we really can't make that claim. We publish both in print and in electronic form. It's one of the things that make us unique and it's probably the most exciting part of what it is that we're doing. It feels very pioneering and at the same time, we're increasing both the pool of and access to high quality social science research-based publications."

"Considering where we're located, I am often asked whether we only publish the research output of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC). While we do manage all of the intellectual property of the HSRC, the answer is no, as we publish many externally authored works - provided they're furthering the social sciences, which is the mandate of the organisation in terms of a statutory act."

How has HSRC Press expanded business structures/opportunities?

Conscious that the HSRC in years gone by produced publications of varying quality, they instituted a formal peer-review process in 2004.

"The editorial board guarantees the highest academic quality and members assist greatly in the review process. We currently publish approximately 45-50 publications per year, that is reports containing primary research, monographs and edited volumes, and the manuscripts keep flooding in."

"But it wouldn't do to be pushing out all of these publications without an active local and international marketing programme, in addition to collaborating with foreign publishers on specific titles."

Development of African intellectual life

The marketing is Karen's domain, although she says that all of publishing is about marketing, and she cannot lay claim to doing it all.

"Working with authors of high intellect automatically implies that most of my "constituencies" are natural cynics. It's part of the territory and in my day-to-day dealings with authors, the media, and booksellers; I am constantly reminded that these are not people that can be rah-rahed into excitement about the marketing opportunities in scholarly publishing. For some it is assumed that credibility sells; for others it comes as a complete surprise that academic books should be marketed at all. Armed with catnip, I constantly work at herding cats and enthusing people about the incredibly exciting opportunities that lie within academic publishing and in the future of this sector that is key to the development of African intellectual life."

Key to success

"But notwithstanding that we achieve approximately R6.5 million (advertising value equivalent) in free PR on our books alone each year, and that we have international prize-winning titles in our list, and that we have increased representation in the national bookstores, and that we're establishing some flagship South African products - what most people ask us most often is whether the open access model assists in selling more books!"

"The question is most often accompanied by a cynical eyebrow and a wary expression. I am just as wary to answer, because my answer would have to be that we have seen significant year on year sales increases since our inception in 2002."

According to Karen, their success can be linked to the improvement of their products, the increase of their sales network, and their growing efficiencies. She is wary of pinning their success to the adoption of the open access model, as she wouldn't want publishers, librarians, authors, academics, policymakers, or civil society to think for one minute that the adoption thereof was a marketing ploy!

"The reason that we have adopted this model - apart from adoring innovation as we do to a person at the HSRC Press - is that we wanted to assist in opening access to quality social science in Africa - both to Africa and from Africa."

Comment: Karen strikes a chord for me in this interview when she comments wryly on the fact that that the most common question people ask is whether Open Access online provision sells more books. As she says, that is not the point at all. I cannot imagine that book sales come anywhere near covering the costs of the publishing department. The HSRC provides generous financial support for the HSRC Press, presumably because the organisation finds that this is a good investment. Having its research effectively and widely disseminated achieves the purpose of the research council, ensuring that its research findings have significant development impact. Moreover, I would imagine that its successfully marketed publications profile the HSRC very effectively in the eyes of the government that funds it and contributes to its ability to attract private research contracts to expand its research activities and supplement its public funding.

At the end of the Workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access in Bangalore two weeks ago, it was agreed that what was needed was not just another declaration, but a document that could be used to drive policy implementation in developing countries. The final version has now been released and is revealed as a remarkably clear and pragmatic document, the National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries.

Where this differs from its predecessors is not only in its focus on the developing world, but the fact that it includes a brief but very clear policy undertaking for signature by national governments, accompanied by a statement of the advantages of Open Access publication to governments and to academics as well as practical implementation guidelines for effective and easy deposit of articles. The strategy that underpins its approach is that mandating deposit in institutional repositories of journal articles arising out of publicly funded research and making these available for harvesting provides a quick and affordable way of building a national record of research output.

From the first paragraph, this document reflects something I said in my previous blog - that the mood has changed and that there is now an assertive voice articulating the value of the knowledge that is currently largely marginalised in the global research hierarchy:

The Bangalore workshop was convened to bring together policy makers and research scientists from major developing countries to agree a path forward towards adopting full Open Access to publicly-funded research publications. The importance of access to the world's research information for the development of a strong economy and a vibrant research capability is widely acknowledged, yet financial barriers limit access by developing countries to the research information they need. Equally, the unique research carried out in countries representing 80% of the world's population is largely 'invisible' to international science because of economic or other constraints. The resolution of many of the world's problems, such as emerging infectious diseases, environmental disasters, HIV/AIDS or climate change, cannot be achieved without incorporation of the research from developing countries into the global knowledge pool.

Open Access to the world's publicly funded research literature provides equal opportunities for the communication of all research information, eliminating financial barriers. Furthermore, articles made available electronically on an open access basis have been shown to be cited on average 50% more often than non-open access articles from the same journal, thus ensuring the greatest possible benefit both to the authors, to the investment of funding agencies and to scientific progress. The benefits to authors, readers and their organisations is now increasingly recognised worldwide and by November 2006, 761 repositories had already been registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories, and the Open Archives Initiative's OAIster search engine could search over 9,000,000 records in interoperable Open Access repositories.

The proven advantages of Open Access publishing for developing countries were spelled out in a number of papers at the Bangalore workshop: substantially increased citations leading to higher levels of research impact, the widening of the author base, greater research efficiency through the reduction of duplication and faster dissemination, to name only a few. However, while the SciELO initiative in Latin America demonstrates the considerable benefits of intervention at a national level and of regional collaboration over research publication, systematic policy interventions are still lacking in most developing countries, leading to a fragmentation of efforts that can, in reality, be ill-afforded. The policy undertaking included in the National Open Access Policy will therefore be a boon to those lobbying for national commitments to access to publicly funded research from governments in developing countries. As Subbiah Arunachalam put it in an email late last week, there is now work to be done:

The most important thing now is to get policy makers in India, China and many African countries adopt and implement the OA Policy Statement signed by all the participants of the Bangalore workshop. Your suggestions and help are welcome.

The full text of the National OA Policy for developing Countries can be found at
http://scigate.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/pdfs/NationalOAPolicyDCs.pdf

We met for our meals on a shaded terrace under palms and spreading tropical trees in the centre of the enormous campus of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and held our discussions in their senate room, distinguished home to many of India's leading scientists. Coming from India, China, Brazil and Africa, the UK and US, we were the guests of the Indian Academy of Science, the IISC and the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and had met to discuss South-South relationships in the development of Open Access research dissemination.

The workshop was an important further step in a growing movement of South-South alliances. What emerged most strongly at the Africa-centred conference in Leiden a few months ago was the question, 'Whose knowledge, for what purpose for whom?' The issue there was the tendency for development rhetoric to focus on the supply of knowledge to the developing world rather than the production of knowledge in and from the African continent. This time, in India, the assertion of the rights of developing nations went a step further. Right at the beginning of the workshop, in one of the introductory addresses, Prof N Balakrishnan, the Associate Director of the Indian Institute of Science, said, 'What we need to do is change the “developing country” rhetoric to a world perspective.' Put another way – when I emailed Gordon Graham, of the LOGOS journal, one of the wisest people I know from the publishing industry, he wrote back, 'Do tell me more about the workshop. What a combination. India, China, Brazil and Africa constitute about two thirds of humanity.' They are both right – what this workshop reminded us is that we in the developing world are the norm - with all our challenges - not the privileged and powerful who call the shots in scholarly publishing. Alma Swan raised the same issue in another way, echoing something that was said in Leiden: that we have a problem with the common expression of the international/local dichotomy. Why should developing country issues be considered 'local' when these apply to the greater proportion of the global population, while , for example, we bow down to the 'international' status of the comparatively narrowly-focused ISI indexed journals?

Lawrence Liang, of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, gave us the message in another way. In a typically virtuoso and mind-stretching keynote address, in which he charted different meanings of ownership, in different languages and cultures. He invited us to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property. In that world, he said, those who have most freedom are those who own the most IP. Property in the English sense, he said, the conflation of 'self' and 'own' resting on exclusion, is something not common to other languages. In Indian, apnapen is not a matter of owning, or property , but of closeness. Ownership in this sense has the obligation of care and the opposite of care is brutality, like the 'war' on piracy that is currently being waged – passport control in a borderless world, Liang argued.