I set off for India two weeks ago, digital camera clutched firmly in my increasingly hot and sticky hand, determined that this time I would organise myself to blog my experiences as I went along. I was headed for what sounded like a very interesting meeting - a workshop at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore that would bring together Indian, Chinese, Brazilian and African perspectives on digital publishing and Open Access. The workshop was indeed fascinating and highly productive, but more of that a bit later in my next blog.

Given that Bangalore is the ICT hub of India, I was looking forward to good connectivity and had visions of myself, grey head and all, typing away among the young tecchies in the back row of the workshop. What became immediately apparent, however, was that connectivity was absent. Like the state of affairs at the iCommons Summit in Rio, where exactly the same thing happened, we had a crowd of high-tech people gathered together in a high-tech place and the wireless connection was down. People who know better than me were muttering dark and incomprehensible things about proxy servers. Some conniving anti-Open Access demon must be out there somewhere, watching us, wanting to teach us well-learned lessons about knowing our place in the developing world.

So there were anxious huddles of email-junkies crouching over laptops between sessions, withdrawal symptoms setting in rapidly. Various hugely qualified people from remote corners of the world and the technicians from the Institute fiddled with my laptop, so that just before we left Bangalore, I could connect to the very good wireless system, by then up and running. After that, nothing - my poor neurotic laptop tried frantically to connect to a network that it could not find and then just lay down and wept. Only in Dubai airport on the way back could it download from a super-slick connection.

Resorting to Internet cafés and friends' computers, I then encountered Mweb at its dysfunctional worst – or so I thought, perhaps unfairly. Try sitting in front of a computer in Mysore, after days off line, staring at a screen that has ACCESS DENIED!! repeated across the screen in random patterns. At least Google mail worked, so I could scream abuse at Mweb. I gather that I was perhaps being unfair, although it did me good to let off steam. The problem was quite possibly just that South-South Internet connections don't routevery well, I am told, while Gmail is on a US server at the hub of the e-world. Does that means that I will have to learn my place in the scheme of things and tone down my idealism about the potential of ICTs in the developing world? I hope not.

Now that I am back home, and after much wise head-shaking by the quietly competent son (every Linux-using mother needs one or two), the laptop is now happy and connected again, but its owner is prostrate, coughing the exhaust fumes of Bangalore out of her lungs.

India was worth it though, even if I was off line, so here are some brief impressions. Most of all, the traffic! Chaos! Driving from the airport in Bangalore and then everywhere else I went, there is a hooting cacophony of mopeds, rickshaws, buses, lorries and cars, weaving in and out in apparent disregard for traffic lanes and unnecessary interferences like solid white lines. And then in the middle of it all, a plodding oxcart or a handcart loaded high. The weaving. I realised, is done with great precision and a complicated understanding of patterns and space. You have to learn very quickly, even on a quiet campus, to respond to a hoot behind you, stepping aside just enough to let a bicycle or moped past without getting in the way of another one. We are pretty clumsy by comparison with Indians, and grossly unaware of our own body space - aggressive, linear space-guzzlers, I realised. .

At first boggle-eyed and confused by the chaos, I then began to realise that we are very Calvinist in South Africa, obeying the rules smugly -up to a point - neat and tidy (yes, comparatively, even our much maligned taxi drivers) but really aggressively asserting our individual right to our own space, at the risk of killing each other in the name of that right. Indian traffic seems to be a place for negotiation and is a great leveller - that sleek BMW in a Bangalore traffic jam is completely disabled as a status symbol, reduced to lesser competence than the ancient but pristine Ambassador taxi or the family on a moped weaving around it. No-one can go too fast - there is not room. But there is that heart-stopping moment as a maze of traffic converges at a complex intersection. Instead of an almighty pile-up, there is an exchange of glances, a swarm of mopeds and cars stops briefly to give way and the complex pattern sorts itself out. How it is negotiated, I don't know, but it seems to work. And even when we met a bullock cart plodding the wrong way down the fast lane of a highway in the countryside, road rage did not manifest itself, just a blast on the hooter, a weave, and we were past it.

There were quiet spaces, too, like the avenues of the Indian Institute of Science, walkways shaded by great arching trees, where the crows swooped overhead ,cawing, in the evening. A lone man pushing a handcart down a suburban Bangalore street calling 'papaya! papaya!' Or the beach in Goa at sunset, all sifted light, soft pastels and the warm water of the Arabian sea. There were the quiet and cool colonial lounges at the Green Hotel in Mysore, where yoga aficionados gather, egrets sailing over the Cauvery river in the still morning of a bird sanctuary, a young girl tugging at a reluctant cow at the roadside, or a group of men cross-legged on a verandah wall, talking. In the middle of a rice field, a group f men appear to be having a quiet conversation with their cattle. A cluster of young girls, bright as birds of paradise, crowded around me in the gardens of Tipu Sultan's summer palace in Sringinapatana, wanting to know. 'What is your name? What does it mean? Where do you come from? You are beautiful.' Or a anther crowd of small boys, more precise, “What other places are there in Africa? How much does it cost to get here? How much do you spend in India? What does your name mean?' And the man in the temple who wanted to know if I had found peace.

And the food - eating curry for breakfast turns out to be very good for you. Delicious, mostly vegetarian food wherever I went, and some crab and prawns in Goa (where my Fellowship colleague, Prashant, complained that even the vegetarian food tastes of fish). In a crowded self-service lunch bar in Bangalore, the food was amazing and cost, by our standards, almost nothing - as do the brilliant cottons and silks.

I'll have to go back- we need to work on these South-South alliances.

South African academics are encouraged by national policy for publication reward to publish in accredited journals, with overseas journals considered the most prestigious. Leaving aside for a moment any critique of this policy, how can the successful authors ensure that the knowledge they have generated is not priced right out of the market for their colleagues and fellow-citizens? This is a real issue, given that the subscription prices of the big commercial journals have risen at about double the rate of inflation in the last decade. Even large and well-endowed universities are struggling to keep up their subscriptions to the leading journals (let alone all 24,000 journals out there), so it is no surprise that South African universities don't subscribe to a number of the journals in which their academics publish.

This came home to me when a colleague, Dick Ng'ambi, emailed to his department the other day 'Maybe Eve Gray has a point. I've just received this alert from Springer alerting me on the electronic publication of my article. The cost of accessing this article is US$30 otherwise UCT has to pay (subscribe) to read its own output - are we being short changed?' The Springer announcement reads: We are very pleased to be the first to congratulate you on the electronic publication of your article "Influence of Individual Learning Styles in Online Interaction: a Case for Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ)" published in "IFIP International Federation for Information Processing". If your institution has access to this journal, you may view your paper at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34731-8_14 (you may need to copy and paste the URL into your browser).
Well, UCT does not have a subscription, so how do Dick and his colleagues get to read his article, short of paying $30 a view (the price of a thick hardback book in this part of the world, or around 15 hamburgers on the 'hamburger index')?

There are in fact some practical things that academic authors can do to ensure that they have maximum access to their own publications. The most important would be to publish for preference in an Open Access journal if there is one in your field. (And yes, they ARE peer-reviewed and there are high quality publications among the 2,000-odd OA journals, as well as one OA author who has recently won a Nobel Prize.) Next, it is advantageous to secure the right to archive a preprint or postprint of an article on your personal or institutional website. A preprint is the article in the form submitted to the journal, before peer reviewing. A postprint is the article revised according to peer reviewers' recommendations, but without the journal's editing and typesetting.) What is clear from research conducted on the impact of archiving, is that the availability of a pre-or postprint increases the downloads of the journal article and can have a significant effect on the citation levels of your work. It also means that yourarticle can be made available to your colleagues, or more generally, depending on the policy of the publisher.

What local authors do not all seem to know is that most journal publishers - some 90% of them - including the major ones, do allow this practice. In Dick's case, Springer allows for both pre-and postprint archiving.

So how do you handle this if you are submitting or publishing an article? To check the policy of the journal you are thinking of publishing with, go the the Sherpa/Romeo website, where you can search on journals and publishers to establish their policies. The next step is to use one of the toolkits available through the Science Commons Rio Framework on Open Science (blogged in an earlier blog), which includes links to the Copyright Toolbox produced through a joint UK/Netherlands university collaboration. Then negotiate a contract with as much access as you can, using the sample clauses set out in the toolkits, which by now must be pretty familiar to the journal publishers, seeing that they were created by major university bodies. These include retaining copyright (if you can get away with it) or at least being able to archive your article in some form and being allowed to use your own article in teaching and further research.

The really important thing, though, is that we need to lobby for policies in South Africa for the creation and mandating of research repositories in our universities. This is vital, given the increased access to and impact for our research that this could achieve. But more about that in another blog....

What content would you like to see liberated? This invitation has come from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who asks for suggestions of what content should be freed from copyright - with a proposed $100 million budget.

I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be purchased and freed.

This is a tantalising thought for us information-starved people out here on the margins of the world. What would a South African shopping list look like? It is not as if we don't have a lot of stuff that would be fascinating not only to us but to the world at large. I suspect, for example, that in our recent history, there are documents and archives in our liberatiion history that should be in the public domain and accessible to all. Or are there heritage collections that are currently locked up? Art or music archives? Can we draw up a wish-list?

Tracked from the Boing-Boing blog

Around 65 delegates met in a mild and sunny Leiden in early September, as guests of the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden, to discuss the the North-South divide and scholarly communication in Africa in the digital era.This was a follow-up to an initial conference on the topic in Dakar two years ago. The differences between the two conferences were telling: while the 2004 event consisted largely of informative and explanatory papers, laying the ground for an understanding of the terrain, this time there was a much more confident interrogation of the assumptions that underlie international scholarly communications systems and the power relations at play in the scholarly community. The papers were of a very high standard and the conference teased out many key issues facing African scholarly publishing, bringing delegates up short against of the major challenges that face the continent, yet not descending into the abyss of Afro-pessimism that so often characterises meetings of this kind.

Appropriately, given the venue, collaboration and partnership were very much on the agenda. As Adebayo Olukoshi said in his opening speech, global knowledge dissemination is characterised by asymmetries from previous systems of knowledge production. The conference was designed to address these asymmetries, he said, with the aim of developing strategies for using CODESRIA's CODICE documentation centre to help leapfrog institutional practice across the continent. In this context, CODICE is seen as a pioneer centre on the African continent for the development of digital media and online resources in the social sciences. The main lines of discussions that emerged at the conference were cogently summarised in this opening speech - the inequalities inherent in the scholarly system and the marginalisation of African knowledge in that system; the problematic yet ultimately liberatory role of technology; the need for leapfrogging disadvantage; and the vital importance of collaboration and resource sharing.

Open Access publication seemed to have ready acceptance across the board as the most enabling dissemination model for African scholarship, offering greater citation impact, greater efficiency and, most important, more democratic access to knowledge. Given that a number of speakers identified distribution problems as the major barrier to research dissemination, the potential for Open Access digital distribution was doubly attractive, leading to an increase in impact factor of between 56% and 227%, according to Marlon Domingues of the ASC.

The conference agreed that Codesria should propose the creation of an African citation index as a way of addressing the inequalitites that characterise the marginalisation of African publication.