The iCommons Summit in Rio (June 2006) continues to spin off results. It is great to see that the promises made by various groups at the Summit – in this case the Science Commons - are delivering on schedule. An invaluable set of resources for Open Access scholarship was launched this week, the Rio Framework for Open Science. The resources are set up on a wiki, moderated by John Willbanks (who will be visiting South Africa in February) and our own Heather Ford, who heads up Creative Commons South Africa and is also Executive Director of the iCommons.

The Rio Declaration says this about its purpose:

The goal of this Framework is to provide a seedbed of resources for those interested in Open Science, from the background information to examples of institutional policy, from arguments and evidence to the tools needed to implement various elements of Open Science.

The website collates information and resources that could, as the website puts it, 'unleash the scientific research cycle'. I must confess I brought proceedings to a grinding halt at the iCommons when I asked “Whadd'ya mean by 'Science'?'' The answer appears to be that the main drive for the Science Commons comes from people with an S&T background (it is housed at MIT), yet the tools it is developing could be of value to scholars in all disciplines.

The main headings under which resources are collected are:

• Policy - listings and links to the various OA policy declarations and initiatives and articles and case studies on OA, how it works and its impact factors. There are signs that South Africa is beginning to grapple with the question of access to research from public funding and the recent ASSAf Report on scholarly publishing in South Africa is recommending Open Access repositories and journals. So OA policy is on our agenda right now.

• Law - not only Creative Commons copyright contracts, but invaluable stuff from the Scholar's Copyright Project, such as the 'Author's Addenda' that can be added to publication contracts to ensure that academics can retain at least enough rights to be able to archive their articles on the Internet.

• Technology - useful links to OS software tools for research management – for archiving, creating documents, annotating on the web...

There is a lot here - go and take a look and add to the Wiki with our own resources.

Plos ONE, the radical new journal concept (see my16 July blog) has launched. Eric Kansa, , in his Digging Digitally archaeology blog, has this to say:

...PLoS One represents an experiment in a lot of ways. Papers are more clearly part of an ongoing process of communication and discussion and are less like static artifacts. Evaluation and review continue well after initial public dissemination. And in PLoS One, the community is invited to add value to papers through “Web 2.0? collaborative tools...

Drawing value from user interaction and making users more than consumers of information but inviting them to be participants in creating valuable knowledge sounds like a great approach. It has been widely successful in several high-profile commercial sites, such as Flickr (tagged photos) and Del.ic.ious (tagged web content)....The uptake of these community-participatory (“Web 2.0”) approaches is relatively limited in academic and professional communication (though see Connotea). I doubt this has much to do with technophobia as it much as it has to do with the special social, incentive and professional needs of scholars. If PLoS One can help figure out how to motivate professional communities to use participatory tools that add value to scientific communication, I think they will have made a fundamentally important contribution.

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access Newsletter for this link)

I have given a couple of workshop papers on scholarly publishing in the last ten days or so. Sounds dry, doesn't it? That might apply to one of those 'How to crack the system and get published in an accredited scholarly journal' papers that I think my audiences were expecting (and dreading). But if one casts a steely eye over the system that we all take so unquestioningly for granted, then things can get a lot livelier. What would the proverbial woman from Mars make of it? The basis of the academic accreditation system is that our scholars are assessed and promoted primarily according to their ability to get published in journals in other countries, whose systems are patently weighted to exclude them – and to exclude many of the burning issues that might be of national relevance.

Looking at the scholarly publishing system from the perspective of a scholar in the humanities and social sciences in a South African university, one thing is for sure - we really are on the margins of the world. This is not a system conceived of for the benefit of our developing world, but designed to suit the needs of powerful institutional and hard-nosed commercial interests in big first-world economies. If one looks dispassionately at what the universities put into this system and what they get out of it, it is patently dysfunctional. Scholars pay for conducting the research, writing the articles, for acting as peer reviewers, then pay page charges, as often as not, to get published. Then the universities buy back that information, often at vastly inflated prices, from near-monopoly conglomerates, operating a commercial system in which market forces don't work.

The way we relate to the system has its absurdities. We bind ourselves into trying to publish primarily in journals selected by indexing systems that explicitly marginalise contributions from the peripheries of the world, where we live. Also, as a CSIR researcher pointed out in one of last week's workshops, the numbers just don't work: “There are a thousand-odd researchers in the CSIR”, he said, “and we are each required to publish two articles per year in accredited journals. Where are we going to find accredited journals to publish more than two thousand articles from the CSIR alone? And who is going to read them?”

The scholarly publishing system is not working even in the powerful knowledge economies that call the shots. As the leading radical IP lawyer, James Boyle, said at the iCommons Summit in Rio, “We have a scientific publishing system that is massively dysfunctional and really, really broken.” Or, as Lindsay Waters, the Humanities Editor at Harvard University Press put it in one of his papers; “The patient is dying! Call the ambulance.”

So where does that leave us, here in South Africa? And what can we do about it?

At the iCommons Summit in Rio, Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil gave a lyrical account of his world view, as well as – unusually for a Minister - singing us a few choruses. One of the things he said was, “ I am still cultivating this strange and provocative taste of bringing together ideas that seemed to be bound to be eternally separate. just like parabolic and camara. I like to see the world echoing just like the head of a berimbau. I like to connect the differences.” (In the interests of global confusion - the English text of this speech can be found on the Australian Creative Commons site.)

So, in the interests of making the world echo, and of putting a different spin on the challenge posed at iCommons for developing countries, to leapfrog from the 19^th to the 21^st century, I would like to make a link between pre-colonial history in my part of the world and the iCommons discussion of the 21^st century networked society. Perhaps the 21^st century networked world has something to learn from 18^th century southern Africa.

Judy Breck, in her Golden Swamp virtual learning blog, describes the networked society in relation to the lateral, nodal structure envisaged for the iCommons. This has been greeted with perplexity by some. In a 2002 article in the Journal of Social History,¹ Clifton Crais (whose book² on pre-colonial Eastern Cape history I co-published at Wits University Press in 1992) describes how social reality of the people living there was remade by the colonists of the 19^th century. The idea that these societies were territorially-defined, top-down chieftainships was an invention of the colonial officials trying to make sense of the social and political order in the only language they knew – that of the nation state. What Crais describes could have a number of intriguing parallels with those battling to understand a networked iCommmons:

Political power tended to be localized, boundaries fluid and vague, and the authority of chiefs highly variable. The political landscape was both homogeneous and kaleidoscopic, with widely dispersed material and symbolic resources and constantly changing political domains. Even at moments of relative stasis domains of authority very frequently overlapped. Political identities were multiple, with the fluidity of identities generally increasing with geographical distance from any given center of power.

....The absence of any unequal distribution of economic goods, trade, or population mitigated against the centralization of power. Second, military technology and strategy were widely democratic. Third, there were multiple nodes and overlapping domains of authority.

I also enjoy the parallels when it comes to the nature of leadership:

Europeans and especially early colonial officials very often found African polities to be exasperating and scarcely intelligible. One thing seemed reasonably comprehensible, that is most easily translatable into their own political epistemologies: that there were some men of elevated status who wore and laid claim to the skins of leopards and lions. These men often practiced polygyny, lived in larger communities, usually possessed more livestock than others, and were referred to and used the title "inkosi," but beyond that seemingly little differentiated chiefs from most everyone else. ...

Leopard and lion skins might be an appealing garb for the plenary panel at next year's summit, although I am not so sure of the polygyny aspect. But seriously, where is the historian or anthropologist who could take this analogy further for us...

The iCommons summit in Rio a few weeks ago was a very successful and lively event and is still generating waves - like a stone thrown into water - creating web discussions and blogs in ever-widening concentric rings. The major trigger for the debate that has followed the conference - at least overtly - was the acceptance of sponsorship from Microsoft for the iCommons Summit and Larry Lessig's welcoming of Microsoft's initiative to provide a plugin for attaching Creative Commons licences to Office documents. In the ensuing discussion, particularly in Tom Chance's Newsforge article, I was surprised to see the Open Society, which provides my Fellowship and which was the driving force behind the Budapest Open Access Initiative, one of the major Open Access declarations, lumped with Microsoft and Google as commercial organisations with the potential ultimately of corrupting or undermining the more altruistic goals of the Commons. Where does this come from?

Behind this all, however, is the much older argument between the pragmatic approaches of Creative Commons licences and the more ideologically-driven approach of the GNU licence, or the Free/Libre movement, which considers only share-alike licences as being truly free. At the iCommons, Lawrence Lessig and Jamie Boyle both said that at the heart of the Commons movement was the idea of choice – rather than 'the one true answer'. Creative Commons is not a movement with a single ideology, Lessig said and Boyle made a plea for the recognition that there is not a 'single deified freedom' and that 'it is a mistake to make my freedom your freedom.' There is good reason, in many cases, Lessig argued for the choice of Some Rights Reserved, or Non-Derivative licences – for example the moral commitment, in one case, to children who had been the participants in a project.

In the end of the conference, the Summit had to address the distinction between Creative Commons and the iCommons. This is the second iCommons Summit and the time seemed to have come to articulate how the two organisations should relate to one another. Up until now, it seemed that iCommons had been in an undefined way some kind of umbrella body pulling together a Creative Commons that had spread horizontally into a number of countries (including South Africa) and vertically into a variety of projects. Now it has been decided that Creative Commons will be a body concerned with licences, while the iCommons is a network advancing an (as yet undefined) vision of the Commons as a community.

So, if you want a lively discussion about pragmatism and idealism, networked communities, oligarchies and democracies, socialism or liberal democracy, professionalism and amateurism, all related to the Internet community and its values, then go to the various online debates and blogs, of which the best is probably the Open Democracy debate: Remix World: Towards the Global Digital Commons. Here Tony Curzon Price puts the pragmatic view, while Becky Hogge provides a more radical challenge. Then follow the links.