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 in late June, copyright scholar James Boyle, author of some remarkably incisive critiques of copyright conventions, put it in a nutshell - “We have a scientific publishing system', he said, 'that is massively dysfunctional and really, really broken.' If that is the case in the USA, how much more so in South Africa, where scholarly publishing of any description struggles to survive in what is a really, really marginal market? We need to ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are capable of taking up the challenge put out by our Brazilian hosts at the conference, to take a leap from the 19^th century to the 21^st, thinking of ourselves in the developing world as capable of being in the front line of new approaches. Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian Minister of Culture, said in his opening address: “The player who today loses can become the winner. Everything changes, all the time. And only those who understand change can conquer victory, or yet, victories, which are always partial. '

So what are the new developments that emerged at the Summit, at least in relation to scholarly publishing? It is now well established that Open Access publishing increases citation rates, sometimes dramatically, particularly in developing countries. For example, Subbiah Arunachalam said that going OA had radically increased the impact and reach of a number of Indian journals, with the Journal of Public Medicine now getting over 1 million hits a year. OA, he said, is a way of getting local and relevant knowledge disseminated, too, as it can also dissipate local boundaries.

But now Open Access journal publishing is moving into version 2.0 at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS ONE has a number of radical new features, built,around an understanding of the potential that can be unleashed if one takes full advantage of what the networked environment can offer. It will be launched later this year, as an inclusive peer reviewed publication that blurs the boundaries between the different scientific fields. Rather than regarding a journal article as being 'some form of absolute truth', PLOS One will be set up for ongoing debate and discussion and will also allow for interactive development of online papers, building on conclusions and strengthening data. Most strikingly, it will allow for publication within weeks of acceptance, with open and continuous peer review happening in the open, after publication.

There is enormous discussion going on around journals and scholarly publishing and there might well be batter alternatives to the way we do things. With the Academy of Science's major review of journal publishing in South Africa newly published, is it not time to open up the discussion here?