I have posted a new blog - after a long blogging absence - on my new Word Press site. I will cross-post until a forward has been put in place.

This blog post is on scholarly publishing as a neglected transformation issue and the statements that the Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, has made on this issue in the course of his speeches. Here it is:

With the Higher Education Transformation Summit taking place in Cape Town on 22 April, universities have been in a reflective phase, examining their success – or lack of it – in achieving post-apartheid transformation. The report card shows that we are achieving a great deal, but could try harder. There is still a way to go before all our students and academics feel they are in institutions that are really their home.

No-one seems to have noticed the elephant in the room. In all the discussions, I see very little attention being paid to the role that scholarly communication and publication plays in the transformation process. We talk about the demographic profiles of our universities, yet we do not seem to question the communication environment that students and staff are immersed in and the values that are reflected there.

Why is it, for example, that, as the Minister of Higher Education and Training , Blade Nzimande, complained at the UNESCO 29^th World Conference on Higher Education that 'there is a gender imbalance throughout higher education systems especially in leadership positions.' in his keynote address at the Transformation Summit, he picked up on the fact that the average age of academics continues to rise and that there has been a drop in the number of staff under the age of 30? Does the publishing system that is so central in determining who is promoted and rewarded play a role in these demographics? Is this an alien environment for the young scholars that the universities want so badly to attract? Do students and researchers find their own, African, world reflected adequately in the scholarly resources that they have access to? Are the values that our researchers hold reflected in the ways in which they are supported in publishing their research?

 (More)

Business Day yesterday published my story on the clash between WHO's Public Health strategy and the South African IPR Act (see the gray area blog article on the same topic a few weeks ago for a different version of the same argument). I am glad that there is at last some discussion of these issues in the media, which tends to treat IPR issues as too arcane to engage with, although the Treatment Action Campaign has gone a long way towards dissipating that view.

In the mean time, the discussion on IPR and public health in developing countries continues unabated. There is an interview in the IP Watch newsletter with Ellen t'Hoen, the senior advisor on intellectual property and medicines patent pool at UNITAID, a financing mechanism for the scale-up of treatments for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.  t Hoen recently published a book entitled, The Global Politics Of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power.

The concern t'Hoen expresses relates to potential problems with the availability of cheaper generic medicines in developing countries. The countries that use the DOHA provisions for the import of generics for public health reasons (mostly for HIV AiIDs) rely heavily on imports from India.  Now , she says, there is a change looming that is likely to threaten this (perfectly legal) supply:

Indian producers are able to make generic versions of these medicines because of the 1970 Indian Patents Act which excluded product patents for medicines. As of 2005, India has to comply with the TRIPS Agreement and has started to grant product patents on medicines. So very soon this is going to change. Generic versions of newer drugs will not become available automatically until after the 20-year patent term has run out. Unless of course India starts granting compulsory licences or other mechanisms are put in place to ensure that generic producers can continue to play this role, such as the patent pool.

't Hoen has sharp words to say about the fact that special provisions for affordable drugs in developing countries, at the insistence of the rights holders,  apply only to neglected diseases and exclude non-communicable diseases. Asked whether there was significance in this distinction, she replied, 'Well from a medical point of view, of course there isn’t – it’s whether you die of AIDS or whether you die of heart disease… well, you’re dead. It’s just as serious.'  She is equally sharp with the argument that patent protection is needed to ensure research and development of new drugs and limit the supply of new drugs for developing country diseases:

In the past pharmaceutical companies have en masse abandoned research into neglected diseases. That’s why they became neglected diseases. Much of the innovation for tropical diseases comes from military research and government research that comes out of the old colonial systems: the tropical disease centres and the Vietnam War, which gave for example a number of malaria drugs.

So I don’t quite see that argument. I don’t think that if we close down the generic industry in the developing world that big pharma will spontaneously start reinvesting in tropical neglected diseases.

This is disturbing but very cogent stuff about why IPR does matter - read it. 

At the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, a roundtable session on Africa brought Blade Nzimande, South Africa's new Minister of the new Higher Education Ministry to the fore.

In the official online report on the round table, his speech is reported as follows:

Encouraging the production of indigenous knowledge is indispensable to meet the continent’s development challenges. “The term ‘knowledge society’ means two different things in developed and developing countries: one is the producer and one is the consumer”, said Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and Training, South Africa. Speaking on behalf of the 53-member conference of Education ministers in Africa he delivered some pithy observations on the challenges facing the Second Decade of Education for Africa: lack of access to indigenous knowledge (as “there had been no significant break with the colonial era”); gender imbalance, especially at the leadership level, and the interconnected challenges of gender, racial and ethnic discrimination.

Mr Nzimande criticized the overemphasis on basic education to the detriment of higher education. “Education must not be approached in an atomized or fragmented manner but in a holistic manner”. While he believed that academic freedom was under threat, and that governments needed to guarantee it, responsibility for academic freedom went both ways and institutions had to be accountable too.

Nzimande is also given prominence in the Inside Higher Education report on the conference. This   report details how Philip Altbach spoke of a revolution in higher education and John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning talked about how the use of transformative technology can bend the 'iron triangle' of access, quality and cost for developing country knowledge.  

In the roundtable on African higher education, however, Blade Nzimande, South Africa’s minister of higher education and training, lamented the continent’s overall status as a consumer of knowledge, as opposed to a producer. “Over the last few decades, some things have not changed. There’s been no significant break in relations of knowledge production between the colonial and post-colonial eras. African universities are essentially consumers of knowledge produced in developed countries,” he said.

“Virtually all partnerships tend to be one-sided. This is not only negative for the African continent, but we believe it also deprives global higher education of access to the indigenous knowledge of Africa,” Nzimande said.

This is an encouraging sign that the new ministry might be looking at effective and democratic research dissemination and publication as one of its key strategies.

More in Inside Higher Education, An Academic Revolution 7 July 2009

It is not unusual in national policy for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing. There is now a looming clash of priorities for the new Cabinet that goes to the very heart of the 'better life for all' mandate on which President Zuma's government came to power. This  could cause embarrassment to a number of new ministers, in the DST, Higher Education, the DTI and Health. What is at stake is the way the South African government secures benefits from its investment in public research and how the country and its universities make research work for national development and the betterment of people's lives.
What has happened is the IPR  Act, with its Draft regulations (due for final comment tomorrow) is on a collision course with a landmark resolution passed after years of debate at the  61st World Health Assembly at the World Health Authority. The South African delegation at the Assembly was headed by the Deputy Minister, Dr M. Sefularo and was attended by a delegation of 16 delegates and alternates from the Department of Health. The problem is a radical difference of views on how best to achieve benefit through innovation and intellectual property management.  The IPR Act requires universities and other publicly funded research organisations to secure intellectual property rights and patent as much research as possible, frowning upon open innovation and open source. The WHO, on the other hand promotes the idea of a collaborative world public health regime that uses patenting, but in a responsible way, and combines this with support for a number of open approaches to the shared dissemination of public health research.
The WHO resolution, passed on 22 May, finally agreed the way forward on the recommendations made to the Assembly by the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property. The purpose of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property that has now been voted through, aims to  'secure.. an enhanced and sustainable basis for needs-driven, essential health research and development relevant to diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries, proposing clear objectives and priorities for research and development.' While many people glaze over as soon as intellectual property is mentioned, it is clear that this is a vitally important issue for South Africa, quite literally a matter of life and death.
The recommendations of the Global Strategy contain a vision of the scientific endeavour that stresses global collaboration and the sharing of research information and data. This is also the way forward that President Barack Obama proposed in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences in the US a few months ago. The way forward that he sees for US  science is a vision of collaborative science for the public good:

In biomedicine... we can harness the historic convergence between life sciences and physical sciences that’s underway today; undertaking public projects — in the spirit of the Human Genome Project — to create data and capabilities that fuel discoveries in tens of thousands of laboratories; and identifying and overcoming scientific and bureaucratic barriers to rapidly translating scientific breakthroughs into diagnostics and therapeutics that serve patients.

The WHO plan of action, which the South African government is now called upon to implement, contains a number of provisions that provide for the use of open source development, open access to research publications and data, voluntary provision of access to drug leads, open licensing, and voluntary patent pools. This runs alongside a more traditional approach to the patenting of drug discoveries and vaccines, but with the proviso that there must be measures in place to ensure that patents are managed in such a way as to be appropriate to public health goals. This includes delinking the costs of research from the price of health products, so that they can be affordable in developing countries.

The burning question now is how this can be implemented – presumably by the Department of Health – when the IPR Act and its Regulations will effectively block the WHO provisions for sharing research results and using open licensing and open access for the benefit of public health delivery.

It would perhaps be appropriate for public health departments in our universities and their researchers to submit a request to the DST for the withdrawal of the Regulations for further consideration of the issues at stake by all the government departments that might be involved in this potentially embarrassing clash. 

The University of Pretoria has become the first university in South Africa to adopt a mandate for open access deposit of publications by all academics. The senate of the University of Pretoria has unanimously approved an open access mandate for the university, which requires all academics to deposit digital copies of their publications in an open access archive. The policy will go into effect immediately and it is likely that UP scholars will see a substantial increase in the citation of their articles as a result. Other South African Universities will need to watch this space.    

The wording of  the policy:

To assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public funding, staff and students are required to:

•  submit peer-reviewed postprints* + the metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University’s institutional repository, AND

• give the University permission to make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files in perpetuity.

Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

The University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders' policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Access to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases, an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.

The Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for adhering to archiving policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system's embargo facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.

The University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.

The University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research articles in open access journals that are accredited.

Starting in 2004 with an evaluation of appropriate repository software, and going live in 2006 with UPSpace, UP has established itself as a pioneer and a leader in the development and management of scholarly repositories in South Africa. The university at that time already had a thesis and dissertations repository, UPeTD, started in 2000 and expanded in 2004 with a mandate for the online deposit of theses and dissertations. The decision to expand this intervention to create a repository of research collections followed on the success that UPeTD had in profiling PhD students' research, contributing to their career success and providing expanded readership for UP's research output.

The project was resourced with the creation of a repository management team to oversee the implementation and ongoing management of UPSpace. There are now 7 896 full text items online, profiling the research output and publications of departments and individual academics, who have their own profiles within the repository, which can be linked to their CVs. The online publications can range from public scholarship and media articles to research papers and formal scholarly publications. The latter are collected in a sub-space of the broader collection, called openUP.

The initial reluctance of UP scholars to embrace open access has long been overcome and with Senate's willingness to vote a mandate for deposit, it is clear that there is now top-level support for the initiative. It will be interesting to watch the impact that this has on UP's research profile and scholarly reputation, which is likely to be enhanced by increased access. Research shows that online open access to research publications from developing countries considerably increases impact factors by a considerable margin.  

 Congratulations to UP for a bold initiative that puts in in the front rank among some of the leading universities in the world.

For an account of the setting up of the UP repositories, seeMartie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar, South Arfican Repositories: Brigding the knoweldge divides. Ariadne 55 2008