The
PALM Africa South African Publishers' Workshop was held at the
University of Cape Town Graduate
School of Business on 3 and 4 November 2008. The purpose of the
workshop was to bring together publishers of all kinds – commercial
and not for profit – to brainstorm ideas for alternative licensing
and innovative business models that could help enhance access to
knowledge in South Africa. We hoped that we would come out of the
workshop with agreement that open access and commercial publishing
models were not irreconcilable in South Africa, that the ability to
bring the two together would offer advantages on a continent that still needs print products where connectivity is limited, and that some
publishers would be prepared to take the plunge and put in place
demonstration projects to explore the real potential for the use of
open licences in sustainable ways.
The
workshop was oversubscribed (suggesting that there might be potential
for running further interventions of this kind) and we were pleased
to see equal enthusiasm from the large commercial publishers, small
publishers and start-up ventures, NGOs and non-profit publishing
services. There were large education publishers and a science
popularisation expert, a distance education development organisation
and an agricultural research agency, poetry and literature publishers
and a university press, a publishing services consultant and
research agencies for children and gender issues, among others.
With
this mix of delegates, there was likely to be spin-off, we thought,
from the interaction between groups of publishers who otherwise
seldom, if ever, encounter one another. We therefore planned the
workshop to be as interactive as possible, designing it as an
incubator for the collaborative creation of new business models. The
workshop was attended by Charles Batambuze and Robert Ikoja from the
PALM Uganda project and by Jamil Semanyane and Sim Katende from the
Makerere University Business School. This produced not only the
potential for collaboration across projects in the two countries, but
also, unexpectedly, the potential for collaboration between the Book
Development bodies in both countries.
The
workshop revealed a welcome capacity for particpants to engage in an open exchange of experiences
and the potential to shift perceptions of how markets work in a
changing internet environment. This in spite of the fears of some
that such open discussion might reveal trade secrets in a highly
competitive environment. The major fears that were expressed at the
beginning of the workshop were that the knowledge gained would
not be translatable to the real world, that there would be resistance
from delegates' companies and from consumers, and that the risks
might be too high. Interestingly, the fear of copyright infringement
and plagiarism, although present, did not seem to be a dominant
theme. On the other hand, there was a real eagerness to engage with
the changing world of internet publishing and excitement at its potential, with one delegate
claiming that openness could be a relief, as the business of
clutching onto and protecting copyright was an exhausting affair. The real
excitement, though, was about discovering new business models and
finding space to brainstorm with informed colleagues how these could
be applied. The major theme that emerged was the potential power of communities of practice and collaborative development - perhaps as a result of the demonstration of the power of community collaboration in the workshop itself.
Presentations
were made on open licences (Andrew
Rens of the Shuttleworth
Foundation), attention marketing (David
Duarte of Huddlemind
Labs and the UCT Graduate School of Business Nomadic
Marketing programme) and Blue Ocean strategy (Elaine
Rumboll Director of Executive Education at UCT GSB), We also
showed two of the video interviews that Frances Pinter had recorded
with people in the UK who use flexible licensing to create new
business models - Timo
Hannay of Nature Publishing and Tom
Reynolds, author of Blood, Sweat and Tea (the third is with
dot-com entrepreneur, John
Buckman) - while Eve Gray presented some examples of innovative
uses of flexible licensing in the publishing industry worldwide.
There
was certainly enough new thinking fed into the workshop to provide
inspiration for the participants. However, the majority of the time
in the workshop was spent doing just that – workshopping. When,
during the afternoon tea break of the second day, delegates were
still clustering in groups having animated discussions, we realised
that the process had been a success and that a really productive
dynamic had been generated.
What
emerged as potential demonstration projects included:
the
creation of a platform for
a collaborative online community that could interact in posting and evaluating creative content, developing commercial approaches using flexible licensing;
the
creation of a solidly-founded publishing plan for a research and development agency, with a coherent licensing and
dissemination strategy to
extend the impact of its community-focused programme;
a
community web space that could post scientific research online in order to make it accessible in a variety of ways, popularising it for a wider range of audiences and
creating an Interdisciplinary dialogue that could also help
contribute to the innovation chain;
the
creation of an online forum for academic content, linked to a scholarly list and made available with CC
licences, designed to generate discussion and feedback for reputation-building and to the publication of selected content voted for by the community;
the
publication of open access peer reviewed conference proceedings as
the first step towards the launching of a suite of online journals,
strategically developed to address a gap in the market and to ensure
accreditation, with a community space linked
to the publications;
the
creation of a dialogue between Ugandan and South African book
development councils for inter-African publishing development using online content linked to print on demand print delivery.
The
Ugandan projects that are under way and which were selected from 11
publishers wanting to participate in the project are:
Femrite,
a publisher of women's writing, has selected 3 titles and has
explored using Creative Commons Non-Commercial (NC) and Share-Alike
(SA) licenses for these. Femrite's goal is to guarantee revenue
streams through rights deals, sales of physical books globally and
through grants from donor agencies. Since they are members of the
African Books Collective (ABC), they will use POD opportunities
elsewhere for international distribution. Hopefully, the content for
these three books will be online by December 2008.
Mastermind,
a publisher of books for SMEs is currently exploring using an NC
license. They want to guarantee revenue streams through rights deals
and demand for physical books, as well as through driving demand for
their training programme for SME entrepreneurs.
Fountain
Publishers is East Africa’s leading academic publishe, a
commercial publisher with an impressive academic list of
well-established authors, including internationally-known authors
like Mahmoud Mamdani. One effective marketing strategy is to
publicise these well known authors. Fountain Publishers want to make
their academic titles freely available online and are currently exploring
the NC license. They believe this will add value to the reputation
of their writers as well as to the company itself. They will be
using their profits from school textbook publishing to finance this
experiment. They are looking at revenue streams from POD in UK and
USA. They would like to make content available freely online from
February 2009.
The
Makerere Insitute of Social Research feels that there is limited
appreciation for their work and for African research output in
general. They believe that making their content freely available
will boost their reputation and attract more research funding. PALM
has recommended the SA license.
What was particularly pleasing were the synergies that emerged between the Ugandan and South African projects, with a number of potential cross-overs between projects and a shared interest in the need to grow inter-African communications through online content and distributed POD for local printing.
