Making Knowledge Work for Development

Strategies for bridging the global divide

Whose knowledge, for what, for whom?

The knowledge divide

The importance of research dissemination

The body count

The body un-count

MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Channai, India

The benefits of research are derived principally from access to research results. To the extent that the dissemination of research results is less than might be from given resources, we can argue that the welfare of society is sub-optimal. Currently access to research is restricted and the means to gain access is determined by a market in which a number of publishers have a dominant position.

Costs and Business Models for Scientific Publishing – A report commissioned by the Welcome Trust. Created by SQW

Research dissemination in South Africa

Research policy – the DST

Strong commitment to development goals and poverty reduction, research to meet national needs

Uses the language of 'Science' and 'Innovation' Acknowledges the 'African reality' and stresses the

importance of the humanities and social sciences Talks of the importance of the information revolution Promotes the idea of collaboration across disciplines,

institutions and countries

But....

Uses counts of patents and accredited journal articles as measures

Contradictory approaches to IP policy Dissemination and publication hardly appear The 'information revolution appears to apply

only to the technological vehicle, not the contents

Instrumentalist approach to communication of research findings

Research publication policy – the DoE

Talks of the need to promote research to meet development goals

Identifies the importance of the social sciences as mediators of research knowledge

Talks about the 'changing modes of disseminating research and output'

But...

'Publish or perish' and publishing by numbers The system is a mechanical one of numerical

counts – number of journal articles, number of patents

Journal articles are seen as the major output 'Originality' and personal achievement

supersede collaboration International citation indexes are the measure

of quality

The effect - a collision between a 21st century research policy environment and a 19th to 20th-century research

publication policy

Policy- making – the challenge

Policy-makers need the capacity to look forward, to plan policies that will still be viable in 2016, not

just 2006 (let alone 1996)

Policy-makers need to discern, based on their expert knowledge,

the future trajectories of the subject and the interventions that might improve its development ...

(NEPAD 2005)

What does the present look like, let alone the future?

Challenges to traditional ways of doing things

The publishing industry worldwide faces multiple challenges and opportunities in a networked society.

The network society

The change wrought by the networked information economy is deep. A series of changes in the technologies, economic organisation and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge and culture. These changes have increased the role of non-market and and non-proprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations.

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)

The grand challenge for scientific communication is not merely to adjust the economics of publishing to reflect new realities (though that is certainly happening), but rather to redefine the very concept of a scientific publication.Only in this way will scientific publishing remain relevant and fulfil its duty to help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery now that we are unconstrained by many of the restrictions imposed by print.

Microsoft Research. (2006) Towards 2020 sciencehttp://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/downloads/T2020S_ReportA4.pdf

Copyright in the networked world

Lock-down

The Budapest Initiative

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual

The myth of IP benefit models to the developing world

[T]he above-marginal-cost prices paid in ... poorer countries are purely regressive redistribution. The information, knowledge, and

information-embedded goods paid for would have been developed in expectation of rich world rents alone. The prospects of rents

from poorer countries do not affect their development. They do not affect either the rate or the direction of research and development.

They simply place some of the rents that pay for technology development in the rich countries on consumers in poor and

middle-income countries. The morality of this redistribution from the world's poor to the world's rich has never been confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply

goes unnoticed.

Benkler The Wealth of Networks 2006

Conventional scholarly publishing in the developed world

Where is it at?

'We have a scientific publishing system that is massively dysfunctional and

really, really broken.'

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University, at the iCommons Summit, Rio, June 2006

What are the problems?

Commercialisation of journal production – control in the hands of large near-monopoly conglomerates

Double-digit price increases in a captive market Profit strategies of publishers at odds with

public interest of scholars Publish or perish policies driving up book

production Library budgets down

Not a normal commercial market

Libraries are the buyers, academics the readers 'Bundling' distorts the market further Price elasticity is low – readers not much

influenced by price, but rather by reputation If readers buy per article, they know the price,

but buy 'blind' on the basis of an abstract Libraries spend their whole budget- if prices

rise, they will buy less

Scholars provide the services but lose control

Research costs and authoring costs paid by the universities

Scholars provide peer review services Often have to pay page charges to journals Relinquish copyright Then their library buys back the information at a

high price

Publish and perish

Publish or perish policies have debased the value of the scholarly book and led to a proliferation of poor-quality journals across the world.

In the face of falling budgets and buy-in into commercial models, university presses driven to 'break even' or make profits.

Result – the convergence of scholarly publishing with upper-end trade publishing

Peculiar assumptions

Publishing should be outsourced Scholarly publishing is a profit-based business Research dissemination is not the business of

universities and research institutions and they do not need to fund it

These assumptions become even more peculiar when applied in a developing country context

Academic publishers face dangers from all sides these days - the public, taxpayers, profs, students, librarians, colleagues. There has

emerged the idea among administrators and some academic publishers themselves, who seem to feel compelled to comply with

unreasonable expectations, that university presses should be turned into ‘profit centres’ and contribute to the general budget of the university. Where did this idea come from? It’s bad. We have financial records of publishing in the West since Gutenberg, and it is clear that books are a losing proposition. Widgets have been,

and always will be, a surer bet. And the idea of milking the university presses – the poorest of all publishers – for cash is the equivalent of making the church mice contribute to the upkeep of

the church.

Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: publishing, perishing, and the eclipse of scholarship. Chicago, 2004. Prickly Paradigm Press

The costs of this model

Universities ignore the real costs of their contribution

In Australia the cost of getting an article published (authoring, peer reviewing, editorial activities) is AUD19,000.00

A monograph costs AUD115,000.00 The costs of administering the evaluation and

assessment process are even higherGovernment of Australia, Department of Education, Science and Training.

Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging opportunities and benefits.

We forget too readily that the accepted scholarly publishing system is is not

'traditional' but a very recent invention – a combination of the massification of

education and the corresponding consolidation of publishing by media

baron Robert Maxwell

Developing country perspectiveson conventional scholarly

publishing

Global divides

If the publishing model is working badly in the developed world, it is never has worked in the developing world

International publications unaffordable to libraries, scholars cut off from mainstream research

In most countries local readership too small to approach anything like viability

Scholars expected to publish internationally but the selection process geared against them

Research agendas

The emphasis on mainstream journals in international indices skews research priorities – critical research areas of importance to the developing world can be marginalised

Local researchers target international priorities for reasons of prestige and promotion

Restricted access to international research findings can block development needs

Local- interest research gets second-rate status

Do new Internet-based dissemination models provide an

answer?

Internet publishing

Reduces the marginal cost of publishing (i.e. the cost of making more copies)

Distribution costs near-zero Greater reach - geographical barriers no longer

relevant Peer to peer networks allow for collaborative

and interactive research development Without the expense of print distribution, new

financial and business models are possible

International initiatives

South Africa is a signatory to the OECD declaration on access to research data from public funding (2004)

There are now a number of international declarations – Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda, Salvador...

Governments and agencies have addressed the issues and endorsed OA in varying degrees: the UK government, the EU, WSIS, the NIH in the USA, Wellcome Trust...

Policy positions

EU has just issued a report – asks for a guarantee of public access shortly after publication; a levelling of the playing field, ro-competitive pricing strategies...

Wellcome Trust requires OA to the research that it funds, with deposit required within 6 months

The NIH in the USA requests OA archiving The RCUK asks that funded researchers

deposit a copy in an archive

And the Bill Gates Foundation will only fund Open Access Aids vaccine

research

Open Access is not..

Self-publishing – still applies quality assurance, selection, content preparation

vanity publishing, second-class or cut-price 'Anti-copyright' – operates within the parameters

of copyright law, but with the right of free access Low-profile – impact levels for OA are higher than

conventional publishing and that impact kicks in faster

'Author pays' financial model only – there are a variety of routes to sustainability

Products – the Green and Gold Routes to Open Access

The Green Route - the pre-or post-publication deposit of journal articles in personal, institutional or national repositories

The Gold Route - publication in an Open Access journal

Authors encouraged to find an OA journal where one is available, if not, negotiate the right to pre- or post-publication archiving

Mixed models are available – e.g. Elsevier OA option

The Gold Route – OA journals

There are currently 2316 OA journals listed in the DOAJ, of which 666 are searchable at article level. 104476 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Citation impact for OA journals higher than traditional journals, particularly for developing countries

Quality evaluations suggest that OA journals are of acceptable and often good quality

The Green Route

Can be combined with publication in a conventional journal – many journals now allowing deposit with various restrictions

OS software for archiving – EPrints (Southampton) DSpace (MIT)

Globally interoperable through OAI protocol for Metadata harvesting (OAIPMPH)

Research shows that voluntary deposit does not work – needs to be mandated

Developing world perspectives

Open Access Publishing

The Gold Route - India

Close to 100 journals are now OA These include the journals of the Indian

Academy of Science, the National Science Academy, Council of Medical Research

Two agencies bring out OA versions of journals published by mostly professional societies

NIC, a government agency, publishes electronic versions of 38 biomedical journals

Varying degrees of ease of access

Impact of Indian OA journals

Journal of Postgraduate Medicine: gets 150 000 hits a month; the circulation of the print version has

increased; the number of papers submitted has increased,

as have submissions from outside India; papers are getting cited more often.

Business model

None of the journals are 'author pays' Most journals are published by the government,

science academies or professional societies Science academies get government grants and

the professional societies some government support

Private firms publishing print versions also supply OA digital versions

SCIELO – South America

Methodology for managing journal and data publication

Websites for collections of scientific journals – national and thematic

Development of collaboration between all the different players – governments, institutions, authors, funding agencies, libraries....

More than 200 journals online

A case study – the HSRC Press

Online content Open Access

Parallel print products for sale

Professional publishing

Intensive marketing

Investment

Stop Press....

The Academy of Science of South Africa