OA 2013 - A Broader Vision of Open Access for Development

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OA 2013: A broader world vision for Open Access for

development

UNISA Open Scholarship SeminarOpen Access Week

23 October 2013

The beginning of Open Access, in Budapest in 2002…

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 Budapest Open Access Initiative

Budapest Open Access Initiative

A good strong definition of OA…

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users

to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for

indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or

technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

(BOAI 2002)

Two models emerged – the ‘Green route’ …

…leading to policies and mandates for the deposit of journal pre-prints and

post-prints in institutional repositories…

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… or the ‘gold route’ of open access journal publishing…

…which has had its successes in the developing world…

Brazil with its SciELO platform is now the second biggest producer

of OA journals in the world

Alperin et al., 2008, Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America: ten flavours and a few reflections revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/article/view/269/167

but less so in Africa…

…where technical platforms have been promoted as the easy solution…

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Is this a case of tunnel vision?

We have tended to base our advocacy for OA on the potential for increased impact in ‘mainstream’ ‘international’ journals..

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…a competitive system in which the rules are weighted agains the developing world…

…like the Times Higher Education university rankings …

… the real problem has to

more to do with promotion

and reward systems…

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..particularly our reliance on the ISI Impact Factor…

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Real impact?

So, one might ask, ten years later - how much has really changed as a result of OA?

Peter Murray Rust, #openaccess 10 years on; can we say “This is for everyone”? http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/10/

The outcome of our tunnel vision…

…at the same time as we seek development impact for our research production…

Something we have in fact delivered on for a long time…

..and fail to deliver to our government’s satisfaction…

Our universities, in particular, should be directing their research focus to address the

development and social needs of our communities. The impact of their research

should be measured by how much difference it makes to the needs of our communities, rather than by just how

many international citations researchers receive in their publications.

Blade Nzimande, SA Minster of Higher Education and Training, Women in Science Awards. 2010

..or deliver to our university vision..

“Towards the African university in the service of humanity”

…although in South Africa we have demonstrated the power of open social

science book publishing through a science council…

…internationally, the born OA journals are helping address the marginal status of developing country research…

…and the megajournals offer new solutions to our capacity dilemmas and link journal articles to wider content and

altmetrics..

The principles…research must be replicable, reusable, data must be capable of being mined, relevant research outputs

must be linked to the core article…

Globally, things are changing…

We used to be a bunch of activists, planning the flight path of Open Access …

Photo: Eve Gray 2008- CC-BY iCommons 2008

…but now OA policy is in the mainstream…

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UNESCO

… a human rights approach …

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EC Horizon 2020

…investment in open research and open data…

...with a vision of the power of regional open networked science…

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UK Policy Initiatives

http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

The Finch Committee goes for gold

.. provoking fierce arguments…

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… for us, the cost of APCs remains a problem – and who is going to pay

for and handle this?

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…major funders and government agencies insisting that publicly funded research must

be openly available…

…with availability not only to scholars but to businesses and the broader

public…

… major international agencies link OA policies to direct development impact…

… and the latest adherent, a large agricultural research co-operative …

…mandating the use of the most open of the Creative Commons licences – CC-BY…

…offering a treasure trove of policy and data management guidelines…

New models emerging for scholarly books, like Knowledge Unlatched …

The central messages…

…we have to take control of research dissemination and pay for

this…

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… we need a wider range of quality and impact measures

...the ‘three pillars’ of the university research mission become a continuum – OA, OERs and ‘community engagement’…

Eve Gray Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme

University of Cape Town

Centre for Educational TechnologyIP Law and Policy Research Unit

University of Cape Town

http://www.gray-area.co.zaTwitter: graysouth