Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme

This Green Paper, launched by the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training Dr Blade Nzimande in January 2012, identifies the key challenges facing South African higher education and sets out a path for overcoming these obstacles. Here SCAP Programme Director Eve Gray (with the input of Professor Julian Kinderlerer, Head of the Intellectual Property Law and Policy Unit at the University of Cape Town) highlights key issues contained in the paper as pertains to ICT, IPR, access to knowledge and open innovation.

The Green Paper is available for download here. Interested organisations and persons are invited to respond to the Ministry by 30 April 2012.

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The role of ICT, IPR, access to knowledge and open innovation

The Green Paper on Post-School Education contains a number of provisions that are of interest from the perspective of the IP Law and Policy Research Unit and related projects and centres at UCT, such as SCAP and Open UCT. We have also identified gaps in the policy framework that could be addressed using the knowledge and experience accumulated over the past 5 years in research conducted at UCT.

The focus in this short discussion paper is therefore on the provision – or lack of provision – in the Green Paper for ICT use in higher education for the purposes of capacity growth and transformation; for the use and advantages of open approaches to knowledge creation and communication; and for the creation of national and institutional IP policy incorporating open licensing.

The vision of the Green Paper

The Green Paper offers an ambitious vision for growth in Higher and Further Education provision in order to meet one of the country’s most serious challenges: the 3 million young people who are falling into the gaps, facing long-term unemployment (p. 4). It is further education that faces the largest deficit and requires the greatest intervention. Ambitious growth targets are set to remedy this situation: for a 1.5 million enrolment in higher education by 2030, and a 4 million enrolment in further education These are participation rates of 23% and 60% respectively (p. 5).

The core focus of the Green Paper is therefore on employment and economic growth and how the higher and further education system could best contribute to this national imperative. However, the Green paper also places a strong emphasis on transformation and redress in the HE system.

The strategy – a collaborative approach to growth and technology transfer

The strategy that the Green Paper articulates to meet the challenge posed by the very substantial expansion needed in the sector is to initially focus growth in the successful institutions in the system, while progressively dealing with the weaker institutions (p. 19), acknowledging the need for increased funding in order to deliver these goals and also to create a better balance between research, teaching and learning (p.12). The stronger institutions (such as UCT, one presumes) would be used to help empower and capacitate the weaker ones. Collaborative development is stressed and the need for cooperation between institutions (p 52). Of direct relevance to UCT is the proposal that there should be a considerable increase in the output of postgraduates in successful research universities to help balance the ratios of academics to students and provide a qualified and competent cohort of academics to staff expansion across the sector (p. 8).

The need for regional and international research collaboration is also stressed, with the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) identified as a core partner in this regard.

Research

The Green Paper aims for growth in research outputs in the form of postgraduate degrees and ‘patents and products’ arising out of research. It aims for more differentiation in the research agendas of the different institutions (p.39). The general aim is to ‘help drive South Africa’s transformation towards a knowledge-based economy, in which the production and dissemination of knowledge leads to economic benefits and enriches all fields of human endeavour (p. 12).

What is missing here is the recognition  - now widely accepted internationally and supported by UNESCO and other international agencies – of the role of open access to research publications in enhancing technical expertise and business growth, particularly in small to medium businesses[1].

ICT and open learning

The Green Paper promotes the central role of ICT in delivering effective teaching and learning and increasing institutional capacity in this regard. Of particular interest is the proposal that learning resources should be made available as open educational resources (p. 57, 59), and the Green Paper declares an interest in a government-managed development programme for open textbooks (p. 43; 60)[2]. In making this proposal, the document explicitly refers to the UNESCO initiative for the promotion of OER policies in member nations[3].

However, the Green Paper does not address open access and open research.

IP policy development

In the light of these provisions for the adoption of OER, the Green Paper calls for supporting IPR policy development, suggesting ‘the adoption or adaptation, in accordance with national needs, of an appropriate Open Licensing Framework for use by all education stakeholders, within an overarching policy framework on intellectual property rights and copyright in higher education’ (p. 60).

The IP Law and Policy Research Unit is arguably the only research space in the country with the expertise to inform the development of such an IP policy framework, incorporating, as it does, open licensing provisions alongside ‘all rights reserved’ protection.

The gap – Open Access

What is missing in the Green Paper is a recognition of the importance of access to knowledge and open access to research publications. This is all the more surprising as Open Access as a policy issue has now moved into the mainstream of global higher education. UNESCO has adopted an open access strategy that has been adopted by its General Conference. An Expert’s Meeting and Open Access Forum in November 2011was held to launch this strategy[4].

UNESCO is calling for open access policies to be adopted by its member nations, arguing that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, crucial in reducing the knowledge divide and increasing socio-economic development^[5].

UNESCO is not alone in this approach. In addition, the World Bank has adopted an open approach to its data[6], and the FAO, which has adopted open access for its own publications, makes a strong case for the use of open access publishing to increase the impact of agricultural research across the globe^[7].

At national and regional levels, governments are addressing the question of open access as a policy issue. Federal legislation in the USA requires the open access publication or deposit of research publications funded by the National Institutes of Health; the European Union is reaching the final stages of a major initiative to provide infrastructure and support for an open access framework for research across the region, Open Aire (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe)^[8]; the UK is progressively exploring open access policies through the national Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)[9].

Given that policy formulation needs to be forward looking, it is important that the question of open access be addressed in the Green Paper as a strategy and policy issue. UCT would be in a good position to contribute to the research, given the existence of the IP Law Policy and Research Unit and the successive donor funded research programmes that have been conducted at UCT, from Eve Gray’s Open Society Policy Fellowship in 2006-7, through the OpeningScholarship project to the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme, the Open UCT initiative, and the various research initiatives and donor programmes carried out in the IP Law and Policy Research Unit

Questions for further research

There are a number of areas in which UCT could contribute to further research on higher education policy development in this field.

Intellectual property policy

The Green Paper explicitly asks for the development of IP policies for universities that encompass open and Creative Commons licences. UCT is probably ahead in its adoption of a revised IP policy that includes the use of open licences alongside all rights reserved copyright models and patents.

There would be advantages in expanding this policy, researching further options and refining and consolidating UCT’s existing IP policy to align it more effectively with 21^st century research processes and research communication practices. UCT could play a leadership role in this regard, given the existence of the expertise in the IP Law and Policy Research Unit.

Open access

At a national level, the potential of open access could be researched, in relation to national goals for economic development, business and employment growth, as well as the delivery of the Millennium Development Goals. An expansion of such an investigation could evaluate the impact of openness on transformation and redress in the HE system; on gender balance and disability access. It could also reflect on the explicit desire of the Green Paper to advantage young researchers and the potential of open access to empower this cohort.

Given evidence suggesting the increased impact of open research publication, the competitive advantages of open access and its potential contribution to the prestige of the national research effort could be tracked.

Open Innovation

Given the narrow focus on industrial-economy innovation systems in DST policy as the main path to evaluating university research impact on economic growth, there would be value in conducting further research on the potential for open access to serve the economic and social needs enshrined in national policy and in the UCT mission, and for tracking the social and economic benefits that could accrue.

Existing research on the impact of open research publication models suggests that the availability of open access to journal articles and to ‘grey’ publications has a beneficial effect, particularly in supporting the growth and effectiveness of small and medium businesses. This is in addition to the social benefits that can arise from access to research findings on important developmental issues such as health, food sustainability, and ecology.

Eve Gray (with Julian Kinderlerer)
February 2012

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme has a Researcher position available in its research team at the University of Cape Town.
Applications to be submitted to the Programme Manager: michelle.willmers@uct.ac.za.
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Location
Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme, Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town

Job Purpose
Undertake research around scholarly communication and publication practice in four Southern African institutions; specifically as relates to: (1) current research communication practice, (2) values associated with current practice, and (3) costs and benefits arising from an open, expansive approach to scholarly communication. All research work to be undertaken with the guidance of the programme Research Lead in line with scoped programme objectives.

Key Tasks
1. Conduct study around costs and benefits arising from changing approaches to scholarly communication based on principles of open access.
2. Assistance in conducting and analysing data from a survey, interviews and questionnaires on current research communication practice.
3. Conduct interviews with managers at four Southern African universities around values associated with scholarly communication and synthesise data with programme findings to date.
4. Familiarisation with programme application of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) methodological approach. (Already-existing expertise in this area is not prerequisite.)
5. Produce reports and other documentation communicating research findings.
6. Participate in site visits to participating institutions.
7. Attend and present at conferences, both local and abroad.

Key Requirements
1. Knowledge of or interest in current, digitally-mediated scholarly communication practice; research for development; and dynamics of 21st-century higher-education environment (particularly African context).
2. Methodological rigour.
3. Understanding of key processes in undertaking qualitative research. Additional quantitative expertise would be advantageous.
4. Ability to take responsibility for delegated tasks and work unsupervised.
5. Professional communication and presentation skills.

Key Attributes
1. Team player, self-motivated, energetic.
2. Ability to build relationships and communicate at all levels.
3. Interest in advancing new approaches to knowledge dissemination in African context for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research.

Qualifications
A minimum Honours qualification and substantial relevant experience in a research domain such as media studies, educational technology, education, computer science or new digital media studies. Experience with Activity Theory would be highly advantageous.

Terms of Employment
This is a full-time position in the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. Candidates outside Cape Town are welcome to apply, but the programme will not cover any relocation costs.

Applications close Friday 24 February 2012.
The successful candidate will be required to take up the appointment no later than 1 April 2012.

by Michelle Willmers
SCAP Programme Manager

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme is both a research and implementation programme in that we are experimenting with technology solutions for a revised, expanded approach to scholarly communication and conducting research on scholarly communication practice within four Southern African institutions(1).

All activity within the programme is framed by our methodological lens: Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CHAT is a valuable tool in that it addresses our objective of trying to define the ecosystem of scholarly communication within our four partner institutions. We want to know: What are the historical trends and factors that have shaped current scholarly communication practice; and what impact are new research and communication technologies having on these ecosystems?

Beyond this we are interested in advancing the open agenda as a means to growing more robust scholarship and profiling the important research conducted on the African continent. In this utilisation of openness and technology, we address the notion of impact and the question of how to promote the visibility/findability of local research for the purpose of addressing the socioeconomic and developmental imperatives on the continent.

The technology or implementation strands of SCAP activity are dictated by an action-research approach in which participating institutions dictate the course of action. Through a series of workshops with researchers in pilot research units coupled with senior management consultation, we have identified a particular ‘need state’ around scholarly communication at each of the institutions, and technology implementation activity has been designed to address or stimulate these site-specific contexts.

At the Universities of Botswana and Namibia repositories are central to the need state and form the focus of our implementation activity in these institutions – the issue of uptake around the sharing platform being the issue in the first instance, while total collapse is the case in the latter.

Conscious of the legacy of failure and disappointment associated with many repository initiatives on the continent, we have grappled (at times uncomfortably) with the idea of the repository being the focus of programme activity in two of the four SCAP sites; repeatedly expressing that we didn’t want to invest resources in a slightly updated version of what would still turn out to be a ‘roach motel’(2) … we just wanted an institutional SPACE in which to describe and store content and a platform from which to disseminate. But that’s a repository … isn’t it?

The examples of successful repository activity we have seen in the South African context have been in institutions where repository activity has been aligned with university strategy and the interests of academics. This suggests to us that the answer in getting beyond the beleaguered repository lies in the fundamental approach to its conceptualisation.

Revising our approach to repository

In both the Universities of Botswana and Namibia repositories were established 5–10 years ago in the library and hard-working librarians set out to populate them with content. The focus appears to have been technology and the library.

The focus (or objective) of the SCAP technological implementation strategy is to advance a strategic approach to dissemination as a means to address the core mission objectives of the university, particularly the imperative to be “a major contributor to nation building”, as the UNam mission statement puts it.

This objective requires an expanded view from seeing traditional book or journal article as the primary mode for knowledge sharing, and we are therefore interested in profiling a broad array of outputs, let’s call them ‘research objects’, which can be accessed and understood by an expanded audience (including government and policy-makers).

The ‘research objects’ category includes traditional outputs such as books and journal articles, but also extends to the further end of the spectrum to include research reports, social-media communication of work-in-progress, and data. (Open data is, however, still a glimmer in the eye as we focus, for now, on text-driven objects.)

So how do we share these objects and ensure their findability? Build a repository? Already tried that. The answer: A strategic approach to describing, curating and disseminating. In short: publishing.

Building a publishing layer onto the repository (and into the institutional scholarly communication ecosystem)

There has been a lot of talk about ‘publishing layers’ being added to repository software platforms. Much of this discourse seems to focus on Web 2.0 tools and plug-ins (and on technology generally). The technology is, of course, important, but our interest and focus resides more firmly on the influence of activity which we see as being human-driven and shaped by the activity system at work in the institution.

At perfunctionary level, this publishing layer is concerned with the manifest, explicit activity of harnessing metadata and strategy to boost visibility (such as indexing in databases and online profiling). But when examined more closely, there appears to be a complex (and more interesting) implicit dimension in which this publishing layer is driven by and relates to the ecosystem of scholarly communication in the institution: the rules which govern institutional practice around dissemination, the division of labour underpinning the enterprise, and the tools which academics use in the process of conducting and sharing their research – all of which constitute the matrix that is the cultural historical activity system.

The Cultural Historical Activity Theory approach provides a means for us to examine this dynamic matrix of activity which exists as a culmination of historical forces … and to identify where the tensions or misalignments are in this system which must now adapt to a changed context.

How the dynamics of the activity system shape and determine the publishing layer is at the centre of our inquiry; repository software being incidental, a means to an end, in what we trying to achieve.

In the Universities of Botswana and Namibia our revised approach to repositories is bolstered by what we perceive to be a new willingness on the part of managers and academics to engage strategically with dissemination and to see publishing (this dynamic, complex vision of publishing activity) as part of the core business of the institution.

We have no guarantees of uptake or success, but seeing the repository space as a means to service a more holistic, ecosystem-driven approach to dissemination (as opposed to a technologically-determined process) is interesting for us to explore.

Note:
This post is a summation of preliminary thoughts around SCAP repository activity and the first in a series of exploratory posts. We are interested to tap into the experience and expertise of others in the field. If you are involved with or know about an initiative that is engaged with reviving or taking a renewed approach to institutional repositories (particularly in a developing-country context) we’d like to hear from you.

(1) Participating institutions are the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.
(2) The term ‘roach motel’ is an allusion to Dorothea Salo’s exploration of repositories and the participation gap which calls for a serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals and means.
Salo D (2008) Innkeeper at the roach motel. Library Trends 57:2

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) recently hosted Cameron Neylon on his first visit to South Africa for a week of activity and discussion around alternative metrics and research evaluation.

Based at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, Neylon is a leading thinker in open science, open access and open data. He is one of the original authors of the Altmetrics manifesto, co-author of the Panton Principles for open data in science, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Open Research Computation.

He visited UCT in his capacity as a member of the SCAP Advisory Panel and to participate in discussions around defining and measuring the impact of academic research – a core strand central to all SCAP activity. SCAP Research Lead Catherine Kell interviewed him briefly.

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CK: What is alternative metrics?

CN: When we think of the term alternative metrics we have to think what the word alternative means, what it is alternative to. There are many differences within this emerging field, but for most of us working in this area – it is seen as alternative ways of measuring scholarly output. At the moment the system currently involves simple citation counting and this runs into all sorts of problems, where you are really just judging a book by its cover, that is, by what journal it appears in.

There are two strands to the alternative metrics movement. One takes the traditional journal articles approach to scholarly outputs, and it tries to measure that related to the use of the articles on the web. So what the ‘Article level metrics’, which is the approach that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is taking, involves providing information on the details of article usage gathered through internet tracking, such as numbers of downloads, page views along with information on who is bookmarking articles and who is talking about them online. So with regard to wider forms of communication, there is a range of different measures on usage which can be tracked through what happens on the web, like the number of tweets, the use of FaceBook, blog-posts. It could also include other references like policy papers and other news outlets, which link back electronically to the original research articles.

So, in the first strand of the alternative metrics movement new measures are applied to traditional scholarly outputs. The second strand involves working out how to apply the traditional idea of measurement to new scholarly approaches which are emerging online. An example of this is data citation (where the web enables data itself to be cited independently of the article in which it is embedded), and equally the production by academics, of video and audio presentations, and websites in general. So: how we apply traditional notions of referencing using citations to track that variation in type of output.

CK: Why did you come to be involved with this work in alternative metrics? You are a very successful scientist, does this not just take you away from your scientific work?

CN: I came to be interested in alternative assessment measures because of what I saw in my own experience: that traditional measures and the impact factors currently in use seemed to be pushing academic work in a direction that was not in line with my values. I wanted to make sure that my research was useful and was being used, and I felt that the incentives were pushing me in a direction which made my research output less useful. I was writing articles and putting them into journals where people couldn’t read them, making data into a state where it was not useful for others. So I wanted to find procedures for managing and describing my data and my work that would make it reusable so that my research could really make a difference.

CK: So what steps did you take to start engaging with the idea of alternative metrics?

CN: Well, when I started to meet up with others in this area, lots of us had the same experience. So our thoughts were around how to encourage people to ensure that their research is communicated in a way that it reaches the right people. So this raises a policy issue. Funders and universities just tend to tell people what to do, and that is not effective. So, for us, the question became how do you shape the incentive system so people are really encouraged to do the right thing. We felt it was important to make it a plausible adjustment and not an impossible leap, so it was: how do we take what already exists in terms of measurement and adjust and expand that?

My own thinking has been: if we want to measure use of research, then we need to measure its reuse. We need to track different ways that this happens and this has got a lot easier with the way the web works now. In the ‘traditional’ academic world this is already happening with measures of citations, and people’s work being measured through journal impact factors, like how many times is it cited? So this idea of tracking reuse fits quite naturally.

CK: What potential is there for this approach in Southern Africa?

CN: Well, I’d like to say that this is my first visit to Africa and to South Africa, so I would be very cautious about saying anything. But for me, having had a few days in SCAP now, what is most striking is that researchers are really aware and motivated to find ways by which to engage with the community; who see that their research has value for development and education and for improving the social situation and the economy. I get that strong sense that that is what researchers and academics want to do. So, in some ways, it will already be easier than it might in the UK or more widely in the North. There’s already an acceptance of such an approach.

CK: How would you tell if this work around alternative metrics was making a difference?

CN: Well, you would ask is your research reaching local people and are they engaging with it? For example, you would look at people who are talking about a paper using social media and Twitter, and then you would look at, is it local people tweeting about this paper, or is it a wider community, or an international community? Is it people on the ground, who are directly connecting with it? So people are constantly leaving traces in public places on the web. And you can so all if this with ease, actually, the techniques are just so good. So this is a tremendously powerful and new phenomenon and the results can be very meaningful, because you are really following through on the question of how your research is relating to people and how they are relating to it.

In this way researchers can become more motivated to address challenges and local issues. By getting this feedback they can tell if they are doing the right thing. They can ask what worked and what did not work?

On the other hand, because there is a sense of a wish to engage together with a desire to make a difference, this can enable communication to work in the other direction – you, as a researcher, can get direct feedback on what people think. So it short-circuits normal lengthy feedback routes, which, in many cases, do not exist at all.

Otherwise what researchers are doing is meaningless, research always has to be in context. You have to find a balance between the right breadth of research and the right areas to be looking into. More broadly, our political systems are based on mid 19 Century technologies. The evolution to a more democratic political system has to involve an engaged community. If you don’t talk to the community it can’t work, and the community needs to know what’s going on to participate. We have the mechanisms now, and we have these channels that can demonstrate engagement.

CK: Is it not possible that this approach could be co-opted, for example, by big business wanting to use it for instrumental ends? We could therefore end up with narrowed research agendas?

CN: There is potential for that, but I think it is possible to mitigate against the risk of co-option by creating value in a range of outputs which have different levels of access and by being mindful of this risk. We know that one number (the traditional one) as a measure doesn’t work, but we can now get the responsiveness and know who is the target of our efforts with appropriate methods, and these would involve tracking and getting feedback on all kinds of outputs from traditional papers to technical reports, policy papers, to visual and audio presentations and even to oral workshops. So the range is very wide now. And the web makes all of this possible and in some ways fairly effortless.

*** Postscript: See Cameron Neylon’s reflections on his recent visit and the dynamics around open access in the developing world in his blog post ‘Open Access for the other 85%‘.