A paper delivered at the UNISA Open Access Seminar, 23 October 2013. The paper argues that in a developing world context, and particularly in Africa, the narrow focus of conventional OA arguments on journal articles and an emphasis on the impact factor has been counterproductive. A wider approach, incorporating transformative uses of scholarly outputs for policy development and teaching and learning would be more appropriate.

1. OA 2013: A broader world vision
for Open Access for
development
UNISA Open Scholarship Seminar
Open Access Week
23 October 2013
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2. The beginning of Open Access, in Budapest in
2002…

3. The Budapest Open Access
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...
Budapest Open Access Initiative

4. A good strong definition of OA…

5. 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)

6. Two models emerged – the ‘Green
route’ …

7. …leading to policies and mandates for
the deposit of journal pre-prints and
post-prints in institutional
repositories…

8. … or the ‘gold route’ of open
access journal publishing…
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9. …which has had its successes in the
developing world…

10. 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/vie

11. but less so in Africa…

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

14. Is this a case of tunnel
vision?
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CC attribution licence

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

16. …a competitive
system in which the
rules are weighted
agains the
developing world…
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17. …like the Times Higher Education
university rankings …

19. … the real
problem has to
more to do
with
promotion and
reward
systems…
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20. ..particularly our reliance on the ISI
Impact Factor…

21. Real impact?
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22. 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/

24. The outcome of our tunnel vision…

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

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

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

29. 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

30. ..or deliver to our university vision..

31. “Towards the African university in the service of humanity”

32. …although in South Africa we have
demonstrated the power of open
social science book publishing through
a science council…

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

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

37. The principles…research must be
replicable, reusable, data must be
capable of being mined, relevant
research outputs must be linked to the
core article…

38. Globally, things are changing…

39. We used to be a bunch of activists, planning the
flight path of Open Access …
iCommons 2008
Photo: Eve Gray 2008- CC-BY

40. …but now OA policy is in the
mainstream…

41. Attribution Some rights reserved by James Cridland

42. UNESCO

43. … a human rights
approach …
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44. EC Horizon 2020

45. …investment in open research and
open data…

46. ...with a vision of the
power of regional
open networked
science…
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47. UK Policy Initiatives
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48. The Finch Committee goes for gold
http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

49. .. provoking fierce arguments…

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51. … for us, the cost of APCs remains
problem – and who is going to pay
for and handle this?
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52. …major funders and government
agencies insisting that publicly funded
research must be openly available…

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

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

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

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

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

63. New models emerging for scholarly
books, like Knowledge Unlatched …

65. The central messages…

66. …we have to take control of
research dissemination and pay fo
this…
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67. … we need a wider range of quality
and impact measures

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

69. Eve Gray
Scholarly Communication in Africa
Programme
University of Cape Town
Centre for Educational Technology
IP Law and Policy Research Unit
University of Cape Town
http://www.gray-area.co.za
Twitter: graysouth