Open Access and the Decolonization of the

University in Africa Open Access and the Future of Africa’s Knowledge Economy

Fourth Codesria Conference on Electronic Publishing and Dissemination

Dakar, 30 March – 1 April 2016

The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement at UCT, demanding an end to neo-colonial higher education, launched countrywide student protests in South Africa in March 2015

Open Access, with its democratic ethos, should play into this movement, yet the question of access to research publication, open access and the democratization of scholarly publishing has not been on #RhodesMustFall agenda…

Instead open access appears to be heading for stormy weather…

Instead of decolonizing, is OA losing out to the corporate strength of the big journal publishers and their hold on academics keen for promotion? A knock-out blow….?

In the last few months, weeks and days, and accelerating unease …

Bernard Rentier, a leading champion of OA in Europe, accuses scholars of succumbing to a ‘Stockholm Syndrome, betraying their own interests in negotiations with publishers’.

Email from Bernard Rentier (University of Liege) to the Communautede Libre Acces Francophone, 25 March 2016

Email from Bernard Rentier (University of Liege) to the Communautede Libre Acces Francophone, 25 March 2016

One of the best-known and longest-standing OA advocates and missionary champion of green OA, Stevan Harnad, walks out in despair

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A weakness of the OA movement - ideological arguments about the right road, the Green or the Gold, finally culminate in this impasse.

What has been missing is a lack of clear strategic thinking that looks beyond the journal article

The weakest point – researchers’ addiction to prestige journals and impact factors…

Yochai Benkler in 2006 expressed reservations about OA based on the conservatism of universities and, given the conservatism of universities, the weight carried by the leading journals like Science and Nature, and the persistence of the reward system. ‘[A]s long as hiring and promotion decisions continue to be based on the prestige of the journal in which a scientist’s work is published, the ability of these new journals to replace the traditional ones will be curtailed.’ (Benkler 2006, 323-4).

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We chase after global competitiveness…

A competitive and individualistic system in conflict with the collaborative culture of digital media.

http://otwartanauka.pl/in-english/experts-on-open-access/open-access-will-remain-a-half-revolution-interview-with-richard-poynder2 March 2016

The source of our unease – a scholarly publishing system brokered over 60 years ago

We have failed to build a strategy on what is needed in a digital 21st century in Africa.

And so we get this… an Elsevier OA African megajournal…

And the ‘gold route’ leaves the system vulnerable to the strategies of the multinationals..

Relationships are not good…

htphhttps://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/wellcome-criticises-publishers-over-open-access

Despite the claim by Elsevier that the policy advances sharing, it actually does the opposite. The policy … requires authors to apply a “non-commercial and no derivative works” license for each article deposited into a repository, greatly inhibiting the re-use value of these articles…Furthermore, the policy applies to “all articles previously published and those published in the future” making it even more punitive for both authors and institutions. This may also lead to articles that are currently available being suddenly embargoed and inaccessible to readers.

https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/advocacy-leadership/statements-and-guidelines/petition-against-elseviers-sharing-policy/

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/big-deals,-bad-feelings-in-the-knowledge-business/6480274

…the war continues and the battlefield resembles the Western Front in WWI: a stalemate. Both sides have won significant victories and suffered significant defeats, but the key questions remain the same. Who owns scientific information? How much does it cost to access it? Who should be able to access it?

Now Africa is being re-colonized…

‘One of the fundamental questions is whether you regard the knowledge that's generated through research as a common good,’ says Professor Leeder. ‘In other words, it should be there for everybody to use, paid for by the community through its taxes to research workers, or whether someone can come along and put a fence around these paddocks and say, “Well that's actually mine.”’

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/big-deals,-bad-feelings-in-the-knowledge-business/6480274

This is only one of many African-centredinitiatives by the multinational publishers

…who until now have denied that Africa is part of their ‘international’ world, and therefore capable of offering research impact..

With disastrous results

Photo European Commisison CC-BY-NC

How did we get into this mess? A lack of strategy?

… someone who did strategise very carefully, after World War II…

Robert Maxwell –media mogul, possibly a double or treble agent, but also one of the main architects of post-war scientific publishing…

… from a poverty-stricken background in what is now Czeckoslovakia, he landed up at the end of World War II working for British information services in British Occupied Germany

Maxwell recognised that research content , scientific and technical knowledge had become valuable – a matter of money….

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English became thedominant language

Politically?

The power base was that of the victorious Allies, the UK and the USA …

… Maxwell lionized scientists, paid for travel, editorial parties, took the business management over for them, created new journals for their specializations…

…promotion and prestige became inextricably linked to journal publication…

… so the real problem lies

in our promotion and reward systems…

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What we have failed to address…

The University of Cape Town, which chases citation counts to maintain its position as the top-ranking African university overall has in fact come 8th in the world subject rankings for development science…

So how should we be strategizing?

Align our publishing practices with our strategic imperatives, developmental, commercial the quest for real excellence…

Although radical alternatives have started to suggest themselves…

Eve GrayResearch Associate Intellectual Property Law UnitUniversity of Cape Town