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How Open Access can strategically benefit African Universities
Paper presented at the Biomed Central Open Access in Africa Conference
Kenyatta University, Nairobi 10-11 November 2010
How Open Access can strategically benefit African Universities
Eve Gray
Centre for Educational Technology
University of Cape Town
The view of a publisher
... from Africa...
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In essence, what is being defined as ‘knowledge society’ means two different things to the developed world and the African continent. The former are the producers and the latter are the consumers of knowledge, which seriously undermines the fostering of the multicultural nature of Higher Education, as virtually all partnerships are one-sided. This is not only negative for the African continent, but it also deprives global higher education of access to the indigenous knowledge of Africa, and it deprives Africans of the opportunity to develop their indigenous knowledge system and strengthen their relationship to western and eastern knowledge systems. Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and Training, South Africa
ʻHow could the application of knowledge end poverty and hunger in Africa? How could higher education empower women and promote gender equity? How can knowledge be considered in the African context to address child mortality and improve maternal health?ʼ
Nahas Angula, Namibian Prime Minister, UNESCO 29th Conference on Higher Education, 2009
Science Research
http://www.worldmapper.org 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).
Is the problem what is being produced, or what is being
measured?
We measure impact factors and citations in a highly
competitive and exclusionary system
..and pay less attention to the publications that
emerge from development-focused research
It is not that our policy-makers do not see the
problem...
Blade Nzimande, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education 2009
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.
But we are stuck in a free rider mentality...
in which higher education does not see
publication as its responsibility.
The result is tunnel vision
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence
which ignores all but a small segment of the publishing ecosystem..
the formal publishing that does not work very well for us...
Open access is an
answer
Text• Builds on collaboration and a
tradition of collegiality
• Depends upon sharing rather than proprietorship, access rather than protection
• Efficiencies and economies of collaborative development
• Networked rather than hierarchical structures
The ethos of OA
overcoming distribution and access barriers
and working across the whole ecosystem
Commercial publishing - journals
offers citation impact, global prestige, access,
reach...
and freedom to reuse content for ‘translation’
of research...
Text
Books
Cooperative publishing platforms
help reduce the South to North knowledge
gap
South African national open access initiative
and building the quality and accessibility of national journals...
Repositories profile the whole range of scholarship
African research centres produce research that
addresses vital development needs
and release their communications for
open access.
The question is how to build a scholarly communication policy
environment that addresses the whole ecosystem.
Eve GrayHonorary Research Associate
Centre for Educational TechnologyUniversity of Cape Town
http://www.gray-area.co.zahttp://www.http://www.sca2kafrica.org/
http://www.cet.uct.ac.za