Herding dinosaurs?

Scholarly publishing in a rapidly changing environment

Presentation for the Emerging Researchers Programme, UCT

26 March 2008

Eve Gray, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Michelle Willmers

OpeningScholarship Project

An evolutionary metaphor

A combination of new technology, outdated business models and greed threatens the survival of the

current, for-profit journal publishing industry. To use an evolutionary metaphor, in the changing

environment, new, smaller and more agile players are scurrying about and yapping at the heels of the

lumbering dinosaurs.

Peter Lor: Keynote address, Codesria-ASC Conference Sept 2006

A traditional system?

Accredited journals? Journal indexes?Citation counts?

Multinational journal publishers?

Where do they come from?

From Bradford's Law (1934)

to Eugene Garfield's idea of the 'core journals' and 'core science'

to the ISI Science Citation Index (1960s)

The rise of commercial journals

From scholarly societies to Reed Elsevier

The 'core journals' are the gold rush -1960s to '70s

Plus the massification of universities

The journals crisis

From copyright to licensing – intensifying the crisis

An illogical model

• The university provides the content (research)• It pays for the author (the time to write the

article)• It provides peer reviewers• Often pays page charges • Cedes copyright

Then the university buys back the journal, paying subscriptions that

have risen fourfold in 15 years

What does all this mean for us down here in the southern

hemisphere?

The state of South African scholarly publication

• Poor international visibility - many authors get little or no international impact

• An ageing cohort of authors • Small cluster of journals with acceptable

impact factors • Most journals struggle along on voluntary

labour

African scholarship in the print world

The challenge – the global knowledge divide

• Africa produces around 3% of books published, but consumes around 12%.

• Africa produced 0.4% of online content in 2002 – if South Africa is excluded, 0.02%.

• Does this mean that Africa has nothing to say?

Africa in the international journal indexes

• The major Northern scholarly journals account for 80% of articles in the Thomson Scientific indexes. 163 developing countries produce just 2.5%.

• Africa has 0.3% of the journals in the TS indexes.• 65% of African research is in local, non-indexed journals• In 2005 there were 22 African journals among the 3800 in

Thompson Scientific indexes – 20 of these were from South Africa.

Conventional scholarly publishing is not working in the developed world

Can it work in South Africa?

Digital media can offer new opportunities

Budapest Declaration on Open Access

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 public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge (Soros Foundation 2002).

What new technologies can offer

• Instantaneous global reach – transcending geographical barriers

• Lower cost publishing and zero-cost distribution – the potential for more democratic access

• Links between research publications and supporting data

• Greater immediacy – faster dissemination of research results

• Multi-channel publishing allows for flexible output in a variety of media

Can Open Access provide an answer?

Eve Gray, International Policy Fellowships - Budapest

Open Access

• Publications made available online, freely to anyone and free on charge

• The business model is to take the cost up front and eliminate administrative costs of subscriptions

• Some journals take payments from the author institutions as a sustainability measure

• But, particularly in developing country OA journals, subscriptions, advertising and government support are more important

The major advantages - for journals

Far greater reach – readers, authors, peer reviewers

Radically increased citations especially for developing country journals

Better chance of getting into the citation indexes

The major advantages – for authors

Faster publication leads to faster citation

Wider reach and greater impact

Eve Gray, International Policy Fellowships - Budapest

Open Access journals

• Increased impact factors – very substantial increase compared with print subscriptions

• Earlier impact – can be pre-publication• Attracts more submissions and more

international submissions • Print subscriptions increase • Sustainability – print subscriptions, subsidies,

advertising ,(not author fees)

Finding Open Access journals

Open Access repositories

• Visibility for research output for academics and institutions, accessibility for users

• Need for standards and meta-tagging for archives to be visible on the web

• Archives can be harvested for consolidation into subject, institutional or regional collections

• More than 90% of major journals allow for pre- or post-archiving.

Finding Open Access repositories

The best of both worlds

Pre- and post-print archiving

How could this work at UCT?

Web 2.0 and scientific communicationsTimmo Hannay, CTWatch Qaurterly Aug 2007