A presentation made at the UNESCO workshop on Open Access in Africa, Pretoria, 22-23 November 2010, co-sponsored by the Academy of Science of South Africa and EiFL

1. Some rights reserved by spinning jenny
Access to Africa’s
knowledge
Publishing development research and
measuring value

2. Eve Gray (2010):Access to Africa’s Knowledge:
Publishing Development Research and MeasuringValue.
The African Journal of Information and Communication
Thematic Issue on A2K in Africa, Issue 10 2009/ 2010
http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/journal.html

3. What does Africa seek
to gain from its
investment in research?

4. 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
Photo: coda Damien du Toit http://www.flickr.com/photos/coda/
Creative Commons Share-Alike

6. Some rights reserved by mrhayata

7. Higher education at a
crossroads?

8. Information and
communication
technology offers new
promise

9. Higher access, higher
quality, lower
cost

10. but we are still caught
up with old paradigms...

11. “Over the last few decades, some things
have not changed.There’s been no
significant break in relations of knowledge
production between the colonial and
post-colonial eras.African universities are
essentially consumers of knowledge
produced in developed countries.”
Blade Nzimande, UNESCO World
Conference on Higher Education 2009

12. there is a penalty...

13. 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

14. National policies tend to
favour what Sir John Daniel at
the UNESCO conference
called ‘poles of superior quality’
rather than ‘the public good’

15. We measure impact factors
and citations in a highly
competitive and exclusionary
system

17. controlled by commercial
companies...

19. Science Research
http://www.worldmapper.org
2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

20. We ask for research to
resolve development
challenges, help achieve
the Millennium Goals...

21. ... even as the policy-makers
and international agencies
require journal articles and
patents as a measure of
success....

22. Some rights reserved by AMagill

23. ..and offer little support
and recognition to the
publications that emerge
from development-focused
research.

24. Some rights reserved by stuartpilbrow

25. Is the problem what is being
produced, or what is being
measured?

27. It is not that our policy-
makers do not see the
problem...

28. 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.

29. But we are stuck in a
free rider mentality...

31. in which higher
education does not see
publication as its
responsibility.

32. http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence

33. The result is tunnel
vision

34. which ignores all but a
small segment of the
publishing ecosystem..

35. the formal publishing
that does not work
very well for us...

37. Open
access is an
answer

38. 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

39. overcoming distribution
and access barriers

41. and working across
the whole ecosystem

42. Commercial publishing -
journals

43. offers citation impact,
global prestige, access,
reach...

44. and freedom to reuse
content for ‘translation’
of research...

45. Text
Books

46. Cooperative publishing
platforms

47. help reduce the South
to North knowledge
gap

48. South African national open
access initiative

49. and building the quality
and accessibility of
national journals...

50. Repositories profile the whole
range of scholarship

51. African research centres
produce research that
addresses vital
development needs

53. How do we develop
value systems, rewards
and recognition to
support development

54. Eve Gray
Honorary Research Associate
Centre for Educational Technology
University of Cape Town
http://www.gray-area.co.za
http://www.http://www.sca2kafrica.org/
http://www.cet.uct.ac.za