This document discusses scholarly communication in Africa and opportunities for open access. It notes that African countries seek African knowledge that is widely accessible from and for Africa. While the internet offers higher access, quality and lower costs, national policies often favor prestige over public good. Open access repositories and journals could help address this by profiling all scholarship and raising quality. The University of Botswana could harness this potential to deliver its strategic goals of applying knowledge to development challenges through open access.

2. Access to Africa’s
knowledge
Scholarly Communication in Africa
University of Botswana
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3. What do we, in African
countries, seek to gain
from our investment in
research?

4. The aim is surely
African knowledge, for
Africa, from Africa,
widely accessible...

5. Globally, scholarly
communication is at a
crossroads
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6. ... as the internet
offers higher access,
higher quality, lower
cost

7. We face two very
different poles of
opportunity...

8. Enhanced global
competitiveness and
prestige....

9. And ways of
addressing our
development
challenges

10. We constantly ask
questions about research
and development...

11. ‘How 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?’
Nahas Angula, Namibian Prime Minister, UNESCO 29th Conference on
Higher Education, 2009
Photo: coda Damien du Toit http://www.flickr.com/photos/coda/
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12. Yet we are still caught
up with old paradigms...

13. ...measuring success on
the basis of counts of
journal articles
in the ISI indexes.

14. The result is tunnel
vision...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence

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

18. .. and offers little support
and recognition to the
publications that emerge
from development-focused
research.

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

20. There is a penalty...

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

22. How can we address
this?

23. ... higher access,
higher quality, lower
cost

24. Open access repositories profile the
whole range of scholarship

25. Raising quality...

26. Publishing open access journals

27. Revaluing ‘grey
publishing’

30. Rethinking business
models and leveraging
open access

32. How can the University
of Botswana harness
this potential to deliver
its strategic goals?

33. 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