Open Access: an institutional imperative

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Open access:
an institutional imperative
Reggie Raju
reggie.raju@uct.ac.za

Outline of discussion
• Open access as a continental issue
• Open access as a national issue
• Open access an institutional
imperative
Open Access: an institutional
21 October 2014
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Introduction
• South Africa early adopters of OA
• Strong culture of research production and information technology
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infrastructure
• Freely sharing translates into wider distribution of published
research
• South Africa’s adoption of institutional repositories
• Managed by the university’s library
• OA policies or guidelines phrased as ‘requests’ or ‘encouragement’
most efficient ways to communicate results and amplify all of its
desired outcomes: accelerating discoveries, fostering
innovation, creating new business opportunities, and
contributing to the welfare of society as a whole” Joseph (2012).
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An African imperative
Connecting researcher, society and development
• Open access facilitates the growth and development of research and society - connecting
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researcher, society and development
• The research process is only complete when the end product is distributed as widely as
possible
• OA critical at the beginning and at the end of the research cycle
• Africa is relegated to the periphery of world knowledge production
• despite the desperate need for trusted and relevant information for African development,
sub-Saharan Africa has not made any significant contribution to the world’s research
output . In fact, Africa has supplied only 0.7% of the output with a very large percentage
of that coming from South Africa. This statistic may well be a true reflection of scientific
activities in Africa, however, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the low profile of
scientists in Africa is attributed to poor access to scientific publications.
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An African imperative
Open access for a more equitable flow of information
• Access to information is essential to redress local and global social inequalities
• Open access is a means of eliminating the factors that inhibit the flow of knowledge
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from the global South to the North
• Rectify the imbalances of information flows from North to South
• “Today’s researchers …are likely to search Google before any other resource. So, if
they are not on Google, they don’t exist!” (Nicholson 2011)
• Free flow of information from South to South, North to South and South to North
dispels the acceptance of one-way flow of information
• Free flow of information that will assist in the repositioning of Africa from the
periphery of knowledge production to the epicenter.
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The South African research landscape
and open access
South African research landscape and open access
• The commitment to open access is in many ways influenced by
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the status of the institution
• UoT - deliver vocationally oriented education
• High expectation of substantial research output from traditional
universities
• Comprehensive universities are considered more ‘middle of the
road’ with commensurate expectation of research output
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and open access
From brain drain to brain gain: the role of open access
• Africa suffers from an acute case of ‘brain drain’
• ‘Hard brain’ - physical migration of researchers
• ‘Soft brain drain’ - is the unavailability of research results to users
• ‘Hard brain drain’ one contributing factor is poor research infrastructure including poor
access to scholarly information to support research output
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• OA can stem ‘soft brain drain’
• South Africa very strong position to reverse the ‘brain drain’ process
• South African open access strategy has the capacity to showcase the research output of the
country, its research niche areas and its areas of research excellence
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and open access
From brain drain to brain gain: the role of open access
• South Africa - develop a roadmap for its own version of the ‘brain
gain’
 growing research infrastructure,
 technology to support the infrastructure
 ‘raw material/data’ for new research areas and innovation
• this is already speeding innovation in industries such as biotechnology,
where models of openly sharing data are being experimented with in
the drug development process, potentially shortening the time from
development to market for effective new treatments and therapies
(Joseph 2012)
21 October 2014
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Open access as an
institutional imperative
• Open access benefits researchers and their
institutions
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• Researchers
it brings visibility of research output
OA increases the impact factor for the researcher
• Institutions enjoy the same benefits in aggregated
form plus elevation in status as per the various
ranking systems
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Open access as an
• Research generated in developing countries are poorly
disseminated and therefore lack global visibility
(Ezema 2013)
• Institutional repositories improve the visibility and
utilization of the research AND increase the global
ranking of the universities and researchers
• The freedom to publish enhances usage of content in
repositories of developing countries thus providing the
rest of the world with outputs from scholars who
previously had difficulty publishing in journals in the
developed world
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Open access as an
Open access and impact
• Demonstrate the link between open access and improved citation counts (Davis 2008)
• Citations are an indicator of the dissemination of an article and provide a quantitative system
for public recognition of work by qualified peers
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• Works cited is an incentive for scholars
• There is synergy between open access and citation counts
• Freely available online research generates more than three times the average number of
citations received by print articles
• Open access articles have a greater research impact than articles that are not freely available
(Antelman 2004)
• Librarians’ commitment to the open access agenda including negotiating rights with
publishers
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Open access as an
Open access and impact
• Journal-level impact is the norm as opposed to the evaluation of authors of
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individual articles
• Individual articles in repositories contribute to measuring impact on individual
articles
• Open access maximizing accessibility and thereby improves citability (Cullen
and Chawner 2011)
• If works are not accessible, they will not be read. If they are not read, they will
not be cited. If they are not cited, the implication is the work does not have
impact nor does it have scholarly reputation (Nicholson 2011)
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Open access as an
Open Access: a case of institutional buy-in
• Strategic Plan for the Environment of the Vice Rector (Research)- one of the strategic goals is to grow
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the knowledge base
• A strategic action is to leave a scientific footprint on the African continent
• Strategic intervention of the Vice Rector (Research)
Supporting, developing and contributing to high-level scholarly publication output and
sharing research data and results with the rest of the world, especially with researchers from
the developing world
• The Library two strategic actions aligned to the strategic action of the VR (R)
 establishing a central open access fund to support and facilitate the University’s Open Access
mandate and,
 establishing an e-Repository Research system to ingest, preserve and disseminate the intellectual
output of the Institution
• Support from the Institution provided the impetus to test and implement innovative ways in rolling-out
OA services
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Open access as an
• Mandatory submission of theses and dissertations
acceptance of ONLY a digital version of the thesis or
dissertation
• Publishing service using Open Journal Systems
(OJS)
• Article Processing Charges
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Open access as an
Publishing service using Open Journal Systems (OJS)
• First for Africa was the publishing service
• In collaboration academic departments began a pilot project of publishing
scholarly journals using the open source software
• SU has become the first academic institution in to formally offer its
academic staff the opportunity to publish their research output using an
open source publishing platform
• Rigor associated with academic publishing is not lost when publishing in
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this open access platform
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Open access as an
Publishing service using Open Journal Systems (OJS)
• local journals that convey critical and relevant research material for the African context
will now have exceptional visibility. In fact, the research output in these journals [local
journals published via OJS] will potentially have greater visibility than any of the leading
academic journals (van Wyk 2011)
• Library included Scientia Militaria (Faculty of Military Science), Stellenbosch Papers in
Linguistics (Department of Linguistics), Per Linguam (Faculty of Education), African
Zoology (from the Zoological Society of Southern Africa) and Zambian Journal of
Physiotherapy.
• Of the eleven titles, more than fifty percent are accredited by the Department of Higher
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Education and Training.
• African Zoology is an ISI listed journal and has an impact factor of 1.018
• The domain name registered for its OJS project is journals.ac.za.
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Open access as an
Article Processing Charges
• Publication fee charged to authors wishing to publish in an open access journal
• Currently there are only three institutions in South Africa that currently support
publishing of articles in open access journals through the payment of APCs
• The leadership in academic libraries needs to come to grips with changing models
influencing the open access movement
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Open access as an
Article Processing Charges at UCT
21 October 2014
• The Objective of APC Project
The primary objective of implementing APCs is to improve the
visibility, discoverability and accessibility of the DHET approved
journal research output of UCT
• Rollout
Sum of R787 000.00 from the Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fund and
a further R388 000.00 for the Library’s operating budget
• End of August funds were depleted - further R300 000.00 was added
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Open access as an
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Open access as an
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Centre of Higher
Education
Development
1%
Commerce
2%
Graduate School of
Business
1%
Health Sciences
Science
28%
Humanities 54%
14%

Open access as an
Article Processing Charges at UCT
21 October 2014
• The Objective of APC Project
The primary objective of implementing APCs is to improve the
visibility, discoverability and accessibility of the DHET approved
journal research output of UCT
• Rollout
Sum of R787 000.00 from the Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fund and
a further R388 000.00 for the Library’s operating budget
• End of August funds were depleted - further R300 000.00 was added
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Open access as an
21 October 2014
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Year
No of
articles
Total no. of
downloads
Total no. of
citations
Most no. of
citation per
article
2012 11 34543 71 17
2013 19 62272 60 6
2014 30 36896 9 3

Conclusion
• OA is the responsibility of all within the institution – the university leadership, the
researchers and the administrators including the library
• Open Access promotes the distribution of scholarly literature for the growth and
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development of research and society
• The institutional leadership, the academics, researchers and support staff need to
collaborate to improve the visibility of its research output
• There is the need to be to attract collaborators, funders and prospective postgraduate
students – especially international students
• Moral obligation to share research output with the rest of the research community
especially researchers from the developing world
• Institutions must pursue publishing directly in open access journals
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Thank you!
21 October 2014
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Open Access: an institutional imperative

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