A speech to Senate at Walter Sisulu University, Butterworth. 24 October 2017

1. Open Access in South African Universities
Walter Sisulu University Open Access Seminar
24 October 2017

2. Tony Carr CC-BY-NCTony

3. 2015 Turmoil in South African universities

4. #RhodesMustFall!
#FeesMustFall!
#Decolonise the
University!

5. Blade Nzimande had long recognised that
there was a problem...

7. But only in 2015 did the question of knowledge
production and publication start to become a
mainstream issue as a result of student action.
why did it take so long?

8. #Decolonise the university…
Students in talks and
negotiations about the
curriculum, African content,
black identity… Steve Biko
and Franz Fanon…..
Photo Sami Ben Gharbia CC-BY2.0

9. In one of these discussions students asked the scholars
they were talking to how, after obtaining a doctorate,
one became a professor. The answer was … ‘you publish
journal articles… lots of journal articles… in international
journals…

10. Yet this relentless quest for publication in foreign
journals, and the way in which this drives prestige
and promotions in our universities has not been
on the ‘decolonisation’ agenda.

11. Why is this
so?
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12. Scholarly journals are seen as sacrosanct – but is the
current system really part of the 17th century ‘old
tradition?

14. Transactions was more like our current networked
science – a community engaged in discussion and
discovery…

15. The current journal system in reality is in fact the
product of the post World War II climate in Europe and
in particular arose out of the recognition of the value of
research in an increasingly technological society.

16. Robert Maxwell –
media mogul, but also
one of the main
architects of post-war
scientific publishing…

17. … landed up at the end of World War II working
for British information services in British Occupied
Germany, where Springer was in the British zone

18. Maxwell offered Springer UK distribution… he
could make things happen, with his connections
with the British …

19. … two years later he had a staff of
120…
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20. The UK government quietly, in the background, set
up a national initiative to purchase German
content and put in the hands of UK publishers,
through Butterworth..

21. AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by daniel.d.slee
English would become the
dominant language of science
Politically?

22. Providing the essentials of a neo-colonial enterprise: the
English language and British national interests were now
at the dominant features of journal publishing

23. Eugene Garfield’s creation of metrics in 1955 to
measure the impact of journals and the extension
of this system to measure the impact of individual
authors helped created a dominant and inelastic
market

24. …promotion and prestige of academics became
inextricably linked to journal publication…

26. In this world, Africa is on the margins. The
‘international’ standards that lead to reward and
recognition address British/American interests

27. To the detriment of developing country
concerns, with often disastrous results...

28. Photo European Commisison CC-BY-NC

30. It has also become a hugely expensive system
dominated by 5 mega-corporations who make
profits of upwards of 35%

33. Does Open Access offer a solution?

34. The beginning of Open Access, in Budapest in
2002…

35. Read the Budapest Open Access Initiative
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.
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

36. Seeks free and open access to journal articles,
through self-archiving and the creation of
open access journals

38. Preface
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and
economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and
cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers
the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation
of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the
guarantee of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of
the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing
knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to
significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as
the existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest
Open Access Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda
Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the
Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional
instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human
reflection and to specify measures which research policy
makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries,
archives and museums need to consider.

39. Open Access – the ‘green route’ of open articles,
often mandated by funders, in institutional
repositories and open articles, the ‘gold route’ of
open access journals, and the hybrid model of
articles in closed commercial journals.

40. There are international and national policies
being put into place to support OA

41. South Africa’s participation has grown over the
years – there are now upwards of 40,000 articles
listed in the Directory of Open Access journals and
69 journals

43. Brazil with its SciELO platform is
now the second biggest producer of
OA journals in the world
Alperin et al., 2008, Open access and scholarly
publishing in Latin America: ten flavours and a
few reflections
revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/article/vie

44. But there is something missing in this focus on
journals, and the policy environment is changing
fast …

45. 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.
Blade Nzimande, SA Minster of Higher Education and Training, Women in
Science Awards. 2010

47. Walter Sisulu University (WSU) will be a leading
African comprehensive university focusing on
innovative educational, research and community
partnership programmes that are responsive to
local, regional, national development priorities,
and cognisant of continental and international
imperatives.

48. A new emerging model – open access, open
data, open science
The old model thinks of publishing as a point in time. Once a work has
gone through that temporal point and is published, credit and the
accompanying authority are bestowed upon the author. But, in an open
science model in which the work is done in public and there is no one
moment in which the work goes public, credit and authority become
harder to bestow unambiguously.
David Weinberger: Too Big to Know

49. New models are emerging – open, integrated
and continuous science

51. Will the European Commission’s Horizon 2020
Open Science has a vision of Open Science that is
now in discussion in South Africa in joint planning
workshops with the DST and organisations like
Codata

53. Everything is connected

56. The future is an exciting place and it is
happening in Africa now

58. Eve Gray
Senior Research Associate
IP Law Unit
University of Cape Town
Blog: www.graysouth.co.za
Twitter: graysouth

59. References
Brian Cox, The Pergamon phenomenon 1951-1991. Logos: the
Journal of the World Book Community 9 (3) 1998, 135-140.
Albert Henderson, The dash and determination of Robert
Maxwell, champion of dissemination. Logos: the Journal of the
World Book Community 15 (2) 2004, 65-75.
Achille Mbembe, Decolonising Knowledge and the Question of
the Archive:
Robert N Miranda, Robert Maxwell: Forty-four Years as
Publisher. In E. H. Friedriksonn (Ed): A Century of Science
Publishing, pp. 77-89. IOS Press 2001
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New. Basic Books, New
York, 2009.