Open Access: an institutional imperative

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Open access: an institutional imperative

Reggie Raju

[email protected]

Open Access: an institutional

21 October 2014

Outline of discussion

• Open access as a continental issue

• Open access as a national issue

• Open access an institutional

imperative

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21 October 2014

Introduction

• South Africa early adopters of OA

• Strong culture of research production and information technology 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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21 October 2014

An African imperative

Connecting researcher, society and development

• Open access facilitates the growth and development of research and society - connecting 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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21 October 2014

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 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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21 October 2014

The South African research landscape

and open accessSouth African research landscape and open access

• The commitment to open access is in many ways influenced by 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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21 October 2014


and open accessFrom 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

• 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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21 October 2014


and open accessFrom 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)

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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperative• Open access benefits researchers and their

institutions

• 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperative• 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperativeOpen 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

• 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperativeOpen access and impact

• Journal-level impact is the norm as opposed to the evaluation of authors of 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperativeOpen 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 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an


• Mandatory submission of theses and dissertationsacceptance of ONLY a digital version of the thesis or

dissertation

• Publishing service using Open Journal Systems (OJS)

• Article Processing Charges

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21 October 2014

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 this open access platform

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21 October 2014

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 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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21 October 2014

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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21 October 2014

Open access as an


Article Processing Charges at UCT

• 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an

institutional imperative

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21 October 2014

Open access as an


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Centre of Higher Education

Development1%

Commerce2%

Graduate School of Business

1%

Health Sciences54%Humanities

14%

Science28%


21 October 2014

Open access as an


Article Processing Charges at UCT

• 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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21 October 2014

Open access as an


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YearNo 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


21 October 2014

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 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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21 October 2014

Thank you!

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Open Access: an institutional imperative

Education

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