Applying scientific thinkingin the service of society

Open Access Journals in AfricaSciELO 15 years celebration, Sao Paolo

Susan VeldsmanDirector: Scholarly Publishing Unit

2013

Generic corporate slides to be used for content and in conjunction with dividers and fillers

What does it mean for African research (IR’s) to be visible and accessible?

• Quality• Intellectual Property Rights• Infrastructural requirements e.g servers,

bandwidth, software• Building up expertise and capacity• Digitization• OA advocacy

Low visibility, accessibility and indexability of African scholarly research

• Large proportion of African research published in local journals, many of which are non-WoS – journals from Africa & Middle East comprise 1% of WoS journals

• ASSAf 2006 report on Scholarly Publishing revealed that papers published in 60 SA journals did not receive a single citation in any of 9 000 WoS journals over a 15-yr period

• Local, high-quality journals not necessarily available to the rest of the world

• Global recognition—research must be accessible to global world. SA has only 70 journals on WoS system

• Promotion of local knowledge very important

Challenges of journals in South Africa 2006 – Report of a Strategic Approach to Research

publishing in South Africa

Research publishing in South Africa is undertaken in good faith and with much personal effort and commitment by editors and their editorial boards, but is very fragile in that:

infrequent, often irregular publication of thin issues is generally used to deal with a low supply of good papers

a majority of the journals play only a tiny role in the world research publishing system,

the “mixed bag” of quality and reputation means that the whole group is “tainted” in the eyes of key stakeholders.

 Invitation to Participate in Scholarly Publishing in Africa Survey : Clobridge Consulting

With all of the changes in scholarly communication and ICTs over the past few years, we are interested in learning more about the current state of scholarly publishing throughout Africa. Clobridge Consulting is working in partnership with African Journals Online to conduct a research study to collect, analyze, and disseminate knowledge in this arena – in order to share best practices, identify emerging trends, and gain insights from editors about their successes and concerns. While a good deal of research has been conducted over the past few years regarding global trends in the shift from print to digital, changing dissemination and business models, and uptake in technology to support publishing, no research has focused exclusively on these issues within Africa.

Funded by : Carnegie Corporation

Challenges of journals in Africa (2)• Available expertise

– Editors, reviewers, layout, design, copy editing

• Editorial integrity– Peer Review of articles, low of knowledge in editorial best

practices

• Infrastructure– Connectivity, servers, software

• Financial sustainability– Mainly paper based journals, heavily dependant on

subscriptions;

• Language– English, Afrikaans, Indigenous languages, French

• Intellectual property rights—Creative Commons

• Lack of training

Article Processing Charges• World Bank classification

– Africa- low per capita income—exemptions for most authors in Africa except SA

– South Africa—medium per capita income country

• How does it get paid?– University of Stellenbosch- APC fund– Pay these fees from their own research grants or, if

available, from traditional central publication support funds.

• What does it cost?– APC’s when charged by local OA journals vary

between R500-R1500. – This compares well with international APCs which vary

between $1 350 and $5 000

Article Processing Charges (2)• What is our concern?

– It is clear that APCs could eventually replace subscriptions in a systemic commercial ‘Gold Route’ publishing system

– that would still be hyper-inflationary, – with new versions of ‘bundled institutional

membership’ fees, – barriers to publishing opportunities for

resource-poor sectors or countries, – and the same hallmarks of monopolistic

practice as characterised the previous system, will prevail

Commercial OA journal publisher—14 titles

Commercial OA journal publisher—25 titles

+-130 Open Access

+ article/processing fees+ subscription fees

DST funded- subtle approach to OA

www.scielo.org.za

SciELO South Africa, Number of access and downloads per months for years 2011 and 2012

2012: 3.07 millions, 256 th per month, 8.5 th per day, 615 per document

SciELO South Africa, 2012. Evolution of citations received within SciELO Network by journals with three years collection.

CitationsAuto 

CitationsCitations

Auto Citations

CitationsAuto 

CitationsSA SciELO 63 56 159 146 132 115LAC SciELO 1 3 21Total citations  64 56 162 146 153 115% of LAC 2% 2% 14%% of auto citations 88% 90% 75%

2010 2011 2012Source of Citation

Benefits for SA to participate in the SciELO network

Searchable through the SciELO network portal

Exchange metadata with other international databases

Eligible for participation in special integration projects like Web of

Knowledge

Certified collections are rated higher than collections-under-

development

Signing a Memorandum of Agreement with DHET to do quality peer

review of ALL South African journals

Change in the DHET policy for the automatic accreditation of SA

journals

Improved accreditation policy towards the publishing of books and

conference proceedings

Challenges within the African Science System

• Science system is less developed• Not all the countries has a funding system • Technical change in Africa slow and low• HEI in Africa should be in the forefront of

ensuring Africa’s participation in ICT and knowledge production

• Immense potential in Open source software and Open Access

Roleplayers

• Network of African Science Academies (NASAC)

• African Academy of Sciences• ICSU-regional office for Africa• INASP and eIFL• Library professionals• Publishers

Just to name a few!

What is lacking??

• Coordination between multitude of small scale, often very energetic and creative pilot initiatives pockets of innovation

• This leads to underfunding as economies of scale is not reached

• Good news is….. Emergence of continent-wide strategies ; time to harvest and connect

between initiatives

Science academies can undertake this initiative

The Case for Science Academies

• Unique competitive advantage in influencing policies

• Great convening power—bringing together scientists and policy makers

• Constitute the brain thrust of a nation –use membership to conduct evidence base studies (independent and objective)

• African Union (Consolidated Plan of Action) under review

• Capacity building• Knowledge production• Technological innovation

Thank yoususan@assaf.org.za

Website: www.assaf.org.za

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