Beyond Open Access - new technology provides appropriate methodologies for sharing research knowledge in the developing world

Beyond Open Access

– new opportunities for scholarly communication in developing countries

Leslie Chan, Trustee of EPT and Director of Bioline International, presented the following video at the recent BioMedCentral Open Access Africa Conference held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJXcm-xTfU&feature=youtu.be. As well as outlining the aims and the resources available from Bioline International and the usage that is made globally of developing country research from this platform, he discussed the need for a rethink on the evaluation of research articles and journals, based on their relevance to development in emerging countries of the world. He emphasised that the goal of Bioline International is not solely a means of increasing the Impact Factor of journals based on Northern values and suggested that the future of sharing research globally will be met in additional ways than by traditional journals. He introduced the concepts of networked knowledge, open science and a new invisible college, and explains how these new technologies are more appropriate for the advancement of research in the developing world.

IFLA establishes OA Task Force

The International Federation of Libraries Association (IFLA) has endorsed open access and established (Bordeaux, October 11^th 2011) an OA Task Force to take this forward. The Task Force will work on the following issues:

-          Advocate for the adoption and promotion of OA policies within the framework of the UN institutions;

-          Build capacity within the IFLA Memebership to advocate for OA at the national level, through the development of case studies and best practices for OA promotion;

-          Connect to various organisations working for OA – such as SPARC, COAR, OASPA, EIFL, Bioline International & DOAJ, among others.

The first step is to produce a road map for the work to be presented to IFLA Governing Board in December 2011, and to begin collecting case studies and best practice as to how the library associations can promote national policies and programmes to foster the progress of OA.

Dedicated web pages will be created in cooperation with IFLA Head Quarters.

The Task Force has the following members (two of which are Trustees of the EPT):

- Lars Bjornshauge,1st Vice President Swedish Library Association  (contact, see below)

- Christoph Bruch, Member Ellen Tise´ Presidential working group on OA

- Leslie Chan, Associate Director Bioline International, Trustee EPT, University of Toronto,    Scarborough, Canada;
 - Jan Hegerlid, Programme Coordinator of OA se, National Library of Sweden

- Iryna Kuchma, EIFL Net, OA Manager, Rome, Italy

      - Derek Law, Professor University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom, Chair EPT

- Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, Emory University, USA

- Felipe Martinez, Director, University Center for Library Science Research, Autonomous University of Mexico

- Reggie Raju, Member Ellen Tise´ Presidential working group on OA

- Bas Savenijie, Diector, National Library of Netherlands

- Xuamao Wang, Associate Vice-Provost, Emory University Libraries, Emory University, USA

- Qiang Zhu, Director, Peking University Library, Beijing, China

From announcement sent by:

Lars Bjornshauge

Independent Libraries & Scholarly Communications Professional

1st Vicce President Swedish Library Association

mobile phone +45 53510603

Skype id: lbj-lub0603

e-mail elbjoern0603@gmail.com

Open Access in Africa - a conference organised by BioMedCentral

A valuable conference was organised recently by BMC, titled Open Access Africa. There is now an excellent web site available from which all presentations may be viewed, see here . Presentations range from overviews of OA in Africa to OA-experiences of individual organisations, both publishers and university repositories. Note also, the presentations by EPT colleagues, Daisy Ouya and Eve Gray.

OA in Kenya

. An important workshop, titled ‘Open Access and the Evolving Scholarly Communication Environment’ has been held in Nairobi, Kenya.

Organised by the Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium, Bioline International and eIFL.net, the workshop’s objective was to discuss how open access can maximise the visibility of research publications and improve the quality, impact and influence of research. Some of the questions discussed were:

- How to disseminate research results in the most efficient way?
- How to showcase the quality of research in universities and research institutions?
- What are the new tools to better measure and manage research in such institutions?
- How to collect and curate the digital outputs?
- How to generate new knowledge from existing findings, enable and encourage collaboration?
- How to bring savings to the higher education sector and better returns on investment?
- What are the key functions for research libraries?

Open access, as a viable solution to existing problems in scholarly communication, is now being debated by governments and publishers and mandated by funding bodies and universities throughout the world. The considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access, and strategies for collective advocacy of open access to research results, were discussed. Practical sessions included case studies on successful management of open repositories and open access journals, training on how to start, and the best approaches to collaborative promotion of research outputs.

EPT Trustee and associate director of Bioline International, Leslie Chan, was a major contributor and fellow-Trustee, Daisy Ouya, was also present. There are currently 20 African bioscience journals available on an open access basis via Bioline, and 31 African open access institutional repositories, 20 of which are in South Africa.

African universities to get greatly improved bandwidth

This was announced in Russell Southwood’s recent Balancing Act newsletter, October 9th 2009:

“African universities will buy 60 Gb of bandwidth and set up a continental network

Almost unnoticed African universities have come together to sort out their bandwidth problems in the new era of fibre. In April 2010, European NREN Dante will start to implement with eastern Africa’s UbuntuNet Alliance, a continental network to link up African universities with plentiful bandwidth to their colleagues across the globe. On 1 November West and Central Africa will set up its own network organisation to join the process. African universities currently spend an estimated US$1.4 million and are destined to become important players in network development.

15 million euros from the European Commission will go via European National Research Network (NREN) Dante to buy connectivity for African universities with a start date for implementation of April 2010. A 25% contribution will either come from the African Union or national Governments. According to UbuntuNet Alliance’s Tusu Tusubira:”Dante will buy the cross-border connectivity and UbuntuNet may get to operate it. UbuntuNet wants to be part of the implementation and to develop the opportunity.”

In advance of this happening, National Research Networks (NRENs) have been buying their own capacity in considerable quantity at low prices that acknowledge universities are a different type of customer. . . .

South African NREN TENET got the ball rolling by buying an STM64 from Seacom, which is just short of 10 Gbps. .. . . As an independent cable provider Seacom understood the importance of the university market as an “anchor tenant” early whereas some of the other telco-initiated cable providers were keener on universities buying individually at higher prices. As Dunacan Martin, CEO of TENET tells it:”Seacom has been very supportive.”

”By the end of year, the South African research and education backbone SANRen will (be) connected and the full bandwidth can be delivered to the member universities. ”

. . . . However all is not plain sailing as the capacity will have to cross borders to supply universities in neighbouring countries. The problem as Martin has discovered is as follows:”Cross border connectivity prices are controlled by unpublished agreements between incumbent operators on either side of the border. One of the negotiating partners, Telkom, said it would drop its prices to accommodate us but the other country’s telco would not agree”.

On the West and Central side of the continent, the Co-ordinator of Research and Education Networking of the Association of African Universities, Boubakar Barry has been the moving force behind getting an UbuntuNet Alliance-like structure together that will be launched on 1 November.

Barry emphasises the unique nature of universities as customers: ”Providers should not consider the Higher Education and Research institutions as normal customers. They are critical for the development of Africa. It’s now very important for them to be able to part of the game with this type of infrastructure for global academic collaborations. . . . The same rules cannot apply to Higher Education and Research Institutions that apply to other operators. It’s a public good. If you train and educate people, it benefits the private sector as they need highly trained engineers. Networked universities will provide them.”

So, a major step forward, a recognition of the value to economies of research connectivity, but a few hurdles to be crossed on the road to equality of access to global research. For the full article click here.

eIFL countries continue to make impressive OA progress!

Thanks to eIFL, we learn that 26 rectors of universities in the Ukraine endorsed the Olvia Declaration that includes academic freedom, university autonomy and the role of science and education for sustainable development.

Academic freedom includes open access to research information through the development of open repositories and open access journals, enabling the free communication of researchers in the Ukraine with peers around the world.
In Article 2.11 of the Action Plan on implementing the Olvia declaration, it is stated:
“To practice open access to knowledge Universities and research organizations should:
• develop institutional polices and strategies on open access (free and unrestricted access to full text peer reviewed research results), provide access to, search and usage of the above mentioned works by the faculty to every internet user to increase scientific, social and economic impact of the research;
• launch and develop open institutional repositories and open access journals;
• encourage open use of this information for research and education.”

This follows on from the Belgorod Declaration to stimulate and support open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage endorsed by 10 rectors of universities of the CIS countries in May 2009, as reported in this blog on July 10th.

eIFL and its partner colleagues in the Ukraine are greatly to be congratulated for achieving this important step towards global research communication.

Photo from eIFL newsletter, with thanks.

South and East Africa get faster telecommunications links

The monthly e-newsletter of the Southern African NGO Network (SANGONeT )has announced the following good news: "The much-anticipated Seacom undersea fibre optic cable was finally launched on 23 July 2009 during simultaneous events in South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique. The 17 000 kilometere, 1,28 Terabytes per second (Tb/s) cable links south and east Africa to global telecommunications networks via India and Europe. It represents the dawn of a new era for broadband connectivity in Africa with the potential to significantly impact on the future growth and development of the continent."

While much remains to be done in terms of regulatory and policy issues, this is a major step forward for all consituencies able to benefit from online access to global information, including of course research findings available to all academic communties through open access resources.

Growing recognition of the need to share research findings

First India's CSIR, then CGIAR's ICRISAT network and now South Africa's University of Pretoria have recently adopted (or in the case of CSIR, strongly recommended) a requirement for their researchers to make all publications arising from their work openly accessable to all. These institutional mandates show a recognition by developing/emerging country organisations that for their research to become part of the global knowledge base and accelerate the rate of finding solutions to urgent problems, free access to their research output is essential.

This news comes just as new charts showing the growth of world-wide open access mandates has been published by Alma Swan on her blog, Optimal Scholarship. The chart of half-yearly increases, shown below, clearly indicates that a better understanding of the need for sharing research information is taking place, and developing countries are joining Harvard, MIT, Wellcome Trust, and over 80 other seats of learning in accelerating the speed of research distribution and thus making best use of funding. For a full list of open access policies, see the ROARmap database.

Africa: scholarly publishing study

Eve Gray, University of Cape Town, South Africa, has prepared a report on the status of research publications in the country, and made recommendations for a policy review. The study formed part of the Open Society Institute International Policy Fellowship, Programme 2006-7. The full report can be found at: http://www.policy.hu/gray/IPF_Policy_paper_final.pdf

She describes the present situation that leads to African knowledge being seriously marginalized and poorly represented in the global scholarly output. She makes a number of recommendations that could be appropriate for other African countries and concludes that Open Access and collaborative approaches could bring substantially increased impact for African research, with marked cost-benefit advantages.