The University of Pretoria has become the first university in South Africa to adopt a mandate for open access deposit of publications by all academics. The senate of the University of Pretoria has unanimously approved an open access mandate for the university, which requires all academics to deposit digital copies of their publications in an open access archive. The policy will go into effect immediately and it is likely that UP scholars will see a substantial increase in the citation of their articles as a result. Other South African Universities will need to watch this space.    

The wording of  the policy:

To assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public funding, staff and students are required to:

•  submit peer-reviewed postprints* + the metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University’s institutional repository, AND

• give the University permission to make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files in perpetuity.

Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

The University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders' policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Access to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases, an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.

The Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for adhering to archiving policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system's embargo facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.

The University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.

The University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research articles in open access journals that are accredited.

Starting in 2004 with an evaluation of appropriate repository software, and going live in 2006 with UPSpace, UP has established itself as a pioneer and a leader in the development and management of scholarly repositories in South Africa. The university at that time already had a thesis and dissertations repository, UPeTD, started in 2000 and expanded in 2004 with a mandate for the online deposit of theses and dissertations. The decision to expand this intervention to create a repository of research collections followed on the success that UPeTD had in profiling PhD students' research, contributing to their career success and providing expanded readership for UP's research output.

The project was resourced with the creation of a repository management team to oversee the implementation and ongoing management of UPSpace. There are now 7 896 full text items online, profiling the research output and publications of departments and individual academics, who have their own profiles within the repository, which can be linked to their CVs. The online publications can range from public scholarship and media articles to research papers and formal scholarly publications. The latter are collected in a sub-space of the broader collection, called openUP.

The initial reluctance of UP scholars to embrace open access has long been overcome and with Senate's willingness to vote a mandate for deposit, it is clear that there is now top-level support for the initiative. It will be interesting to watch the impact that this has on UP's research profile and scholarly reputation, which is likely to be enhanced by increased access. Research shows that online open access to research publications from developing countries considerably increases impact factors by a considerable margin.  

 Congratulations to UP for a bold initiative that puts in in the front rank among some of the leading universities in the world.

For an account of the setting up of the UP repositories, seeMartie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar, South Arfican Repositories: Brigding the knoweldge divides. Ariadne 55 2008

I have posted a blog in the PALM Africa blog site on an open access book from Fountain Publishers in Uganda, created as part of the PALM project. The timing of this publishing initiative is telling for us in South Africa, as the book deals with an issue that is directly releant to the Department of Science and Technology's legislation and proposed Regulations aimed at forcing the commericlialisation of research. The impact of profit-driven commercialisation of public health research is an issue that this book takes apart in a searing critique. 

From the PALM blog:

Fountain Publishers
in Uganda has launched as its first open access book a powerful and
moving indictment of the price in human lives that the global
innovation system has extracted in sub-saharan Africa, written by the
internationally respected AIDS specialist, Peter Mugyenyi. The book is Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. This is the first demonstration project in the PALM Africa initiative and the response to the open acess book as well as its impact will be tracked and researched by the PALM team…

The timing is impeccable, as
the release of the open access version of the book coincides exactly
with a breakthrough at the World Health Organisation, which has finally
reached agreement on a global strategy and plan of action on public health,
innovation and intellectual property. The WHO initiative, after long
negotiations driven by developing countries, aims to address exactly
the problem that Mugyenyi addresses – the excessively and unaffordably
high prices of the drugs needed to treat neglected diseases in
developing countries, driven by the global patenting system. In
addition, it addresses the lack of adequate research on neglected
diseases, also spawned by the profit-driven Intellectual propoerty
regime supported by the developed world.  

 Among the
recommendations in the WHO  plan of action is government intervention
to ensure voluntary sharing or research, open access publication
repositories and open databases and compound libraries of medical
research results. Thus Fountain's engagement with open access
publishing on a public health topic is right in line with – and ahead
of – developing global policy.

Mugyenyi's book needs to be
read by the South African bureaucrats who are trying to enforce
widespread and rigid commercialization of public research. Mugyeni's
conclusion to his book puts the issues succinctly:

Laws
that deny or delay access to life-saving and emergency drugs should be
urgently addressed on the humanitarian principle of lives above
profits, but without hurting the businesses. Innovation in the crucial
area of human survival should not be entirely dependent on money-making
and big business, but should primarily aim at the alleviation of all
human suffering and saving lives as a basic minimum.

This
does not contradict fair trade. Business success and humanism are not
incompatible It is just a big lie to suggest that humanity is too dim
to find ways of rewarding innovation and discovery other than by
holding the very weakest of our society at ransom. It is also untrue
that the only way businesses can thrive is by cutthroat pursuit of
profits under powerful and insensitive protective laws, irrespective of
the misery caused and the trail of blood in their wake. Lessons learns
from the AIDS disaster should help the world find a way of
incorporating justice and human rights in business. It is glaringly
clear that the ills of the present system need to be fixed.

He appears to be vindicated by the fact that the WHO is now aligning itself with this approach.

more from thePALM blog, with further details of the book and its contents…

The book is a powerful indictment of a failed system, written with passion and clarity. 

An article by Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard in India in mid 2008 provides a succinct account of the secretive progress of a piece of Bayh-Dole legislation in India. It sounds rather similar to our experience in South Africa. The Indian Act has subsequently been submitted to Parliament. The Bill was apparently being passed around the various ministries without much transparency when the text of the Bill was published on SpicyIP, an Oxford-based blog. Similar secrecy seems to have been reflected in the South African, process. Although the original draft of the SA Bill was published for comment and the universities' criticisms of what many considered an unworkable system were noted, it was very difficult to lay hands on subsequent drafts. People I know trying to track the final draft only saw it after the Act was passed, although it appears from personal accounts that industry players were probably consulted in a workshop (in India there appears to have been a workshop for the chambers of commerce and industry).

Jishnu's article concludes:

Technology transfers can and do happen through many channels, and the diverse methods now in use would be restricted by the new law, says Abrol. Nistads is one of the one of the 38 institutes grouped under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) whose chief, Samir Brahmachari, has been advocating the open source system (reported several times in this column) of collaborative, incentive-based research.

What we need is some informed debate on what is India's best interest at this particular stage instead of going for a wholesale import of an American system that could prove ineffectual. Otherwise, we could be headed for a nuclear deal in our science establishment — corrosive, divisive and ultimately ineffective.

A series of SpicyIP blogs goes into the Indian legislation in some detail. It sounds much like what we are facing:

The Indian bill, much like its US equivalent is premised on the assumption that intellectual property rights are the best way to drive innovation. The more IP, the better for innovation. There is plenty of literature that casts strong doubt on this lopsided view.

Additionally, we’re seeing some great alternatives to the IP model emerging. Indeed, even as we speak, international scholars and activists are debating the merits of incentivising innovation through a variety of alternative means including “prizes”, “advance purchase contracts” etc. Closer home, Dr Samir K Brahmachari, Director General of CSIR, India’s premier R&D body, has been advocating an open source model in drug discovery. This is not to suggest that intellectual property rights (IPR’s) are bad in any way, but only to caution that IPR’s are but one way of incentivising innovation. Given that we are dealing with innovation and creativity, we must be open to trying out some of these alternatives i.e. we need to innovate within our innovation regimes!

Particular stress is placed on the damaging effect that this legislation could have on access to medicines in India, given the above.

Like our South African legislation, the draft Indian Bill also takes away the discretion of researchers and universities to make their own decisions on how best to make their research work for the public good. Both the decision to patent or a decision to use open approaches are subject to decision by a government office.

The Indian Acr aims to generate revenue through its provisions; however, SpicyIP argues, 'In fact, the cost of operating a technology transfer office (TTO) often exceeds the money made from technology licensing. CSIR bears out this point well. While it generated approximately US$1 million in licensing revenues in 2004–2005, it spent more than twice that amount on filing patents.'

What is different in India is that there has been a strong activist movement, with a number of individuals and organisations tracking the progress of the Bill, unearthing copies of successive drafts, providing links to commentaries and analysis on Bayh-Dole in other countries  and generating debate. Useful for those who want to explore this issue in more depth.

But this particular budding conspiracy theorist, down on the southern tip of Africa, is asking why the secretive processes in both countries? And why does this legislation seem unstoppable? Is this a big-industry driven initiative and if, so given Obama's view on scientific research development in last week's speech, is this Reagon-style legislation what the US still wants?(1) And what of our new pro-poor government? What will our new Cabinet make of what they have been landed with?  Watch this space!

(1) It is to be noted that Professor Arti Rai, one of the authors of a very good article critical of  Bayh Dole's relevance to developing countries is one of Obama's IP advisors.

The Australian federal government has just completed a review of its National Innovation system. Australian research and innovation policy-making tends to be broadly consultative, wide-ranging  and forward-looking, so I was interested to compare this with what the South African government is doing. Our IPR Act of 2008 is Bayh-Dole on steroids, insisting on commercialisation and patenting wherever possible, and apparently treating open innovation as the exception, not the rule. And speaking of rules, the Regulations impose layers of bureaucratic filters between the researcher and the innovation outcome.

I am still working through the Australian document to absorb its detail but it has some valuable insights and the overall thrust is clear: there needs to be a balanced system, in which commercialisation is but one strand of the innovation role that universities can play. Far from taking Bayh-Dole as gospel, there is a critical evaluation of such strategies and a re-evaluation of  what innovation policy should look like in the 21st century.

Moreover, the Australian government and the participants in the policy process are aware of the pitfalls in excessive patenting. They review the past record, warn against the damage that can be done by patent law that is not rigourous enough and advise against policies that could create patent thickets. Most interesting, there is a strong argument for this arena to be opened up, so that the participants in the innovation system have a strong say, rather than this being the exclusive domain of lawyers. This is a lesson that I think South African universities might need to learn – it appears that our academics are not engaging with the South African legislation, thinking that this is the domain of professionals.  

This Australian policy document reminds me of a recommendation from Arie Rip at an  early stage of the South African higher education policy process (2000):

The common mimetic route is to define the nature of capacity-building in terms of what is now seen as important. This may well be a recipe to become obsolete before one’s time … [T]he world (of science and more generally) may well evolve in such a way that present-day exemplars will be left behind. So developing countries should set their sights on what is important in 2010, rather than what appears to be important now – however difficult this will be politically. 1

The IPR Act of 2008 is unfortunately trapped in the 'mimetic route' that Rip warns about here. But what about Australian thinking in 2009? Here are some extracts that give some insight into the thinking that will inform policy review down south:

On the commercialisation of research:

Research commercialisation is not a core role for universities. Nevertheless, universities can play a vital role in the commercial process. In cases where the benefits of research are best achieved through commercial engagement, universities should, where possible, attempt to partner with appropriate stakeholders to achieve these goals. Such instances are in the minority and universities more commonly play a role of commercial significance through provision of vital research advancement, workforce training and substantial international links.

On the protection of intellectual property rights:

[T]here is a caveat which is increasingly important: The development of intellectual property is cumulative. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Because new knowledge always builds on old knowledge, the property rights we have erected to encourage innovation can actually obstruct it.

On the need to open up the question of patenting and IP beyond the legal profession and the IP industries:

Nevertheless the consideration of policy … is dominated by IP practitioners and by the beneficiaries of the IP system. We need the expertise of lawyers in this as in many other areas of policy but it is imperative that IP policy make the transition that competition policy made over a decade ago now, from a specialist policy area dominated by lawyers, to an important front of micro-economic reform.

On access and dissemination for social and economic benefit

Along with the rise in support for access to information has come a growing recognition of the need for users to be able to search and interact with data and content. Legal frameworks must also be developed to facilitate access and reuse. This points to the need for an Australian National Information Policy (or Strategy) that optimizes the generation and flow of ideas and information in the Australian economy. As the National Competition Policy (NCP) involved systematically scanning Australian institutions to optimize the operation of competition to enhance outcomes so National Information Policy would scan Australian institutions to optimize the generation and dissemination of information for social and economic benefit.

Thus for instance, unless it seriously undermines its commercial objectives of sale of product, the ABC should err on the side of making its content available over theinternet unless this has large opportunity costs. The presumption against free availability might be overcome where it would involve the foregoing of substantial commercial revenue from the sale of the content or there are large costs of hosting the necessary internet bandwidth (although in this latter case, peer to peer means of distribution should also be explored as should the diversion of funding from other activities and/or additional funding).

The advantages of  open science

To drive cumulative knowledge creation researchers and others must have access to high quality data and information on developments not just in their field but beyond. For instance, Jeff Furman and Scott Stern have calculated that Biological Resource Centres that are repositories of biological materials (including cell lines, microorganisms and DNA material) have boosted cumulative scientific knowledge by three times more than alternative institutional structures 2.Australian physicist Michael Nielsen has stressed the importance of unlocking scientific information in scientific journals to make it more easily discoverable, searchable and useable to enable the cross-disciplinary search for knowledge:

We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything – data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else – the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.3

There is a lot more in this report – I recommend that South African researchers read it as they engage with our legislative process with an eye to preserving their expertise and independence in the process of ensuring that their research has maximum national impact.

1. Rip, A. (2000) Fashions, Lock-ins and the Heterogeneity of Knowledge Production. In Kraak, A. (ed.) Changing Modes: New knowledge production and its implications for Higher Education in South Africa. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council.

 2. Furman, J. and Stern, S., Standing Atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research, National Bureau Economic Research Working Paper. 2004. 

3. http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=448 

President Obama has made the headlines with his speech to the National Academy of Sciences. First of all, he is apparently unusual among Presidents for attending the NAS annual meeting, but he also made a powerful speech promising to put science and research at the heart of the recovery of the US, with substantial increases in investment.The full text of his speech can be found on the New York Times Dot Earth blog which will be running a commentary space on the speech.

It is instructive to compare Obama's proposals with the policy developments we are facing in South Africa. The IPR Act of 2008 is based in the USA Bayh-Dole Act  of 1980. Not to labour the point too crudely, that is 29 years ago. We are forgetting the fundamental injunction that policy formulation needs to look forward, not backwards if it really to advance the country. The philosophy behind Bayh-Dole was informed by a Reagon-style economic vision that imploded in 2008 and one that the Obama adminstration is aiming at undoing. That outdated view says that the economy is all and that if universities act like businesses and commercialise their research, using patenting and revenue-seeking, then this will bring benefit to the country through economic growth and trickle-down. In my next few blogs I will be exploring the debate on how this has really worked (or rather, not worked) and what alternatives are now being proposed in other countries for effective innovation.

But for now, let us celebrate Obama's speech and see what vision it embodies, rather than the dysfunctional 'managemented' view we currently live with. He talks of the crisis: 'a medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures and
treatments — attached to a health care system that holds the potential
for bankruptcy to families and businesses; a system of energy that
powers our economy, but simultaneously endangers our planet; threats to
our security that seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and
openness so essential to our prosperity; and challenges in a global
marketplace which links the derivative trader on Wall Street.

The main focus is on medicine and energy for a sustainable environment, both with a strong human perspective.

Obama's vision is of an interdisciplinary, international, collaborative and open scientific system. For a start, the policy system is being opened up: 

As part of this effort, we’ve already launched a web site that allows
individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal, but
to collaborate on those recommendations. It’s a small step, but one
that’s creating a more transparent, participatory and democratic
government.

Then science itself is perceived as a collaborative open system: 

 In biomedicine… we
can harness the historic convergence between life sciences and physical
sciences that’s underway today; undertaking public projects — in the
spirit of the Human Genome Project — to create data and capabilities
that fuel discoveries in tens of thousands of laboratories; and
identifying and overcoming scientific and bureaucratic barriers to
rapidly translating scientific breakthroughs into diagnostics and
therapeutics that serve patients.

And of course, with someone like Harold Varmus leading his scientific team, one hopes that open access will be on the agenda of a new scientific system.

Science is seen as not only the ivory tower (although basic science is given a strong emphasis) but scientists are preceived as potential activists. Applied research is valued and Obama places a strong emphasis on the potential role of the young and of the role that scientists can play in taking their knowledge into the schools and the community to help enthuse and inspire a new generation. 

Ultimately, in typical Obama vein, it is a moral vision that drives this iniitiave, although substantial funding is going to drive it: 

Science can’t answer every question, and indeed, it seems at times the
more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we
must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics or our values, our
principles or our faith. But science can inform those things and help
put those values — these moral sentiments, that faith — can put those
things to work — to feed a child, or to heal the sick, to be good
stewards of this Earth.

We need to ask whether our policies are in line with this renewed vision from the country that drives sceintific research in the world and if we are ready to collaborate with Obama's USA. 

Derek Keats. the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Knowledge management at Wits University has posted a series of blogs in the proposed Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act. He thinks – and I agree – that they will probably be unworkable and that they will almost certainly act as a hindrance and not a help to research effectiveness in the country.

Some of his comments: 

 Most importantly, innovation thrives in the absence of impediments.
Every time a researcher must go to NIPMO for permission, there is
another barrier to innovation. More barriers equates to less
innovation. This is a sine quo non, and cannot be changed… These regulations will stiffle innovation, not just in software, but in
almost every sphere of research endeavour. They are bad for innovation,
they are bad for research, they are bad for business, and they are bad
for South Africa.

Research innovation is something that is made from a harvest of
passion and energy, and the capacity for the unfettered creativity that
universities make possible. Anything that reduces that capacity for
unfettered creativity, and creates the risk of a passion drought will
undermine innovation and lead to less, not more, innovation. This is
something that I know with as much certainty as I know I have 10
fingers (currently).

Much as software patents favour existing large companies, and make
it difficult for a new company to become large, these regulatins will
have a small negative impact on the research superstars, but will make
it much more difficult to become a new superstar, and will drive
passionate people away from research into other carreers. Academic
freedom is important to people, and people do innovation. Trample on it
at your peril!

 ……

If you look at the range of work that these regulations cover, which
is effectively all knowledge work undertaken with public funds, the
range of knowledge needed to make non-spurious decisions is enormous.
The level of talent that will be needed for the imlementing body,
NIPMO, to work is very high. These are not decisions that can
reasonably be expected to be taken by inexperienced people who have
just completed a masters degree. They need experienced researchers,
with doctorates and many years of research and development experience.

Such people simply do not exist in South Africa. They could be taken
out of the Universities, but then that would undermine the innovation
process they are supposed to be managing. So where will they come from?

Finally, he makes a set of useful suggestions on how things could and should work: 

• Leave critical decisions close to the site of the action,
  where people are most familiar with the challenges and opportunities
  and can act in an agile manner with the minimum of delays;
• Ensure
  that the services are available to assist with commercialization of
  research, including legal services, product development assistance, and
  that these are available with minimum of fuss whether a proprietary or
  open source business model is followed;
• Ensure that there
  is a National fund to help startups fight patent challenges from patent
  trolls and other holders of spurious patents, especially large
  multinational corporations with large patent portfolios which may
  contain numerous dubious patents;
• Recognize that the vast
  majority of researchers are not doing research that will lead to
  commercial products, and do not bring the whole innovation regime in
  South Africa under these regulations, where social and cultural
  innovation will be stiffled; rather provide means to assist and inform
  such researchers to find commercially or socially beneficial uses for
  their research when they tell you they would like your help;
• Where
  software and documentation in various forms are concerned, accept the
  National Policy on Free and Open Source as also being an important
  guide for action among responsible, knowledgeable researchers.

I hope Wits University's reposnse to the Regulations will incorporate all o of this.

Today Legal Brief has posted a brief referring to Andrew Rens's blogpost arguing that the Draft Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act of 2008 are unconstitutional. Legal Brief quotes a telling passage from Andrew's post:

Andrew Rens, Intellectual Property Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town, says in a blog on the Creative Commons blog site
that the regulations 'are simply unworkable, intending to funnel the
entire research output of SA through a convoluted series of
bureaucratic filters'. Rens points out that almost all advanced
scientific research in SA takes place through multinational consortia.
These consortia enable scientists to share data and to contribute their
skills to complex research. 'Taking part in international consortia is
a minimum necessity for SA scientists,' he says. However, the
regulations 'represent an attempt to squash multinational,
multi-institutional research consortia into the form of agreements
between a corporation and a research institution'. Rens says this is,
in effect, a ban on participation in multinational research consortia,
'since research consortia have their own rules on how research may be
used'. Says Rens: 'In other words, researchers may not choose to join
the only, or best research consortium in the world, but must instead
cede their academic freedom to bureaucrats, and not only to bureaucrats
but bureaucrats impelled by the single objective of patenting whatever
they can.' He says for this reason, the regulations are
unconstitutional.

What Andrew's comments highlight is that the Act and the Regulations designed to enforce them- and 'force' is an appropriate word here – are some 30 years out of date and completely out of tune with the way research is being conducted in the world's leading universities in the 21st century, with high levels of collaboration. What is worse, they are out of line with the

realities of how research can best contribute to the national good, through
flexible strategies, effective and open dissemination and vehicles that are
aligned with the needs of the poorest in our society, something that patents
don't always do well. I cannot help recalling Yochai Benkler's striking
indictment of the patent system, in his seminal book, The Wealth of Networks : 'The above-marginal-cost prices paid
in …. poorer countries [as a result of patents] are purely
regressive redistribution. The morality of this redistribution from
the world's poor to the world's rich has never been confronted or
defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply goes
unnoticed.'

It is certainly unnoticed in these Draft Regulations, which seem intent on forcing the maximum commericialisation of South African research, at whatever cost.

The Department of Science and Technology has published the Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act of 2008. These have serious implications for researchers and the universities and research institutions they work in and even more dire implications for open access and open innovation in South Africa.

I set out below my preliminary reading of what these Regulations might mean. However, they are not very well drafted and contain some confusions, so it would be good to share reactions from researchers on how they see this affecting their research practices. The time for responding is short – we have until 8 May.

How this relates to what is happening in the rest of the world will follow in subsequent blogs, as will feedback as UCT and other institutions grapple with what this means for how research will be carried out in South Africa.

A brief recap for those who are not familiar with the Act.

The full name of the Act is The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Funded Research and Development Act, 2008. (I blogged the Draft Bill last year here and here and here and here and here) In 2009, one would expect a piece of legislation dealing with publicly funded research to be dealing with access to research, but that could not be further from the case of this legislation. To put it briefly, this is designed to ensure that all publicly funded research gets intellectual property protection for the purposes of commercialisation. This seems to be the only way that this legislation can conceive of public benefit from research. Open innovation, open science, open access and open source have to get special permission from the bureaucrats before they will be allowed.

The provisions of the Act

Before looking at the Regulations, researchers need to grapple with the basic definitions and provisions in the Act:   

1. The central provision of the Act is that universities carrying out research from public funds have to assess and report on all research carried out in the university that might have the potential for IPR protection and commercialisation. (Which being translated means they are patentable – but beware; it means more than that, as set out below.)
2. If the university/researcher does not want to lock down the IP in the research, then this decision has to be made according to the guidelines provided by the national IP Management Office (NIMPO) and it has to be notified of this decision. NIMPO then reviews this decision and can, if it disagrees with the university, acquire ownership of and obtain statutory protection for the IP in this research. In other words, the university and its researchers no longer have the right to make their own decisions on how best to ensure the impact of their research.
3. Research funded by private organisations only counts as not being publicly funded if the full cost of the research is covered, including all direct and indirect costs (15b). Does this mean that if you are running a research programme with donor funding, but UCT supports your office and computer infrastructure, your research is subject to this Act?

How is intellectual property defined in the Act?

In other words, what does this really mean for researchers and who would be affected by it? The primary focus of this legislation is clearly patents, but those researchers who think that their work has nothing to do with patents in South African law need to think again.

The definition of IP in the Act excludes copyrights in published works, and includes ‘creations of the mind’ that are capable of being protected under South African and foreign IP law. That means that software and business processes, patentable in the US but not in SA, have to be considered in terms of this Act. Databases, which are protected under the EU database provisions, would also fall under this legislation. Trademarks, artistic works and designs would presumably have to be considered, too.

It is clear therefore that researchers in humanities, social sciences, business school, and architecture cannot sit back on the assumption that these provisions would not apply to them because what they do is not normally patentable. Nor can any unit working with open source software development. The scale of what this might mean for the university IP office and for individual researchers is daunting; even more so the volume of forms to be filled in. But most of all, it is the loss of freedom for researchers and the university to make their own decisions on how to manage the dissemination of their work and how to ensure its impact that is most threatening.

What do the Regulations say?

When a decision is made on whether or not a piece of research requires protection, the only basis on which the researcher or the university can make this decision on their own is that it is not patentable (2 (2)). In any other case, a form has to be filled in and the decision referred to NIMPO. The criteria that NIMPO will apply include the sector, potential contribution of the research, commercial and social potential and the ability for this work to be protected under any law anywhere in the world.

Provisions are then made for what happens if the State takes over the IP rights (2(8)) and what happens if permission is given for them to be waived (in which case they have to be offered to the funders of the research or, where there is no private funding, to the researcher concerned) (2 (9,10,11)).

Researchers will need to think about how this sits with the funders of research that they carry out.

Open science, open access and open source

There is confusion in the Regulations between public domain, open source and open access (see Andrew Rens's blog on this question), but Section 2 (12) appears to be trying to say that where a the university wants to make research open access or develop open source software, it has to fill in a form and apply to NIMPO. If the need to make the research open comes from the requirements of cooperative research agreements or funder requirements, then this has to have prior approval from NIMPO. According to the Regulations, NIMPO then decides whether this agreement is in the best interests of the country or not (2 (14)).

It looks as though the university and its research departments will not be able to join collaborative research ventures or accept funding from donors who require open dissemination without government permission.

Andrew Rens thinks this might be unconsitutional – see his Aliquid Nova blog.

Given the requirements of some of UCT’s largest research funders, this is somewhat startling. This would also be threatening to a department like the Centre for Educational Technology, which has contracts with an international consortium, Sakai,  that requires assurance that all software developed has no IP restrictions and is open source.

How is this going to affect UCT’s research collaborations and research funding agreements?

The NIMPO Structures 

What skills will the NIMPO Advisory Board, which will oversee all this, bring to bear? It will consist of people chosen for their ‘knowledge and experience in intellectual property management, commercialisation, technology transfer, and business skills’ (4 (6)). In other words, people without special research knowledge or familiarity with disciplinary fields will be making decisions about how research could best impact on the country.

Revenue sharing

Researchers do get the right to revenue earned from the commercialisation of their research (7(1). However, the deductions that can be made before this happens sound somewhat threatening, as they include expenses for ‘filing, prosecution and maintenance of statutory protection; bank fees and other charges for collecting revenues due; defence, validation and enforcement of IP rights; legal advice; market research, marketing and sales, travel costs and admin expenses, up to R1 million (7 (2)). In truth, there is not much likely to be left after all this. If I were a researcher in this position, I would not be holding my breath. Perhaps, like the music recording industry, the creator will land up owing more than is earned.

Licences

There are detailed provisions for how NIMPO will intervene in the granting of exclusive licences, offshore deals, assignment of rights. In the case of exclusive licences granted, NIMPO can walk in and reverse these licences if they think that commercialisation is not adequate.

Auditing and retrospective licensing

Then there is a retrospective clause that says NIMPO can audit a university’s disclosure of IP. The university is required to fill in forms twice a year detailing the IP governed by the Act and how it has been commercialised. Then NIMPO can audit annually. If it finds that any IP has not been declared, then it can retroactively enforce assignment of the rights (11 (2)). 

 Does this mean that the university’s ability to contract with donors who require assurances of open IP management will be compromised? How could the university offer such assurances if they can be reversed by NIMPO at a later date?

This will surely mean that super-caution will be exercised by submitting everything for approval before research contracts begin. And what effect would that have on research effectiveness?

Research collaboration

When it comes to dealing with private organisations and institutions, the university could licence a share of the IP to a co-owner. If the university enters into a collaborative research agreement, it must retain ownership of any pre-existing IP and commercialise this in line with the Act; retain IP rights in what it produces, or jointly own IP. It must ensure the commercialisation in SA of this collaborative research. 

If the partners in the collaboration require open licences, then NIMPO has to approve before the university can enter such an agreement. NIMPO will publish guidelines on how universities have to manage such collaborations (12 (3)). 

How will universities manage their research collaborations with this level of interference? And what effect will this have on research output and its social and economic impact?

The Deprtment of Science and Technology has published the Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act of 2008. These have serious implications for researchers and the universities and research institutions they work in and even more dire implications for open access and open innovation in South Africa.

I set out below my preliminary reading of what these Regulations might mean. However, they are not very well drafted and contain some confusions, so it would be good to share reactions from researchers on how they see this affecting their research practices. The time for responding is short – we have until 8 May.

How this relates to what is happening in the rest of the world will follow in subsequent blogs, as will feedback as UCT and other institutions grapple with what this means for how research will be carried out in South Africa.

A brief recap for those who are not familiar with the Act.

The full name of the Act is The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Funded Research and Development Act, 2008. (I blogged the Draft Bill last year here and here and here and here and here) In 2009, one would expect a piece of legislation dealing with publicly funded research to be dealing with access to research, but that could not be further from the case of this legislation. To put it briefly, this is designed to ensure that all publicly funded research gets intellectual property protection for the purposes of commercialisation. This seems to be the only way that this legislation can conceive of public benefit from research. Open innovation, open science, open access and open source have to get special permission from the bureaucrats before they will be allowed.

The provisions of the Act

Before looking at the Regulations, researchers need to grapple with the basic definitions and provisions in the Act:   

1. The central provision of the Act is that universities carrying out research from public funds have to assess and report on all research carried out in the university that might have the potential for IPR protection and commercialisation. (Which being translated means they are patentable – but beware; it means more than that, as set out below.)
2. If the university/researcher does not want to lock down the IP in the research, then this decision has to be made according to the guidelines provided by the national IP Management Office (NIPMO) and it has to be notified of this decision. NIPMO then reviews this decision and can, if it disagrees with the university, acquire ownership of and obtain statutory protection for the IP in this research. In other words, the university and its researchers no longer have the right to make their own decisions on how best to ensure the impact of their research.
3. Research funded by private organisations only counts as not being publicly funded if the full cost of the research is covered, including all direct and indirect costs (15b). Does this mean that if you are running a research programme with donor funding, but UCT supports your office and computer infrastructure, your research is subject to this Act?

How is intellectual property defined in the Act?

In other words, what does this really mean for researchers and who would be affected by it? The primary focus of this legislation is clearly patents, but those researchers who think that their work has nothing to do with patents in South African law need to think again.

The definition of IP in the Act excludes copyrights in published works, and includes ‘creations of the mind’ that are capable of being protected under South African and foreign IP law. That means that software and business processes, patentable in the US but not in SA, have to be considered in terms of this Act. Databases, which are protected under the EU database provisions, would also fall under this legislation. Trademarks, artistic works and designs would presumably have to be considered, too.

It is clear therefore that researchers in humanities, social sciences, business school, and architecture cannot sit back on the assumption that these provisions would not apply to them because what they do is not normally patentable. Nor can any unit working with open source software development. The scale of what this might mean for the university IP office and for individual researchers is daunting; even more so the volume of forms to be filled in. But most of all, it is the loss of freedom for researchers and the university to make their own decisions on how to manage the dissemination of their work and how to ensure its impact that is most threatening.

What do the Regulations say?

When a decision is made on whether or not a piece of research requires protection, the only basis on which the researcher or the university can make this decision on their own is that it is not patentable (2 (2)). In any other case, a form has to be filled in and the decision referred to NIMPO. The criteria that NIMPO will apply include the sector, potential contribution of the research, commercial and social potential and the ability for this work to be protected under any law anywhere in the world.

Provisions are then made for what happens if the State takes over the IP rights (2(8)) and what happens if permission is given for them to be waived (in which case they have to be offered to the funders of the research or, where there is no private funding, to the researcher concerned) (2 (9,10,11)).

Researchers will need to think about how this sits with the funders of research that they carry out.

Open science, open access and open source

There is confusion in the Regulations between public domain, open source and open access (see Andrew Rens's blog on this question), but Section 2 (12) appears to be trying to say that where a the university wants to make research open access or develop open source software, it has to fill in a form and apply to NIMPO. If the need to make the research open comes from the requirements of cooperative research agreements or funder requirements, then this has to have prior approval from NIMPO. According to the Regulations, NIMPO then decides whether this agreement is in the best interests of the country or not (2 (14)).

It looks as though the university and its research departments will not be able to join collaborative research ventures or accept funding from donors who require open dissemination without government permission.

Andrew Rens thinks this might be unconsitutional – see his Aliquid Nova blog.

Given the requirements of some of UCT’s largest research funders, this is somewhat startling. This would also be threatening to a department like the Centre for Educational Technology, which has contracts with an international consortium, Sakai,  that requires assurance that all software developed has no IP restrictions and is open source.

How is this going to affect UCT’s research collaborations and research funding agreements?

The NIPMO Structures 

What skills will the NIMPO Advisory Board, which will oversee all this, bring to bear? It will consist of people chosen for their ‘knowledge and experience in intellectual property management, commercialisation, technology transfer, and business skills’ (4 (6)). In other words, people without special research knowledge or familiarity with disciplinary fields will be making decisions about how research could best impact on the country.

Revenue sharing

Researchers do get the right to revenue earned from the commercialisation of their research (7(1). However, the deductions that can be made before this happens sound somewhat threatening, as they include expenses for ‘filing, prosecution and maintenance of statutory protection; bank fees and other charges for collecting revenues due; defence, validation and enforcement of IP rights; legal advice; market research, marketing and sales, travel costs and admin expenses, up to R1 million (7 (2)). In truth, there is not much likely to be left after all this. If I were a researcher in this position, I would not be holding my breath. Perhaps, like the music recording industry, the creator will land up owing more than is earned.

Licences

There are detailed provisions for how NIPMO will intervene in the granting of exclusive licences, offshore deals, assignment of rights. In the case of exclusive licences granted, NIPMO can walk in and reverse these licences if they think that commercialisation is not adequate.

Auditing and retrospective licensing

Then there is a retrospective clause that says NIMPO can audit a university’s disclosure of IP. The university is required to fill in forms twice a year detailing the IP governed by the Act and how it has been commercialised. Then NIMPO can audit annually. If it finds that any IP has not been declared, then it can retroactively enforce assignment of the rights (11 (2)). 

 Does this mean that the university’s ability to contract with donors who require assurances of open IP management will be compromised? How could the university offer such assurances if they can be reversed by NIMPO at a later date?

This will surely mean that super-caution will be exercised by submitting everything for approval before research contracts begin. And what effect would that have on research effectiveness?

Research collaboration

When it comes to dealing with private organisations and institutions, the university could licence a share of the IP to a co-owner. If the university enters into a collaborative research agreement, it must retain ownership of any pre-existing IP and commercialise this in line with the Act; retain IP rights in what it produces, or jointly own IP. It must ensure the commercialisation in SA of this collaborative research. 

If the partners in the collaboration require open licences, then NIPMO has to approve before the university can enter such an agreement. NIPMO will publish guidelines on how universities have to manage such collaborations (12 (3)). 

How will universities manage their research collaborations with this level of interference? And what effect will this have on research output and its social and economic impact?

A new blog – OER@UCT – is charting the process of setting up an OER repository at UCT:

In the next few months we will be documenting our progress as we attempt to build a repository of UCT open resources.  We are trying to encourage faculty and students to contribute to our repository buy adopting Creative Commons licences which enables content to be easily shared.

The first blog (posted on 1 April, but no April Fool's joke) has a nice quote about the impact of open resources:

"Open resources are the path to humility. They are an invitation to experimentation and collaboration. The more open the resource, the less one is committed to a single pedagogical path or theory, and the more one can profit from the insights of strangers, or collaborate with people one has never met."  (Bissell, Doyle)

The OER@UCT blog has now posted an account of Hussein Suleman's Teaching with Technology seminar last week at which he spoke on Open Access in a Closed Institution – Hussein's view of UCT;s progress, or lack thereof, in creating an institutional research repository. From the OER@UCT blog:

Hussein spoke very briefly about the OA movement and some of the rather interesting developments in this area.  Large institutions around the world are pushing for open access and taking measures to ensure that their own research outputs are made available.  MIT (always a leader) has created a repository using the opensource dSpace software platform.  This also includes over 20,000 thesis going back as far as the 1800's!!!
It makes good academic sense to do this.  For lecturers it creates an opportunity to collaborate and share research.  For students it provides access to high quality research and makes it easy for the growing "just google it" generation to do what they do best.

Have you ever been searching for an older news clipping, found it on the newspapers website, and then been asked to pay for the article?  I have found this incredibly irritating.  Why should I have to pay for old news?  This is an random rant – but the discussion really led me to think about it. …

Here at UCT the idea of an open access repository for research has been under discussion for some time.  Certainly our research output is scattered throughout the internet and in journals around the world, but can we account for it and provide details about it?  Can we tell how many times those articles have been cited, or read?  An open access digital archive could answer some of these questions. 

Hussein says he had developed the UCT CS Research Document Archive for the Department of Computer Science here at UCT simply because he could not wait any longer for a university wide initiative to happen.  They now archive their publications and are able to provide details of how and when articles were accessed. The Law Faculty has also felt the need for a digital archive for their own research and have launched UCT Lawspace which also powers dSpace.  So it is clear that a unified system would be of great benefit if not only for these two faculties…

When I think of OER resources in the context of UCT I think of research output almost immediately.  Research papers, handbooks, conference papers, and articles will make a tremendous addition to our project.  Having them searchable and accessible will be of tremendous benefit in terms of reputation. 

As Hussein reported in his talk, UCT is moving now to create an institutional repository, with funding from Carnegie. The question he raised was, Why has it taken so long?  and 'Why does a university as prominent as UCT not invest in the creation of its own  repository rather than waiting for Carnegie to offer funding. It was clear from the information that Hussein provided that UCT has fallen badly behind other South African universities in adopting more open approaches to its research dissemination, with the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal the only other major South African university without an institutional repository.
One of my reflections on what Hussein was saying took was that there is a good deal of wastage in a university like UCT which produces very high quality research right along the spectrum of basic and applied research, but tends to favour the former in its research publication policy. The push at UCT is to get academics to publish as much as possible in  'internationally accredited' publications. This is a dual push – to enhance the research prestige of the university through increased citation impact and to earn the very generous subsidies paid by the Department of Education for such publication. While there is a list of South African accredited journals, the statistics show that UCT – probably the country's and the continent's leading research university – tends to publish journal articles rather than books and to publish these articles predominantly in ISI listed journals. In UCT's publication list submitted to the Department in 2005-6, only 78 out of 622 journal articles listed were in locally accredited journals. (There were 23 South African journals in the international indexes at that stage, so there would have been some overlap between local and international publication, but not much.)  In other words, to put it bluntly, given the profile of the journal industry that UCT favours, it exports most of its formal scholarly publication to commercial journals published by multinational conglomerates in the USA and Europe.
In the mean time, back home, our ever-inconsistent government, which pressurises South African universities to publish in this way in the name of global competitiveness, also berates those same universities for not doing enough to resolve our very pressing development issues, particularly unemployment and skills shortages. If one delves into the UCT record, it is clear that formidable levels of skill and intellect are being devoted to just such tasks. There are a large number of research units and collaborative research ventures devoted to interfacing high level basic research with community needs. These research units often publish a range of online policy papers, research reports,  discussion documents and data sets. Other units produce training materials and community handbooks. It is clear that the university has made a formidable contribution to policy development in health, poverty reduction, industrial and skills development, to name but a few.
Trying to find this rich record of research publication is, however, a mission. The publications are there, but buried in departmental websites that are in turn buried inside the university website. As good as this website is, this is just too many clicks away from discovery. The question I has to the senior administration was 'UCT is a major player in the development of an AIDS vaccine in South Africa. Why, if you google AIDS vaccine South Africa, does UCT's name not come up?'
Clearly, UCT could do a lot more using open access publishing, a strong repository system and some marketing of its wider range of publications, to demonstrate the contribution that is makes in return for taxpayer contributions.

I was given pause for thought last week when, in a University of Cape Town  Centre for Higher Education Development seminar on research ethics, Kevin Williams, of the Higher and Adult Education and Development Unit (HEASDU) mentioned that some of his respondents to an investigation of the ethics involved in higher education practitioner research had expressed doubts about the real intentions of researchers interviewing them. Were these researchers really interested in the importance of the research they were conducting, or was their main concern to get material that could be worked into journal articles and chapters in books, for promotion purposes? This might have been something of an aside in Kevin's talk, but it struck a chord and made me think that there might indeed be an ethical dimension in our obsession with journal article counts and accredited publications.

I have had the question in mind as I have scanned a number of recent publications on the renewal of higher education in Africa and have noted with concern the persistence of the use of counts of journal articles published in ISI journals as the standard and sometimes the only measure for the status of African research in the world. In other words, in a continent in which the goal of public investment in research is explicitly to contribute to national growth and development, the measure of success all too often applied is the production of a lot of journal articles in foreign publications targeted at other scholars in the field. This is hardly a metric that is going to tell us anything about what our scholars are really contributing to the resolution of the considerable problems that challenge the continent.

The surge of  interest in African higher education is good part owing to the publication by the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) of a series of reports on the state of higher education in the SADC region, summarised in Towards a Common Future: Higher Education in the SADC Region. Drawing in part from this, Sci-Dev.net has published a series of articles on developments in African higher education. And the World Bank, backtracking from its damaging dismissal of higher education as a funding priority in the 1980s, in 2008 published Accelerating Catch-up: Tertiary Education for Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa1.

The message in all of these reports has a not very equal measure of good and bad news. The good news is that there is a concerted effort to turn around the deficits in African higher education, damaged by 20 years of funding neglect, on top of a poor colonial inheritance.

The bad news is that African higher education remains in poor shape, in need of radical infusions of funding and visionary planning. It is all too easy to forget that when the wave of independence rolled across Africa from the 1960s, there were very few universities outside of South Africa, and as  universities were rapidly developed in newly independent countries, these were based on the colonial model, designed to produce a governing and professional elite and to reinforce what were accepted as 'international' values.

This is only one of the reasons why I am concerned with the insistence on ISI journal article counts as the measure of research excellence. This is par excellence a colonial measure, designed to value research according to how it conforms to criteria set by a commercial conglomerate in the metropolis/the USA to define what is 'mainstream'.  Africa, on the other hand, is about as far off in the periphery as one can get and, not unpredictably, does not score well in this index. What is often ignored that is that the value system that underpins this particular measure is competitiveness of universities and individual scholars  in the the not very level playing field of the global knowledge economy, where commercial enterprise and copyrights and patents are seen as the ways to make a difference.

There is no doubt that as long as this remains an accepted standard of excellence by the most powerful players in the global scholarly community, African scholars will have to go on playing this game. And this is an ethical issue. As Obama calls for shared values and the power of ideals over cynicism, power politics and greed, perhaps the way in which Africa can say 'Yes we can!' is in learning to value the knowledge it produces by its own standards. In those SADC countries in which 89% of scholars responded that their research interests coincided with national development targets, how can we develop measures for 'Africa's share of world science' that measure this rather than participation in someone else's science endeavours?

How can we re-cast the idea of what is 'international' – as Paul Zeleza has said, how do we learn to globalise our research and localise US research? Most importantly, how do we revalue the hierachies of 'applied' and 'basic' research to develop ways of valuing what we in Africa are really good at: high level and high quality research that responds to and learns from society? How do we get support for the more effective and more extensive production of research outputs that  this kind of research is already producing and that demonstrate genuine contributions to national and regional development?

What is certain is that if African universities were to provide open access for the considerable volume of publications already posted online by development research units and ensure that these are easliy accessible, this in itself could boost the contribution of African universities to development goals. 

1. I am not including the url to the World Bank publication, by the way, because of its confused approach to its intellectual property rights management. I would have thought that the World Bank would want its African readership, in particular, to read this publication. But, although it exists as an e-book, that version is 'available to subscribers only'. Otherwise you can buy it in print. Does the World Bank really want to make money from African countries by selling its publications, or restrict access to a text that is readily available in PDF format and costs nothing to distribute? The e-book is copyrighted with an 'all rights reserved' licence, that nevertheless states that '[t]he International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank encourages dissemination of its work and will normally grant permission to reproduce portions of the work promptly.'  Which being translated means that you need to apply  to the US Copyright Clearance Centre for permission to photocopy or reprint 'any part of this work'.  You have to either write a letter or telephone – no email address available. Could someone please send an ambassador to the World Bank publisher to explain how Creative Commons licences work?

On Obama's inauguration day, I thought I was going to be in the wrong place.

I was banking on seeing the speech live. But instead I was at a celebration for  a very good policy research organisation – one of the many in South Africa that take it for granted that what research is about is making a difference and that their research publications should be made available free online for everybody. It is one of those very South African research organisations that have became a source of high quality research interventions to inform development in a democratic South Africa.  

The occasion was the launch as  an Institute  of  PLAAS – the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.  The acronym is wonderful – for non-South Africans, you need to know that 'plaas' is 'farm' in Afrikaans and that is the language of the rural workers in the Western Cape who are a primary focus of  PLAAS's research. The venue was the pool terrace of a hotel near the sea, at a spot where Robben Island is just a short way across the bay, a reminder perhaps of the Mandela inheritance that Obama might draw on.

I arrived at the venue with the Inauguration very much in mind, thinking through how things might change for us with a new US President. Obama's is a very different face in the now gloriously inappositely-named White House, with special meaning for Africa. In the background, the sound effect is the thundering crunch of falling masonry as the mad world of global business falls apart. From the southern tip of Africa, the question is not only how Obama will do as President, particularly in relation to Africa, but also whether the economic crash is going to be hard enough to give him space to help usher in a different and less exploitative world order.

In his interview at Google, while still a candidate, Obama had given us a glimpse of  his vision for a more open way of government, a world in which access to knowledge and information is a guarantee of democratic participation and good governance. 'If you give people good information,' he said, 'they will make good decisions'. Giving good information and making it accessible to the people who need it is what  PLAAS and other research groupings like it do pretty well.
 
In my naïve way, I believe that this kind of research is in truth the globally competitive cutting edge strength of the South African research endeavour, rather than the journal indexes, journal article counts and the tallying up of citation counts that is used as the metric for valuing South African research. The engaged research carried out by organisations like PLAAS features the combination of high quality and cutting edge basic research with real engagement with the community. As Subbiah Arunachalam would say, scholarly communications need to flow from scholar to scholar, from scholar to farmer, from farmer to farmer and from farmer to scholar. That is one of the things that makes for really good research.

But organisations like PLAAS do face problems in our current research policy environment. This   emerged in the speech of Ben Cousins, the Director of PLAAS He said two things that struck me particularly on US inauguration night. One was that, although the Institute publishes a high volume of quality research in print and on its website and makes sure that this reaches government policy-makers and other stakeholders, PLAAS's researchers are under relentless pressure from the university to publish more and more journal articles in 'accredited' (i.e. indexed) journals in order to attract government publication subsidies. Policy research papers and research reports on development-focused research don't count.

The other piece of information Ben gave us was that the government appears to have taken a strangely wrong-headed direction – as he sees it – in its land rights reform policy and is planning  an empowerment programme that aims to create black empowerment through the sponsoring of large-scale corporate farmers who could operate in a globally competitive market.  

In both of these cases, the values at play are those of  the world that seems to be failing, of the large corporations, with profits and competitiveness as the driving forces. That is all too clear in the land rights reform proposals. However, not all academics recognise that it is this very same global business world that owns and directs the hallowed traditions of journal publication and citation counts that dominate how scholarship is disseminated and how it is valued in South Africa.  After all,  the journals that are most highly rated tend to be those in the hands of large commercial publishers. And the way these are indexed – and hence valued – is in the hands of a single US conglomerate. Thomson Reuters owns the ISI journal indexing system that is treated with such reverence in South African academe and it is Thomson Reuters and no-one else that decides who wins and who loses in this particular game, which journals make the cut and which don't.

What is happening in South African research therefore is that the commercially-driven values of global competitivenesss in exactly the world order that Obama is challenging dominate the academic reward system, marginalising the value-driven research that aims to make a difference, contributing to  national development in precisely the way government says it wants its research investment to deliver.

It turned out that there was a television screen in the venue, so it was with the supporters of PLAAS that I listened to the inauguration speech. There was less of relevance than in his interview at Google, where he talked of the need to provide open access to all aspects of policy making, making medical policy through a consultative process, but 'not letting the pharmaceutical companies buy the table' and expressing the perspective he has as the grandson of a woman living without running water or electricity in rural Kenya. But in the inaugural speech, he did talk of the restoration of 'those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old.' These things are also the values of research centres like PLAAS and not of the global journal publishing system that has grown up in the last 60 years, giving us s remarkably inequitable knowledge regime, where far too much of the really important research that we do is consigned to the margins.

UCT, as a good research university, likes to compete in world
rankings, endorsing its  high international profile. Well, we have
creamed another competition, in relative terms, but I
nevertheless have some unsolicited advice on how we can improve our
ranking even further to power our way into the 'Premier
League' top 200 of this particular competition.

We are talking about the Webometrics
world ranking of university websites, which has just released its
2008 rankings (thanks to Peter
Suber's Open Access News for bringing this to my attention). UCT
comes in at number 385 out of over 14,000 universities. Not bad at
all – it puts us at the top
of Africa and gets us in ahead of all but two Latin American
universities and all Indian universities (where Bangalore comes in at
605). Not unexpectedly, the top 8 African universities are from South
Africa, with Stellenbosch second at 654 and Rhodes third at 722.
UNISA, surprisingly comes in quite low – 8th, at 1,499. DUT is the
lowest rated South African university at 8,735.

So, congratulations to UCT and its web developers. But can I be
grudging and suggest that we should do better? We need to get into
the world top 200 – the Premier League, among the big Asian, US and
European players (and yes, that is the order). After all, UCT prides
itself on its far-sightedness in ICT development and has created the
Centre for Educational Technology
for the development of ICT use for teaching and learning – something
that turned out in a recent online discussion forum in the eMerge
2008 online conference to be the envy of many of our colleagues
in other universities. 

To get a hint on how to do better, one needs to look at the
criteria for evaluation. This is what the Webometrics site says about
its criteria:

The original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web
publication, not to rank institutions. Supporting Open Access
initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to
other academic material are our primary targets. However web
indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not
based on number of visits or page design but global performance and
visibility of the universities.

As other rankings focused
only on a few relevant aspects, specially research results, web
indicators based ranking reflects better the whole picture, as many
other activities of professors and researchers are showed by their
web presence.

The Web covers not only
only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly
communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high
standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach
much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific
knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing
countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political
or cultural stakeholders) in their own community.

The Webometrics ranking
has a larger coverage than other similar rankings. The ranking is not
only focused on research results but also in other indicators which
may reflect better the global quality of the scholar and research
institutions worldwide.

The site includes a very useful ten-point
list of good web practice for university sites. But it is clear
what UCT needs to do to improve its rankings, and that is to put its
scholars' research output online, to make it accessible and searchable and increase
the 'global performance and visibility of its research'. Note that
the ranking includes not only formal journals and repositories, but
also 'informal scholarly communication'. The Social
Responsiveness programme in the UCT Planning Office is
demonstrating that we produce a lot of that, too, although we do not
record it properly. Putting the not inconsiderable output of UCT's
student and staff community programmes would serve a dual purpose of
increasing the reach and impact of these vital resources
and increasing the university's research profile.

So how about a drive to put UCT's considerable research output online
(including its very substantial contribution to community
development) and see if we can shine even better in another
international ranking? And yes, this does apply also to all those S&T departments North of Jammie steps. 

South Africa's leading research
universities are very keen to compete in the international arena,
ranking up comparative scores of international journal articles
published and citation counts and jostling for research ratings (more
on that tomorrow).

So, if we are competing with the big
players internationally, what are they up to? A review of developments
in open access in the last couple of months is a very telling insight
into how the terrain might be changing – not that the citation
counts have gone away, but that the big research universities seem to
be recognising the strategic importance of open communications. The
universities concerned are quite hard nosed and not into empty
gestures, so I imagine that their reasons for the actions they have
taken are strategic, as was MIT's decision to spend a lot of money
opening up its educational resources to the world.

In the last couple of months:

Harvard University's Faculty
of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to grant the university a
licence to make the faculty's scholarly articles freely available
online.The move was motivated in part by
dissatisfaction with the copyright restrictions and the escalating
cost of commercially published journals and in that mood, the move is
to greater control of the university's and its scholars' own output.
However, it is a also a firm commitment to the active and open
dissemination of research:

"This is a large and very
important step for scholars throughout the country. It should be a
very powerful message to the academic community that we want and
should have more control over how our work is used and
disseminated,"â€ﾝ added
Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of
Computer Science.

"The goal of university research
is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. At
Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we
have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our
scholarship as widely as possible," said Steven E. Hyman,
provost. "Today's action in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
will promote free and open access to significant, ongoing research.
It is a first step in the creation of an openaccess environment for
current research that may one day provide the widest possible
dissemination of Harvard's distinguished faculties' work," he
added.

Shortly afterwards, the
Harvard Faculty of Law followed suit, committing to make articles
authored by faculty available free online.

Harvard University is now creating an
Office for Scholarly
Communications, situated in the university libraries, under the
aegis of the historian Robert Darnton. (perhaps emulatingthe
University of California's similarly-named position). This office
will ensure that faculty, when signing publishing agreements, will do
so in such a way as to best serve the public interest. The Office
will also oversee the creation of a repository for university
publications.

The motivations for all of these moves
talk of the prestige of Harvard research and the need to make it
available globally. Clearly Harvard sees opening its intellectual
capital as a good way of advancing its research mission and profiling
the university.

In June 2008, at the ElPub conference
in Toronto, John Willinsky announced that the Stanford University
School of Education had emulated Harvard in passing a unanimous
motion for a mandate for the open access deposit of research
articles. (See the
account in Peter Suber's Open Access News and the report in the
SPARC
newsletter) The Stanford
School of Humanities and Science is now considering a similar
mandate, Peter Suber reports.

Also inspired by Harvard, the
Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University has
proposed to the university that they adopt and Open Access
policy. Details are in his blog
(he has a blog, take note!)

And Michigan University has created
Open Michigan, which
provides a gateway to a wide variety of university resources (via
Peter
Suber's blog). It includes open education resources, open
software and open publishing and archives. Again, this is a strategic
initiative: as the university describes it:

With a common goal
of opening resources for teaching, learning and research for use and
enhancement by a global community, these projects increase the value
of those resources to U-M and the world. Open.Michigan provides a
clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world's
knowledge and creates exemplary resources for education and research.

That is just a few months' worth in the
US. The question is, 'What are we doing at UCT? And in South Africa more generally?'

On
July 7-11, 2008, a delegation from the Academy of Sciences of South
Africa (ASSAf)
visited BIREME
In Sao Paulo, Brazil. The
ASSAF delegation was there to review the potential for the adoption
of the SciELO
(Scientific Electronic Library Online) model as a platform to manage
scientific publication in South Africa. Given that there is a wider
African Academies of Science project to boost scholarly publishing
across Africa, this could be a spearhead for a future regional open
access network. (For background, see my
blog of 30 April.)

This
was an important visit. SciELO is a model of successful regional
collaboration to raise the profile of a developing economy region's
research publication in the face of an inequitable global system.
Given that Thomson Scientific is reported to be looking at the
question of regional journals right now, it is worth looking at a bit
of history. A similar exercise happened in 1982, at which the status
of 'peripheral' or 'Third World' journals was discussed. As
Jean-Claude Guèdon
describes the
result in a recent publication, given the task of reviewing how
to deal with a national perspective on contributions to world
science, the national perspective was 'ultimately dismissed,
presumably as a provincial exercise of no interest to the rest of the
world. Without justification or analysis, a distinction between
“local publications” and “mainstream” or “world science”
as if it were evidence”.

We
live with the results of this perverse interpretation of scientific
universalism' as Guèdon describes it, as we all know.

BIREME
has produced a detailed newsletter on this visit in which Wieland
Gevers is quoted on South Africa's position in this regard:

According
to Wieland Gevers, among the 225 South African scientific journals,
over one hundred have never had an article cited. “South Africa
occupies a paradoxical position in the context of scientific
publication: it is simultaneously a giant within the African context
and a dwarf in the international arena”, defined Gevers. He also
added that “we are talking about a country that has nine Nobel
Prize winners, and four are related to scientific fields, including
Allan MacLeod Cormack … -the co-inventor of CAT scanning…

We watch the outcome of this initiative with great
interest. SciELO could be a powerful partner. Guèdon
describes it as probably the most  successful regional/international initiative
– it includes Portugal and Spain as well as Latin American countries
– which has the potential, he argues, 'to play a formidable role in
this battle to remove the divide barriers or, at least, lower them' .
He argues for 'strong international collaboration with well-targeted
countries to build a base for the reform of scientific power in a
credible way. These countries are quite easy to identify and have
already been mentioned before: they include China and India. Africa
must be included because it is suffering the most from the knowledge
divide that has been constantly decried, criticised and attacked in
this text.'

More
background from the BIREME newsletter:

SciELO
has had a successful performance in Latin America and the Caribbean,
and is an outstanding reference in the process of research,
evaluation and adoption of a solution for national scientific
communication…The first portal – SciELO
Brazil collection
– started operating publicly in 1998. Since then, the SciELO project
has developed and is present in eight countries, adding up to over
550 titles of certified journals and more than 180 thousand full-text
articles available free online (open access), including original
articles, review articles, editorials and other types of
communication…

ASSAf
showed interest to put into practice a pilot experience with an
initial group of five South African publications in order to test the
functionalities of the SciELO platform. The BIREME was invited to
make a technical visit to South Africa in September 2008 to
demonstrate the system to the members of the Academy Advisory Board.

Guédon,
J., 2007. Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and
“peripheral” science. In Ferreira, Sueli Mara S.P. and Targino, Maria das Graças, Eds. Como gerir e qualificar revistas
científicas. Available at:
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00012156/ [Accessed August 3, 2008].