Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, April 30, 2008

OA progress in South Africa

Eve Gray, A major boost for Open Access scholarly publishing in South Africa - the Academy of Science springs into action, Gray Area, April 30, 2008.

I came back from a meeting of the Academy of Science (ASSAF) Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa (CSPiSA) last week feeling bouyed up and looking forward to a period of rapid developments in Open Access scholarly publishing in South Africa. We were told that the Department of Science and Technology (DST) has now dedicated a substantial three-year budget to fund the implementation of ASSAF's recommendations for the development of scholarly publication in South Africa. ...

The ASSAF Report on Scholarly Publishing in SA ... was commissioned by the DST and produced what was probably the most coherent account of the state of scholarly journal publishing in South Africa, concluding with a set of 10 recommendations which included strong support for the development of a 'gold route' Open Access approach to journal publishing in South Africa.

The central vision of the report is for quality-controlled and government supported publication of open access journals of a sufficient quality to deliver local impact and international recognition. ... Financial support for open access journal publication, it proposed, would be by way of the dedication of a small percentage of the revenue paid to journals through the Department of Education (DoE) publication grant system, for the purpose of paying per-article author charges through the institution where the author is based.

Backing this up is a recommendation for the creation of a national technical and promotional platform for hosting and profiling the best South African journals, possibly along the lines of SciELO in Latin America. ...

It seems that the DST's motivation in offering this support is linked to its 10-year plan for human capital development, which proposes a radical growth in the level of postgraduate degrees, publications and innovation levels in higher education. The ASSAf scholarly publication programme is thus seen as a key to the process of raising the bar for the quality and output of research in the country and leveraging upwards the profile of the country in the international research rankings, while at the same time improving the positive impact of research on economic growth and social development.

... [T]his is a major step forward simply because it puts publication of South African research in South Africa in the spotlight and, through links with the African Academies of Science, connects this to a broader effort to raise publication levels on the continent. (The creation of an African citation index is one of the recommendations in the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa.) And, even more important, this intervention at last recognises that scholarly publishers need support if South Africa research is to be properly disseminated.

We understand that the DST accepts that this model may require long term subsidisation for Open Access journal support and this support is perceived as part of a national service project to build capacity and serve every scholar. ...

A further intervention being undertaken over the next six months, this time with DoE support, is the production of a Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Book Publishing by a selected panel of experts, following a fact-finding investigation by CREST at the University of Stellenbosch. Provisional findings should be available for presentation at the National Scholarly Journal Editors' Forum in July and it is hoped that the final report should be ready for release in November. ...