Wieland Gevers, Regional journals can boost science capacity, SciDev.Net, September 19, 2008. Gevers is the chair of the Academy of Science of South Africa's Committee on Scholarly Publishing and, until recently, the Academy's CEO. Excerpt:
...Participating in the ["highly profitable Western system of commercial journal publishing "] often brings extensive conference and workshop opportunities, sharing of special materials, and exchanges of students and post-docs. It is also a 'must' for career advancement — you 'publish-or-perish'. Yet these benefits largely fail to reach scientists in the developing world....
In choosing which journals to index, [Thomson Scientific] assumes that 20 per cent of journals — the biggest, best established and most respected — contain 80 per cent of the real value of scientific output. This is a self-fulfilling principle....
Systematic interventions are needed to create a less skewed and self-perpetuating scholarly literature system — one where the downward spiral of 'have-nots' can be reversed in sustainable ways on a regional level.
In 2006, the Academy of Science of South Africa published a comprehensive study of about 250 South African journals (20-24 of them indexed by Thomson Scientific) accredited by the local Department of Education as "valid research outputs.” This study strongly supported building up an indigenous system of high-quality, mostly open access, scholarly journals. The academy now has a scholarly publishing programme with several sub-projects....
In Brazil, the publically funded SciELO organisation has established a quality- controlled regional journal system that represents a fully indexed, open access publishing platform for just under 200 journals, out of more than a thousand published in the country....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/23/2008 11:42:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
