Open Access News

Around 65 delegates met in a mild and sunny Leiden in early September, as guests of the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden, to discuss the the North-South divide and scholarly communication in Africa in the digital era.This was a follow-up to an initial conference on the topic in Dakar two years ago. The differences between the two conferences were telling: while the 2004 event consisted largely of informative and explanatory papers, laying the ground for an understanding of the terrain, this time there was a much more confident interrogation of the assumptions that underlie international scholarly communications systems and the power relations at play in the scholarly community....

As Adebayo Olukoshi said in his opening speech, global knowledge dissemination is characterised by asymmetries from previous systems of knowledge production. The conference was designed to address these asymmetries, he said, with the aim of developing strategies for using CODESRIA's CODICE documentation centre to help leapfrog institutional practice across the continent. In this context, CODICE is seen as a pioneer centre on the African continent for the development of digital media and online resources in the social sciences. The main lines of discussions that emerged at the conference were cogently summarised in this opening speech - the inequalities inherent in the scholarly system and the marginalisation of African knowledge in that system; the problematic yet ultimately liberatory role of technology; the need for leapfrogging disadvantage; and the vital importance of collaboration and resource sharing.

Open Access publication seemed to have ready acceptance across the board as the most enabling dissemination model for African scholarship, offering greater citation impact, greater efficiency and, most important, more democratic access to knowledge. Given that a number of speakers identified distribution problems as the major barrier to research dissemination, the potential for Open Access digital distribution was doubly attractive, leading to an increase in impact factor of between 56% and 227%, according to Marlon Domingues of the ASC....

The particular occasion for this event was the launch of Connecting Africa, an ASC initiative to harvest African Studies data by building links to repositories across the world. As an example of North-South collaboration, this initiative builds on existing resources to leverage access to a body of African Studies content, fostering partnerships between institutions in the North and in Africa. The resultant collaboration aims to redress the knowledge divide by balancing access to research content produced in Africa and that generated in the global North.

Providing a perspective from the global South, Subbiah Arunachalam gave an eye-opening account of the ways in which Open Access knowledge dissemination to rural knowledge centres in India had contributed to poverty reduction and the delivery of development goals – as well as saving the lives of coastal fishermen through the provision of weather and tidal information. These networks translate knowledge from the research environment to local communities – 'lab-to-land' as Arun described it - using digital, print, and broadcast media to get the message across in projects in some 40,000 villages....

Williams Nwagwu...[made] the case for the creation of an African citation index, arguing that African research is for the most part, 'unavailable and inaccessible' as a result of the selection criteria imposed by the mainstream Northern citation indexes. These exclude most research done in Africa and, in particular, deny the importance of locally or nationally-focused research, which tends to be applied research, understandably enough, given African circumstances....The South American example of the SCIELO database was cited by a number of speakers as a valuable coordinated cross-national policy initiative that has substantially increased the exposure of research from the participating countries - and if Cuba can do it, so can African countries.

The proposal for an African Citation Index was taken up enthusiastically by the delegates and a proposal was accepted for Williams to prepare a model for CODESRIA, for the idea to be taken up with the AAU and NEPAD. Terms of Reference should be ready by October-November 2006....

In the final keynote address, Olivier Sagna, from Cheik Anta Diop University in Dakar, but recently appointed to a strategic position in CODICE at CODESRIA, pulled together a number of these themes. Africa had been outside most developments he said, but...[w]hat was happening in Africa, he said, was the growth of FOSS,...the establishment of repositories and research archives, Creative Commons SA, with Nigeria to follow, NRENs. What needed to be done was awareness-raising; policy creation (Open Access, FOSS, etc.)....Most important, African universities needed to create communication links and collaborative networks so that efforts are no longer fragmented. Perhaps, he said, in 2007 there should be a Tibuktu Declaration on African Open Access.

PS:  For background, see Jennifer De Beer's shorter report on the conference from earlier this month.