The future female leaders of Africa are up against major barriers to knowledge access, which could mean lost opportunities in university learning and teaching the state-of-the-art research most necessary for academic success. Online academic journals, and university textbooks are a few of the important resources that are part of this access to knowledge, which is pertinent particularly at the university level. Not only do students need to pass their courses, they are also encouraged to develop innovative and novel ideas informed and possibly inspired by past research work. This article questions whether such access of learning materials to all students and teachers at universities in Africa are fair to both women and men.
The 2008 (Abrahams et al.) study called, Opening Access to Knowledge in Southern African Universities, examines key constraints to access to knowledge in universities in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. The eight universities in seven countries found there was a “lack of awareness of what has been produced” in the African region (ibid). Most researchers kept their work as unpublished outputs or as “grey literature” that was not digitized, likely to be filed away in some dusty office and thus was not accessible to the rest of the world. ... Deeper studies as to whether men and women are experiencing similar constraints in the availability to research publications have yet to be explored. ...
The internet has been a major source of accessing and disseminating research through online journal databases and search engines like Google Scholar. However, whether women students or teachers had equal access to the internet or even computers is debatable. One university example showed first-hand experience of gender inequality from computer access. ...
Another element of the knowledge access picture is the copyright environment. ... How, if at all, do copyright environments differentially affect access for men and for women to learning materials, particularly in the university context? ...
The preliminary ACA2K finding from interviews in the eight ACA2K study countries was that most of the chosen interview subjects – government/state actors, university actors, rights-holders/publishers – did not see, or had not considered, a connection among gender, copyright and learning materials access. However, there were smatterings of anecdotal evidence that were of interest. ... While the team has yet to explain these anecdotes through gender analysis, the initial findings has sparked the team to complete further investigation on the significance of gender within the realm of copyright and access. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/21/2009 01:11:00 PM.
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.
