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Access to Africa’s knowledge

Publishing development research and measuring value

Eve Gray (2010): Access to Africa’s Knowledge: Publishing Development Research and Measuring Value.

The African Journal of Information and Communication Thematic Issue on A2K in Africa, Issue 10 2009/ 2010

http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/journal.html

What does Africa seek to gain from its

investment in research?

ʻHow could the application of knowledge end poverty and hunger in Africa? How could higher education empower women and promote gender equity? How can knowledge be considered in the African context to address child mortality and improve maternal health?ʼ

Nahas Angula, Namibian Prime Minister, UNESCO 29th Conference on Higher Education, 2009

Photo: coda Damien du Toit http://www.flickr.com/photos/coda/Creative Commons Share-Alike

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Higher education at a crossroads?

Information and communication

technology offers new promise

Higher access, higher quality, lower

cost

but we are still caught up with old paradigms...

“Over the last few decades, some things have not changed. There’s been no significant break in relations of knowledge production between the colonial and post-colonial eras. African universities are essentially consumers of knowledge produced in developed countries.”

Blade Nzimande, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education 2009

there is a penalty...

In essence, what is being defined as ‘knowledge society’ means two different things to the developed world and the African continent. The former are the producers and the latter are the consumers of knowledge, which seriously undermines the fostering of the multicultural nature of Higher Education, as virtually all partnerships are one-sided. This is not only negative for the African continent, but it also deprives global higher education of access to the indigenous knowledge of Africa, and it deprives Africans of the opportunity to develop their indigenous knowledge system and strengthen their relationship to western and eastern knowledge systems. Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and Training, South Africa

National policies tend to favour what Sir John Daniel at

the UNESCO conference called ‘poles of superior quality’

rather than ‘the public good’

We measure impact factors and citations in a highly

competitive and exclusionary system

controlled by commercial companies...

Science Research

http://www.worldmapper.org 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

We ask for research to resolve development

challenges, help achieve the Millennium Goals...

... even as the policy-makers and international agencies require journal articles and

patents as a measure of success....

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..and offer little support and recognition to the

publications that emerge from development-focused

research.

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Is the problem what is being produced, or what is being

measured?

It is not that our policy-makers do not see the

problem...

Blade Nzimande, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education 2009

Our universities, in particular, should be directing their research focus to address the development and social needs of our communities. The impact of their research should be measured by how much difference it makes to the needs of our communities, rather than by just how many international citations researchers receive in their publications.

But we are stuck in a free rider mentality...

in which higher education does not see

publication as its responsibility.

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The result is tunnel vision

which ignores all but a small segment of the publishing ecosystem..

the formal publishing that does not work very well for us...

Open access is an

answer

Text• Builds on collaboration and a

tradition of collegiality

• Depends upon sharing rather than proprietorship, access rather than protection

• Efficiencies and economies of collaborative development

• Networked rather than hierarchical structures

The ethos of OA

overcoming distribution and access barriers

and working across the whole ecosystem

Commercial publishing - journals

offers citation impact, global prestige, access,

reach...

and freedom to reuse content for ‘translation’

of research...

Text

Books

Cooperative publishing platforms

help reduce the South to North knowledge

gap

South African national open access initiative

and building the quality and accessibility of national journals...

Repositories profile the whole range of scholarship

African research centres produce research that

addresses vital development needs

How do we develop value systems, rewards

and recognition to support development

Eve GrayHonorary Research Associate

Centre for Educational TechnologyUniversity of Cape Town

http://www.gray-area.co.zahttp://www.http://www.sca2kafrica.org/

http://www.cet.uct.ac.za