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It is generally acknowledged that researchers and institutions in the Global South suffer from knowledge isolation because of poor infrastructure and lack of access to key resources, including the current literature. The remedy is therefore capacity building and the transfer of not only knowledge, but also the institutional framework of knowledge creation from the North to the South. In this context, Open Access to the scholarly literature is seen as a means of bridging the global knowledge gap. In this presentation, I argue that a key contributor to the continual knowledge divide and the invisibility of knowledge from the Global South is the persistence and dominance of Northern frameworks of research evaluation and quality metrics, coupled with outmoded national and international innovation policies based on exclusion and competitiveness. These narrow measures have tended to skew international research agenda and undermine locally relevant research. A great opportunity that Open Access provides is the means to develop alternative metrics of research uptake and impact that are more inclusive of knowledge from the South, particularly those with development outcomes. In particular, it is important to re-conceptualize and re-design the metrics of research impact to reflect new scholarly practices and the diverse means of engagement enabled by OA and the new wave of social media tools. At the same time, appropriate policies need to be developed to reward open scholarship and to encourage research sharing — issues of particular importance for ending knowledge isolation. Examples of the new kinds of “invisible college” enabled by networking tools and OA will be presented, and particular attention will be paid to innovations emanating from the periphery.
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Remapping the Global and the Local in Knowledge Production: Roles of Open Access
Leslie ChanBioline InternationalCentre for Critical Development StudiesUniversity of Toronto Scarborough
Global participation in e-research and scholarly communication: Open access strategies for African institutionsUniversity of Cape Town, Aug. 10, 2012
Key points• Open Access as an enabler • “Journal” no longer serves the needs of networked
scholarship• From Wealth of Nations to Wealth of Networks• Need to rethink measurements of “impact” and
values, especially for development• Innovations are happening in the “peripheries” but
there are gatekeepers and structural barriers• Aligning funding and reward policies with new value
frameworks
The World of Journal Publishing According to Thomson’s ISI Science Citation Index
Data from 2002http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=205
“… at a recent editorial team meeting, we discussed a research paper from a LMIC author. The science was well done and with a little editing for English, the paper was potentially publishable. But should we send it out for review? The question we were wrestling with was whether its findings were sufficiently new to make it worthy of page space in the journal. This is always a consideration for all manuscripts, since competition for space is intense and a priority is to publish interesting research that adds something new to the field, rather than too many replications of studies already done. So the initial response when deciding whether to send the paper out for peer review was: Reject. We already know this, don't we?”
“No journal can afford to devote all or even most of its precious page space to studies essentially finding again what others already found, with only the places changing. And this may be a good place to remind authors that we almost never publish prevalence studies, unless they are truly the first ever done (and sometimes not even then), since they tend to be of interest primarily in the countries within which they were conducted.”
So who decide on what is “new” and legitimate knowledge?And
Who have access to that knowledge?
“We editors seek a global status for our journals, but we shut out the experiences and practices of those living in poverty by our (unconscious) neglect. One group is advantaged, while the other is marginalised.”Richard Horton, THE
LANCET • Vol 361 • March 1, 2003
“Research or reviews that cover diseases unlikely to be encountered in the western world will not gather the citations that some editors seek.But if this commercial environment does seriously skew content away from what matters to those people the journal claims to serve, as it surely does at some journals, the culture of medicine is distorted, even harmed.”Richard Horton (2003)
“Is the scientific paper a fraud?”“I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because it misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or give rise to the work that is described in the paper. That is the question and I will say right away that my answer to it is ‘yes’. The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific though”.
Sir Peter Medawar(From a BBC talk, 1964)
http://contanatura-hemeroteca.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/medawar_paper_fraud.pdf
Commons-based peer production in the networked economy
"commons-based peer production refers to any coordinated, (chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a unified intellectual work. CBPP covers many different types of intellectual output, from software to libraries of quantitative data to human-readable documents (manuals, books, encyclopedias, reviews, blogs, periodicals, and more)”Krowne, Aaron (March 1, 2005). "The FUD based encyclopedia: Dismantling the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge sources". Free Software Magazine.
From “Big” science to Networked science
Knowledge for local problem solving
OPEN ACCESS ?
Governance of Knowledge Commons
Need for policy alignment and institutional redesign
Rethink the values and reward system
Social Accounting and Expanded Values
Broadening the definition of “success”, “impact”, “value” and “capital”
Business value monetary return, financial capital, efficiency, competiveness
Scholarly value Reputation and citation; trust; symbolic capital
Institutional value Public mission, community outreach, intellectual capital
Social value Equity, participation, diversity, social capital
Political value Evidence based policy, transparency, accountability, civic capital
Institutional Design
Sustainability as a set of institutional structures and processes that build and protect the knowledge commons (after Sumner 2005, Mook and Sumner 2010)
Conclusions• Open Access is just the substrate, but an essential
one• Metrics are driven by values, so what do we value
in higher education? – Equity, equality, diversity, inclusiveness in knowledge
creation and collaboration • Remapping the local and the global and “world
class excellence”• Seeing university “excellence” through the lens of
openness and sustainability
Thank You! [email protected]
http://www.openoasis.org
http://www.bioline.org.br
http://www.openaccessmap.org
