Matt Cockerill, Managing Director, BioMed Central speaks at Open Access Africa 2010

1. Open Access and the Developing World
Matthew Cockerill
Managing Director, BioMed Central Ltd

3. The old world of access to
knowledge

4. The new world of access to
knowledge

5. The internet has the potential to
radically expand access to
knowledge

6. Digital divide or digital bridge?

7. African internet connectivity is
improving dramatically

8. Cellphones

9. Source: African Mobile Factbook 2008
International Telecommunications
Union report (2009)
“The increase in the number of mobile
cellular subscriptions over the last five
years has defied all predictions and
Africa remains the region with the
highest mobile growth rate”
Although number of Internet users has
also grown faster than in other regions:
“Africa’s ICT penetration levels in 2009
are still far behind the rest of the world
and very few African countries reach
ICT levels comparable to global
averages”
Growth of mobile phones in
Africa

10. Mobile phone networks are already
aiding scientific data gathering

11. As connectivity improves, other
access barriers become significant

12. Open access journals do away with
access barriers

13. About BioMed Central
 Largest publisher of peer-reviewed open access
journals
 Launched first open access journal in 2000
 Became part of Springer in 2008
 Now publishes 207 open access journals
 >80,000 peer-reviewed OA articles published
 All research articles published under Creative
Commons license
 Costs covered by article processing charge (APC)

14. BioMed Central and Africa

15. ComputerAid

16. BMC/Nature 10K fun run in
support of ComputerAid

17. OA Waiver Fund

18. All African countries receive
automatic fee waiver, except:
 Libya
 Namibia
 Nigeria
 South Africa
Algeria
Botswana
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon

19. Growth in manuscript submissions
from Africa to BioMed Central

20. Manuscript submissions from
Africa as fraction of total

21. Top 10 journals for publications
from Africa in last 12 months

22. How can increased access to
knowledge via Open Access help
Africa?

23. UN Millenium Development
Goals
 Reduce child mortality,improve maternal
health
 Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other
diseases
 Ensure environmental sustainability
 Develop a global partnership for
development

24. Who needs access to the results
of research?
Public
Professionals
Researchers

25. Research on global health issues
has expanded greatly
 Developing world health issues are
finally attracting substantial research
spending
 Private philanthropic initiatives have
played an important role

26. Why do research if it is not
accessible where it is most relevant?

27.  Wellcome Trust
 Medical Research Council
 US National Institutes of Health
 Howard Hughes Medical Institute
 European Research Council
 EC Seventh Framework Program
Many research funders are now
requiring open access

28.  Harvard University
(and other members of Compact
for Open Access Publishing Equity)
 More than 100 mandatory
institution-wide open access
policies world-wide
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
 But still very few in Africa…
Many universities are now
requiring open access

29. Open Access in practice

30. Open Access journals

31. What is open access publishing?
 Traditional journals
– take ownership of the research
– provide access to subscribers only
 Open access journals
– have no subscription barriers
– take advantage of the economics of the
internet to allow universal access
– research is openly licensed to allow reuse

32. Who pays?
 Open access journals do have costs
 Publication fee is a very small fraction
of the cost of doing research
 Most open access publishers, including
BioMed Central, give waivers to
developing countries
 In other cases, open access journals
have central support, so no charges for
authors or readers

33. Open Access publishing,
then and now…
20102000
And many more…

34. African Journals Online

35. A new industry association

36. Goals of OASPA
 Represents Open Access publishers
 Agree common definition of Open Access
 Establish and enforce good standards of
editorial and business practices amongst
members
 Identify guidelines and best practices for
publishers and institutions in managing
payment of publication fees

37. Malaria Journal - an open access
journal case study

38. Malaria Journal homepage

39. Annual growth in submissions to
Malaria Journal

40. Top 20 African countries publishing
in Malaria Journal (no. or articles)

41. Impact Factor trend

42. A highly accessed Malaria Journal article
15,000+
downloads
31 citations

43. Parasite to Prevention - Malaria
Journal’s scientific conference
Inaugural conference
October 2010,
Edinburgh, Scotland
Full bursaries for
participants from low-
income countries,
supported by Gates
Foundation
Next conference 2012,
probably in Africa

44. Other high profile open access journals
relevant to tropical diseases

45. Gateways

46. The latest open access research on
global health issues

47. The benefits of open access for the
developing world

48. Zambia

49. Nigeria

50. The Gambia

51. Open Access repositories

52. Open Access repositories
 Allow archiving of articles published
both in traditional journals and open
access journals
 Traditional publishers typically only
allow author version to be archived
 Many require a 6 or 12 month embargo
period
 Open access articles can be deposited
and made immediately available

53. Open Repository
 Hosted digital repository service,
operated by BioMed Central
 Built on the DSpace open-source platform
 Dramatically reduces time and costs
involved in setting up, maintaining and
developing a repository
 Hosting in UK ensures maximum
international exposure

54. Open Repository

55. MSF 1

56. MSF 2

57. How can OA publishers work
with Institutional Repositories?
 Many institutions now have OA
repositories in place
 Populating the repositories is often a
challenge
 Open Access journals provide a stream of
immediately available OA content for the
repository
 BioMed Central is automating this via
feeds using the SWORD protocol

58. Connecting open access journals
and open access repositories

59. InstitutionalInstitutional
RepositoryRepository
(DSpace/Eprints(DSpace/Eprints
etc.etc.))
PublisherPublisher
Manuscript
Author
final
version
1
2
Manual deposit to IR

60. InstitutionalInstitutional
RepositoryRepository
(DSpace/Eprints(DSpace/Eprints
etc.etc.))
Manuscript
SWORD
Import
SWORD
Export
Published
articles
from
institution’s
authors
Published
article
Automated deposit to IR via SWORD

61. University of Stellenbosch

62. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the
conference!