This document discusses how open access can strategically benefit African universities. It notes that currently, Africa is viewed primarily as a consumer rather than producer of knowledge, undermining partnerships and indigenous knowledge. Open access is presented as an answer by overcoming barriers to distribution and access, and working across the entire publishing ecosystem including journals, books, cooperative platforms, repositories, and African research centers. The key question is how to build a scholarly communication policy that addresses the whole ecosystem and allows Africa to both produce and share knowledge.

1. How Open Access can
strategically benefit
African Universities
Paper presented at the Biomed Central
Open Access in Africa Conference
Kenyatta University, Nairobi
10-11 November 2010

2. How Open Access can
strategically benefit
African Universities
Eve Gray
Centre for Educational
Technology
University of Cape
Town

3. The view of a publisher

4. ... from Africa...

5. Some rights reserved by spinning jenny

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. Is the problem what is being
produced, or what is being
measured?

11. We measure impact factors
and citations in a highly
competitive and exclusionary
system

12. ..and pay less attention to
the publications that
emerge from development-
focused research

14. It is not that our policy-
makers do not see the
problem...

15. 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.

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

18. in which higher
education does not see
publication as its
responsibility.

19. The result is tunnel
vision

20. http://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/ CC attribution licence

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

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

24. Open
access is an
answer

25. 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

26. overcoming distribution
and access barriers

28. and working across
the whole ecosystem

29. Commercial publishing -
journals

30. offers citation impact,
global prestige, access,
reach...

31. and freedom to reuse
content for ‘translation’
of research...

32. Text
Books

33. Cooperative publishing
platforms

34. help reduce the South
to North knowledge
gap

35. South African national open
access initiative

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

37. Repositories profile the whole
range of scholarship

38. African research centres
produce research that
addresses vital
development needs

40. and release their
communications for
open access.

41. The question is how to build a
scholarly communication policy
environment that addresses
the whole ecosystem.

43. Eve Gray
Honorary Research Associate
Centre for Educational Technology
University of Cape Town
http://www.gray-area.co.za
http://www.http://www.sca2kafrica.org/
http://www.cet.uct.ac.za