I realise that individual articles tend to get Twittered and bookmarks shared these days, but I want to highlight one paper that I think will be of interest to this list. It's about the development of scholarly communication and publishing in Africa, but you only have to read the abstract to realise that its lessons are wider than that. At a time when economics and politics are changing education and research globally there are important lessons for all those who seek wider access to science and research information.
Eve Gray, Access to Africa’s knowledge: Publishing development research and measuring value
The African Journal of Information and Communication (10), (2010)
http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/AJIC10-Gray.pdf
Gray starts at the July 2009 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education and reports the presentation of the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade Nzimande: "What was interesting is that he cast this statement, not in the way that this problem is most often addressed, as one of access to world knowledge by African researchers, but as a failure in the dissemination of and access to African research in Africa and in the world". I wonder where else that might apply?
The UNESCO conference, Gray says, "identified the tension between pressure for research to be commercialised and a countervailing pressure to ensure that research contributes to the public good, as a critical problem facing research development and dissemination. This is a tension, they argued, that is likely to be aggravated by the economic crisis, which could generate the potential for reduction in government support for research, at the same time as there are increased social needs arising from the impact of the recession. In these circumstances, the critically important public good role of higher education, particularly in developing countries, risks being pushed aside by ‘the rush for income and prestige’, potentially leading to even greater inequalities in the global knowledge divide (Altbach, Reisberg & Rumley, 2009)."
Of course, many open access policies, particularly funder policies, are predicated on the 'public good'. These perspectives should help frame our OA debates. Progress has been made but the stakes are getting higher, for all of us.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
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Received on Wed Jun 16 2010 - 15:35:52 BST