Esta apresentação visa a fornecer uma visão geral do estado do acesso aberto na África, considerando tanto a rota dourada quanto a verde. Explora o nível de desenvolvimento dos repositórios institucionais, bem como dos periódicos de acesso aberto no continente. Também destaca os principais desafios que os editores enfrentam na publicação de seus periódicos na África. This presentation aims to give an overview of the status of Open Access in Africa, considering both the Green and Gold routes. It explores the level of development of Institutional repositories, as well as Open Access journals on the continent. It also highlights the major challenges that editors face in publishing their journals in Africa. Esta presentación tiene como objetivo dar una visión general de la situación del Acceso Abierto en África, teniendo en cuenta tanto las rutas Verde y Dorada. Se explora el nivel de desarrollo de los repositorios institucionales, así como las revistas de Acceso Abierto en el continente. También se destacan los principales desafíos que enfrentan los editores para la publicación de sus revistas en África.

1. Open Access Journals in Africa
SciELO 15 years celebration, Sao Paolo
Susan Veldsman
Director: Scholarly Publishing Unit
2013
Applying scientific thinking
in the service of society

2. Generic corporate slides to be used for content and in conjunction with
dividers and fillers

3. What does it mean for African research (IR’s) to be
visible and accessible?
• Quality
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Infrastructural requirements e.g servers, bandwidth,
software
• Building up expertise and capacity
• Digitization
• OA advocacy

4. Low visibility, accessibility and indexability
of African scholarly research
• Large proportion of African research published in
local journals, many of which are non-WoS – journals
from Africa & Middle East comprise 1% of WoS
journals
• ASSAf 2006 report on Scholarly Publishing revealed
that papers published in 60 SA journals did not
receive a single citation in any of 9 000 WoS journals
over a 15-yr period
• Local, high-quality journals not necessarily available
to the rest of the world
• Global recognition—research must be accessible to
global world. SA has only 70 journals on WoS system
• Promotion of local knowledge very important

5. Challenges of journals in South Africa
2006 – Report of a Strategic Approach to Research publishing in
South Africa
Research publishing in South Africa is undertaken in good
faith and with much personal effort and commitment by
editors and their editorial boards, but is very fragile in
that:



infrequent, often irregular publication of thin issues is
generally used to deal with a low supply of good
papers
a majority of the journals play only a tiny role in the
world research publishing system,
the ―mixed bag‖ of quality and reputation means that
the whole group is ―tainted‖ in the eyes of key
stakeholders.

6. Invitation to Participate in Scholarly Publishing
in Africa Survey : Clobridge Consulting
With all of the changes in scholarly communication and ICTs over the
past few years, we are interested in learning more about the current
state of scholarly publishing throughout Africa. Clobridge Consulting
is working in partnership with African Journals Online to conduct a
research study to collect, analyze, and disseminate knowledge in this
arena – in order to share best practices, identify emerging trends,
and gain insights from editors about their successes and concerns.
While a good deal of research has been conducted over the past
few years regarding global trends in the shift from print to digital,
changing dissemination and business models, and uptake in
technology to support publishing, no research has focused
exclusively on these issues within Africa.
Funded by : Carnegie Corporation

7. Challenges of journals in Africa (2)
•
Available expertise
–
Editors, reviewers, layout, design, copy editing
•
Editorial integrity
–
Peer Review of articles, low of knowledge in editorial best
practices
•
Infrastructure
–
Connectivity, servers, software
•
Financial sustainability
–
Mainly paper based journals, heavily dependant on
subscriptions;
•
Language
–
English, Afrikaans, Indigenous languages, French
•
Intellectual property rights—Creative Commons
•
Lack of training

8. Article Processing Charges
•
World Bank classification
–
Africa- low per capita income—exemptions for most
authors in Africa except SA
–
South Africa—medium per capita income country
•
How does it get paid?
–
University of Stellenbosch- APC fund
–
Pay these fees from their own research grants or, if
available, from traditional central publication support
funds.
•
What does it cost?
–
APC‘s when charged by local OA journals vary between
R500-R1500.
–
This compares well with international APCs which vary
between $1 350 and $5 000

9. Article Processing Charges (2)
What is our concern?
•
–
–
–
–
–
It is clear that APCs could eventually replace
subscriptions in a systemic commercial ‗Gold
Route‘ publishing system
that would still be hyper-inflationary,
with new versions of ‗bundled institutional
membership‘ fees,
barriers to publishing opportunities for resourcepoor sectors or countries,
and the same hallmarks of monopolistic
practice as characterised the previous system,
will prevail

11. Commercial OA journal publisher—25 titles

12. +-130 Open Access
+ article/processing fees
+ subscription fees

13. DST funded- subtle
approach to OA

14. www.scie

15. SciELO South Africa, Number of access and downloads per months for years 2011
and 2012
2012: 3.07 millions, 256 th per month, 8.5 th per day, 615 per document

17. 2010
Source of Citation
SA SciELO
LAC SciELO
Total citations
% of LAC
% of auto citations
2011
2012
Auto
Auto
Auto
Citations
Citations
Citations
Citations
Citations
63
56
159
146
132
115
1
3
21
64
56
162
146
153
115
2%
2%
14%
88%
90%
75%
Citations
SciELO South Africa, 2012. Evolution of citations received within SciELO
Network by journals with three years collection.

18. Benefits for SA to participate in the SciELO
network

Searchable through the SciELO network portal

Exchange metadata with other international databases

Eligible for participation in special integration projects like Web of
Knowledge

Certified collections are rated higher than collections-under-
development

Signing a Memorandum of Agreement with DHET to do quality peer
review of ALL South African journals

Change in the DHET policy for the automatic accreditation of SA journals

Improved accreditation policy towards the publishing of books and
conference proceedings

19. Challenges within the African Science
System
Science system is less developed
Not all the countries has a funding system
Technical change in Africa slow and low
HEI in Africa should be in the forefront of
ensuring Africa‘s participation in ICT and
knowledge production
• Immense potential in Open source software
and Open Access
•
•
•
•

20. Roleplayers
•
•
•
•
•
•
Network of African Science Academies
(NASAC)
African Academy of Sciences
ICSU-regional office for Africa
INASP and eIFL
Library professionals
Publishers
Just to name a few!

21. What is lacking??
•
Coordination between multitude of small scale, often
very energetic and creative pilot initiatives pockets of
innovation
•
This leads to underfunding as economies of scale is not
reached
•
Good news is….. Emergence of continent-wide
strategies ; time to harvest and connect between
initiatives
Science academies can undertake
this initiative

22. The Case for Science Academies
•
•
•
•
Unique competitive advantage in influencing policies
Great convening power—bringing together scientists
and policy makers
Constitute the brain thrust of a nation –use
membership to conduct evidence base studies
(independent and objective)
African Union (Consolidated Plan of Action) under
review
• Capacity building
• Knowledge production
• Technological innovation

23. Thank you
susan@assaf.org.za
Website: www.assaf.org.za
23