Carlos Rossel |
“The
Bank is committed to sharing our data, knowledge and analysis with others in
the search for development solutions. By making Bank research and knowledge
products published by the Bank available libre OA, third parties are free to use, reuse, and build
upon the Bank’s work in ways that can lead to innovative solutions to local
development problems.”
When
Jim Yong Kim takes office
as the new president of the World Bank on 1st July, he will be the
first development professional to head the Bank. That is new. But it is not all
that is new at the World Bank. The new president will inherit an organisation
that has undergone a lot of navel gazing over the past few years. Its
conclusion: the Bank needs to rethink the way it operates.
The
outgoing president of the Bank Robert Zoellick gave some
insight into the Bank’s internal deliberations in a speech at Georgetown
University in September 2010. Significantly, Zoellick acknowledged that pushing
top-down economic solutions that were baked in the West on developing countries can no longer
be viewed as adequate.
In
his speech
— entitled “Democratising Development Economics” — Zoellick pointed out that
“modern portfolio theories” of economics have too often failed to deliver on
their claims. The hubris behind such claims, he added, “turned to humility in
the 2007 sub-prime crisis that led to the global economic crisis.”
To
underline his point, Zoellick said, “A ccording to its risk model, one investment bank suffered a loss on
several consecutive days that should only have occurred once in 14 life-spans
of our universe.”
The
discrediting of established thinking by the global crisis, said Zoellick,
has obvious implications for development economics. In fact, he added, even
before the crisis “there was a questioning of prevailing paradigms and a sense
that development economics needed rethinking. The crisis has only made that
more compelling.”
What
has become apparent, Zoellick said, is that development economics needs, “to
reach out to better encompass the experiences of successful emerging economies
not with ordered templates or with blueprints, not with prescriptions for
prescriptees, but inquiringly, cooperatively, openly.”
Modernisation Agenda
The
outcome of the Bank’s deliberations was the launch in 2010 of its Modernisation
Agenda
— a move intended to ensure that the organisation was “strategically focused,
financially stronger, and more responsive, transparent, and accountable.”
The
Modernisation Agenda has a number of important implications for the Bank. From
the specific perspective of the OA movement, it has seen the formulation of an Open Development Agenda, Phase I of
which is focussed on providing “openness and transparency in development, from
tools and knowledge resources to Bank-wide initiatives.”
The
first step was taken in April 2010, when the Bank announced its Open Data
Initiative.
This saw more than 7,000 development indicators — along with
more than 60 other datasets — made freely available on its web site; and the
amount of data available continues to grow.
Three months later, in July 2010, the
Bank launched its Access to
Information Policy
— with the aim of transforming the way in which it makes its data available to
the public. As part of this initiative, 17,000 historical documents were
released from the Bank’s archives.
More
recently — on April 10th this year — the Bank announced its plans to
introduce an Open Access
Policy.
To come into effect the day the new president takes office, the OA policy will
mandate that the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products are deposited
in a newly-created institutional repository called the Open Knowledge
Repository (OKR), to be made freely accessible on the Internet. The OKR is already
live, and contains
a great deal of data.
In
addition, much of the Bank’s information will be released under the most
liberal Creative
Commons
licence, allowing anyone to reuse it for their own purposes, even commercially.
The Bank is the first major international organisation to take this step.
Larger context
But what
is striking about the Bank's Modernisation Agenda from the perspective of the OA movement is
that it puts OA in a much broader context than OA advocates are accustomed to think
of it — since the Bank is going some way beyond simply making its knowledge more
accessible.
Zoellick
outlined this broader context last week, at the beginning of the 2012 World Bank-IMF Spring Meeting. Explaining
that the Bank is committed to greater openness in a number of ways, he said, “We
are continually striving to be more open about what we know (data, tools, and development knowledge), open about what we do (operations,
projects, finances and commitments), and open
in the way we work (Open Aid
Partnership,
knowledge platforms).”
As such, the Modernisation Agenda couples issues of transparency,
accountability, and freedom of information, with concepts of open content, bottom-up
collaborative working, crowdsourcing, and even open government.
Consider,
for instance, the six “knowledge platforms” the Bank is creating. This includes the Open
Development Technology Alliance, a knowledge platform on ICT that
seeks to use external expertise and citizen feedback to improve public service
delivery.
In
other words, the Bank is treating OA as more than just a tool to enable faster
and more effective knowledge transfer and exchange, but a component part of a platform intended
to create democratic, bottom-up, multi-pronged solutions to the many challenges
confronting not just the developing world,
but mankind at large — e.g. climate change.
The
Modernisation Agenda is also an acknowledgement that both knowledge creation
and economic power are beginning to shift, and to disperse. As Zoellick put it
in 2010, “The flow of knowledge is no longer North to South, West to East, rich
to poor.”
It is no longer a one-way process, but one that moves in both directions. The Bank also views it as a democratisation — for it implies a process in which knowledge and creativity
move seamlessly between the developed world and the developing world, and also between
organisations and individuals. And it does this in a more decentralised manner.
For
OA advocates the take-away point is that while OA may be an important objective
in itself, it should now also be viewed as part of a larger whole. As Zoellick
put it at Georgetown University, “We need to democratise and demystify
development economics, recognising that we do not have a monopoly on the
answers. We need to throw open the doors, recognising that others can find and
create their own solutions. And this open research revolution is underway. We
need to recognise that development knowledge is no longer the sole province of
the researcher, the scholar, or the ivory tower.”
Viewed in this context, and in the context of the developing world, calls
for public access to research, for open science, and even for citizen science,
take on a new meaning, a new purpose, and a new urgency.
Most important legacy
What impact the Bank’s new approach will have on the organisation itself, whether its Modernisation Agenda will prove effective, and whether this more democratic model will enable solutions to the many problems facing humankind to be developed more rapidly remains unknown.
Undoubtedly,
changing the culture of a large institution like the World Bank will prove a formidable
task. Indeed, the Bank may not entirely understand all the implications of the journey
it has embarked on, and many employees of the Bank are doubtless oblivious of
the larger picture.
Certainly
if it is to live up to its commitment, the Bank will need to reinvent its modus operandi — and in a way that most
global institutions would find far too threatening. Indeed, one might venture
to suggest that the very notion of decentralisation is oxymoronic in the
context of a large international organisation like the World Bank.
In
short, only time will tell how successful the Bank will prove in its aim of being
more open, more transparent, and more democratic, and the extent to which its
OA policy will help it achieve this goal. But all credit to the Bank for
trying.
Zoellick
clearly believes that, if it succeeds, the Bank’s Modernisation Agenda will turn
out to have been an historic moment for the Bank.
Speaking last week, Zoellick
said, “Our modernisation agenda is driven by our focus on clients, listening to
their priorities, as opposed to the old top-down approach. So our initiatives
for open information, open data, and open access to knowledge may turn out to
be the most important legacy of the past five years. These steps are key to
democratizing development, and these steps lay the foundation for expanding
social accountability, fighting corruption, and building better governance.”
In
short, Zoellick has bequeathed to his successor not just a new agenda, but a
totally new operational model. Whether the new approach succeeds now doubtless depends on Jim Yong Kim — which is an ironic thought
given the Bank’s new commitment to a bottom-up approach. The task for the new
president will be to square that circle!
In
the meantime, there remains no shortage of critics of
the Bank; and no shortage of people keen to offer advice to its new
president.
For
some insight into the part of the Modernisation Agenda that most directly
concerns the OA movement, I publish below an interview with the Bank’s
publisher, Carlos Rossel.
The interview begins ...
RP:
As I understand it, the goal of the World Bank is to help reduce poverty and
support development. To that end, it provides loans to developing countries for
capital programs. But can you clarify for me how the Bank is funded, and the
extent to which that funding comes from the public purse?
CR: The terms World Bank, or Bank, refer to two
institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the
International Development Association (IDA); IBRD,
which works with middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries, finances its
activities primarily by issuing AAA-rated bonds to
institutional and retail investors in global capital markets.
IDA, which
focuses primarily on the world’s poorest countries by providing credits and
grants, is funded largely by contributions from the governments of its higher
income member countries.
The Guide to
the World Bank,
available for free download on the Open Knowledge Repository, provides an
accessible and straightforward overview of the Bank Group's history,
organization, mission, and work.
RP:
What role does the Bank’s publishing programme play in fulfilling its mission?
CR: The Office of the
Publisher
works with programs across the institution to capture, edit, produce, and
disseminate the Bank’s publications as broadly as possible through free
channels that include the Open Knowledge
Repository,
Google Books, Scribd, Issuu, and Facebook, as print
publications, via the subscription-based World Bank eLibrary, and as
eBooks via the Kindle, Nook, and Apple
devices, and through various content aggregators.
RP:
The recent announcement that the Bank is introducing an OA policy is the latest
stage in what the Bank calls its Open Development Agenda. Presumably, this was
the result of a top-down decision originating from the President of the World
Bank Group Robert Zoellick. But can you say why the Bank took the decision to
become more open?
CR: As World Bank
Group President Robert B. Zoellick said in the press release announcing the
Open Access policy “Knowledge is power. Making our knowledge widely and readily
available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest
problems. Our new Open Access policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank
that is opening up more and more.”
Response to criticism?
RP:
The Bank has been criticised for its information policy in the past. Is its new
commitment to openness partly a response to that criticism?
CR: It may have
played a part, but my view is that advances in online and mobile communications
have created opportunities for making the Bank more open and accessible, for
disseminating and sharing our knowledge more broadly, and for communicating directly
with our stakeholders, and the Bank is simply seizing those opportunities.
RP:
The Bank’s previous open initiatives were the Open Data Initiative and the
Access to Information Policy. Some would view the Open Data and Open Access
initiatives as attempts to create a research environment in which solutions are
developed more quickly. By contrast, the Access to Information Policy seems
more focussed on freedom of information (FoI) and
transparency issues. Does the Bank believe that creating a more open research
environment has much in common with FoI and transparency? If so, how would you characterise
their common goals and philosophy?
CR: This question
is outside my area of expertise so I am not really qualified to respond.
RP:
As we noted, the Bank’s objective is to aid developing countries. To what
extent do you see greater openness, particularly OA to research, as a
development issue, and why?
CR: The Bank is
committed to sharing our data, knowledge and analysis with others in the search
for development solutions. By making Bank research and knowledge products published
by the Bank available libre OA, third
parties are free to use, reuse, and build upon the Bank’s work in ways that can
lead to innovative solutions to local development problems.
RP:
The Bank’s OA policy is complicated. Doubtless this is because the Bank is both
a knowledge producer and a publisher. Can you say what percentage of its
knowledge output the Bank publishes itself, and what percentage is published by
external publishers?
CR: Yes, but only
anecdotally as we do not have accurate statistics. The Bank publishes a large
majority of its knowledge products, both formally and as grey literature. Bank
research that is published by third parties, for example research articles
published in non-Bank journals, is first published by the Bank as working
papers. These working papers are available freely and, with the new policy, are
published under the CC BY licence.
Three broad categories
RP:
I assume the Bank also publishes third-party content. If so, what percentage of
its publishing output is third party content?
CR: The Bank’s
publications, research papers, and other knowledge products often include
contributions from authors that are not Bank staff. For example, many of our books
are edited volumes with chapters authored or co-authored by individuals who are
not Bank staff. We do not have exact numbers of how much third party content is
published by the Bank.
RP:
Can you give me a (rough) percentage breakdown of the Bank’s output in terms of
the different types of knowledge it produces — books, data, economic reports,
journal articles etc.? And can you put unit numbers on these different outputs?
CR: The Bank
classifies its core knowledge into three broad
categories: knowledge for external clients, knowledge as a public good, and knowledge
for internal use. Knowledge for external clients is usually for a specific
client country, although often it will have application in other countries, and
includes analytical work, technical assistance and training. Knowledge as a
public good is meant for a global audience, for example the World
Development Report
and other publications.
RP:
Would it be accurate to say that only a small percentage of the Bank’s
knowledge output is peer-reviewed? How much is peer-reviewed?
CR: No, that
would not be accurate. All Bank research is peer reviewed. Other knowledge
products that are not research per se are subject to varying degrees of review,
which may include stakeholder consultations, internal and external review,
review by senior management, and review by the Board of Executive Directors. Some
books are published in agile, fast-to-market, more informal series that have
less stringent review.
Impact on revenues
RP:
Since the Bank is a publisher, I assume its OA and Open Data initiatives will
have an impact on its revenues. Can you say how much the Bank was earning from
its publishing operations prior to the introduction of the Open Data
Initiative, how much this has fallen as a consequence of that initiative, and
how much the Bank expects it to fall in total once the full impact of its OA policy
has been felt?
CR: Revenues have
fallen significantly and they will continue to fall. However, we are committed
to OA publishing. When the decisions on Open Data and Open Access were made the
focus was not on lost revenues but on the cost of not opening our data or
adopting an OA publishing model, for our clients and for development.
To
the extent that we continue to disseminate through commercial channels it is to
take advantage of the added dissemination via those channels and to make the
content available to customers where and how they want to access it. So, for
example, for some customers the most convenient way to access our content may
be to purchase it as an eBook from Amazon and we should facilitate that
acquisition.
RP:
In deciding to adopt greater openness how did the Bank weigh the inevitable
loss of revenue it will experience against the benefits that this openness is
expected to provide? In other words, how did it balance the benefits of becoming
more open against the need for its publishing operations to remain financially
viable (assuming they are)?
CR: As noted
above, we focused on the cost of not being open rather than the loss of
revenues,
RP:
Does the Bank expect to replace its lost revenue with new revenue-generating
initiatives, or will it need to make savings. If the latter, how will it make
those savings?
CR: Yes, all of
the above, and then some. The fact is that free and open is not free. Some of
our budget support will come from charges to our internal author clients
(internal Gold OA if you will). Savings are realized through reduced
warehousing, fulfilment, and shipping costs, and through a more agile,
fast-to-market e-first workflow we are implementing.
Value-added products
RP:
I note that the Bank is retaining a subscription model for its eLibrary. Is
that because it could not afford the loss of revenue that abandoning it would entail,
or because it views the eLibrary as a value-added product? If the latter, what
added value does the eLibrary provide that the OKR will not?
CR: The eLibrary
is a value-added product which is very reasonably priced, and for which we
offer free or deeply discounted subscriptions to institutions in developing
countries.
In
the context of our program’s budget, the revenues are not insignificant, but
that is not the only consideration. I believe that we need to remain engaged
with that segment of the publishing industry, as that is where much of the
innovation in digital publishing takes place.
It
is also important so that we retain an entrepreneurial edge and our business
acumen and so that we continue to provide the Bank an agile, efficient,
adaptable, and cost effective publishing program.
A
new and enhanced version of eLibrary will be launched later this year that will
offer mobile access, allowing even more flexibility for sharing, using, and
re-using the Bank’s knowledge. The new eLibrary will be XML based and will
allow users to access books and reports at a more granular level — such as by
chapter, table, or figure.
Among
other features, users will be able to build custom ebooks from eLibrary content
that can be used as course packs for classroom use, create alerts, bookmark
content, and enjoy other value-added functionality.
Mandate
RP:
The heart of the Bank’s OA policy is a Green OA mandate. I believe
the Bank’s OA policy also applies to grantees. What sort of funding (and how
much) does it provide to whom and for what? And in way will the OA policy
impact on those who receive grants from the Bank?
CR: The Bank does
not provide research grants. We included that provision in the policy so that
it is covered if there is some ad hoc funding of outside research.
RP:
Unlike the NIH and Wellcome mandates, the Bank’s OA policy does not specify an
embargo period (other than to say “ideally no more than 18 months”, which is
the embargo period for its own two journals). Is this because the Bank, as a
publisher itself, understands the anxieties that publishers have about
embargos, or for some other reason?
CR: Although I
appreciate the perspective of commercial publishers, the major consideration
for now is to not complicate our researchers’ ability to publish in external
journals, which we believe is a vital channel for our research.
However,
I do expect that embargo periods will go down over time and we will revisit
this issue in the future.
RP:
So far as I am aware, the Bank never uses the word “mandate” in its descriptions
of, and documentation about, its OA policy. Is there a particular reason for
that, or did it simply use the same wording as the NIH?
CR: I do not
recall that this was deliberate. We use the word “requires” which in this
context I take to be synonymous with “mandate.”
RP:
The Bank is not the first institution to introduce a mandate. What did it learn
from the experience of those who have introduced mandates before it, and how did
that inform the way the Bank put its own OA policy together?
CR: In 2010 we
conducted a strategic review of the publishing program with the objective of
implementing a cutting-edge publishing program that fully embraces free and
open publishing. We engaged Key
Perspectives,
a UK consultancy to the publishing industry, to undertake the review.
Their
report recommended adoption of an OA policy, the use of CC licensing, and the
development of a repository. In addition, in drafting the OA policy we did look
at the policies of other institutions, all of which informed our policy.
Creative Commons
RP:
One aspect of the Bank’s OA policy that is pioneering is its adoption of
Creative Commons licensing. How did the bank arrive at the decision to take
this step, what were the issues it considered in doing so, and what are the
risks as you see them?
CR: It was one of
the recommendations coming out of the strategic review. The Bank had already
opened its data and made it available without restrictions and had implemented
the Access to Information policy. Adopting CC licensing was a logical next step
in the Open Agenda.
RP:
One thing we have learned about OA mandates over the past few years is that compliance
is often pretty low. I believe the Wellcome Trust recently indicated that it is still
only achieving a 55% compliance rate for its mandate some six years after it
was introduced. Do you anticipate compliance being a problem for the Bank? What
systems is it putting in place to maximise compliance?
CR: A high
compliance rate with the policy is one of our top priorities and we are making
every effort to support Bank researchers to comply with the policy.
As
I noted, the Bank publishes the majority of Bank-authored research and
knowledge products (as books, reports, and working papers). We are confident
that we will achieve high compliance with the policy.
RP:
The Bank’s policy nevertheless allows authors to ask for a waiver (or
“exception” as it calls it). The Harvard OA policy allows this
too. As I understand it, Harvard has found that some publishers routinely insist
that authors ask for a waiver if they want to publish with them. Do you
envisage this being a problem for the Bank?
CR: We are proactively
working with publishers to conclude institutional agreements to comply with the
policy.
In
the case of journal articles, concluding such agreements will make the process
smoother, and we expect that our authors and the journal publishers will
appreciate a streamlined licensing process. We have started discussions about these
agreements with a number of publishers and will reach out to others over the
next few months.
RP:
How often does the Bank anticipate that it will grant an exception, and will it
grant it automatically?
CR: I do not
anticipate that there will be a large number of requests for exceptions, but
time will tell. The cases will be reviewed and decided individually on the
merits of the request.
RP:
The Bank’s Administrative
Manual states that all rights in any work produced by
Bank employees belong to the Bank. It also states that the rights in external
research funded by the Bank belong to the Bank. It later says that it “strongly
encourages” authors to retain the Bank’s ownership. I am not clear how an
employee could give away copyright in a work in which he or she had no rights.
Can you clarify this?
CR: Strictly
speaking, an employee cannot give away copyright in a Bank work unless the Bank
releases the copyright to the employee. In exceptional cases the Bank may
choose to release the copyright to the author if circumstances make that
practical.
Our
objective is to provide the authors with the knowledge and tools that allow
them to publish externally in a manner that complies with Bank policy.
Gold OA
RP:
I could find only an oblique reference to Gold OA in the Bank’s
documentation about its OA policy. Many research institutions are creating Gold OA funds, and
encouraging researchers to pay to publish. Will the Bank be doing either or
both of these things?
CR: No, the Bank
will not encourage researchers to pay to publish and we are not creating Gold
OA funds.
RP:
Will the Bank be offering a pay-to-publish option itself? If so, how will this
operate, and what APC will it charge?
CR: We will not
offer a pay-to-publish option.
RP:
What in your view are the pros and cons of Gold OA? Do you think it offers a
viable model for the future? Do you expect it to become the primary business
model for OA publishing?
CR: Academic/STM
publishing is crucial to scholarly communication and publishers play a vital
role and provide an invaluable service. This service has a cost and that cost
has to be borne. Gold OA has a role and I expect funding agencies will support
Gold OA.
RP:
What advice would you give to other international organisations like the World
Bank who might be considering embracing OA?
CR: Well, I don’t
offer advice to my peers at other international organizations. If asked, I
suggest that they get ahead of the issue and drive the move to OA within their
organizations.
RP:
Can we expect to see the IMF follow suit?
CR: I wouldn’t
venture a guess at whether or not the IMF will adopt OA.
RP:
What advice would you give to those scholarly publishers who are still resisting
the OA tide?
CR: We are an
institutional, mission-driven publisher, working within the context of our
organization and facing a unique set of opportunities and constraints.
Scholarly publishers operate in their own contexts and face their own
opportunities and constraints. I would not venture to provide advice since I am
not familiar with their unique circumstances.
Next Steps
RP:
What is the next step in the Bank’s Open Development Agenda, and what do you
see as the end point?
CR: The Bank will
continue to add more data to the Open data portal, release new research and
knowledge products in the OKR, and additional documents under its Access to
Information Policy.
In
addition new products and applications are being launched including, for
example, the Mapping for Results that maps
30,000+ project locations for 1,600 active Bank projects or the Climate Change
Knowledge Portal
a hub for climate information.
We
will keep tracking aid flows to present a
more complete picture of what money is being committed to development and where
it is being spent.
We
will partner with others to encourage greater openness in development projects,
aid, and in government. The Open Aid
Partnership,
for example, is seeking to increase transparency through open data on aid flows
and public service delivery. Malawi piloted this approach and mapped aid from
27 donors.
Building
on its role as a global connector, the Bank is investing in six new Knowledge
Platforms to collaborate on solving thorny development problems. For example,
the Open Development Technology Alliance, a knowledge
platform on ICT, seeks to use external expertise and citizen feedback to
improve public service delivery.
Finally,
the Bank is helping signatories of the Open Government Partnership achieve
greater standards of transparency and participation through the mapping of
public spending.
It
is also helping governments implement Access to Information legislation. We
have supported the Government of Kenya in launching the first Open Data
Initiative in Africa, which made several large data sets, including the
national census, available to the public.
RP:
Thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
1 comment:
Great interview, Richard. Thanks for continuing to produce these and make them available. It would be very interesting to see if you could get somebody from the IMF to speak about their data and why they haven't followed suit.
Post a Comment