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| Michelle Willmers |
A former journal publishing manager, Michelle Willmers was drawn to the Open Access movement after witnessing international publishers sweep into South Africa and acquire local journals. They then locked these journals behind paywalls and sought to sell them to local academic institutions at prices most simply could not afford.
For the South
African academic community this was a case of bad to worse: Historically South
African research has not been published over much in international journals. As
such, it has tended to be invisible to the global research community. Now it
was in danger of becoming invisible to local researchers as well.
Explaining her
journey to OA Willmers says, “It was perhaps less of a case of becoming an OA
advocate than having a deep realisation that the local scholarly communication
paradigm was broken. The conversation around how to first acknowledge and then
address this led in the open access direction.”
It was this same broken
local context that led to the creation (in 1997) of the South Africa-based
service African Journals Online (AJOL) — which Dominique Babini referred to in an earlier Q&A in this series. A local web portal that
enables African journals to make their content available online (and so visible
on a global basis without the need to cede ownership to international
publishers), AJOL currently hosts content from 462 African journals, 150 of which
are OA.
And it is this local
context that saw the recent launch of SciELO-SA, a South African version of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), the online open-access publishing
platform pioneered in Brazil. SciELO-SA was launched with the
content of 26 “free to access and free to publish” South African journals, and
it is expected that the service will eventually include around 180 of the
country’s 300 journals.
** Please scroll through the introduction if you wish to go direct to
the Q&A **
Number of other factors
To understand the context
for OA in South Africa we need to consider a number of other factors as well.
First, OA tends to
be viewed as just one component of a larger open movement in South Africa, a
movement that also encompasses Open Source software, Open Educational Resources
(OER) and Open ELearning. Indeed, OA is not even the
key component, but a relatively minor part of this larger context — a reality
demonstrated pictorially in a presentation given by OpenUCT
at the 2012 Creative Commons Africa Summit. Here we see OER at the centre of
the open movement, with ELearning and OA playing adjunct roles.
This
doubtless explains why the University of
Cape Town did not sign the 2003 Berlin Declaration in support of OA until 2011, whereas three
years earlier it had been a founding signatory of the Cape Town Open
Education Declaration)
— which calls on stakeholders (including governments, universities and
publishers), to “commit to the pursuit and promotion of open education”.
It
is not hard to see why this is the case. As Willmers explained in a presentation she gave at an Open Access conference held in Cape Town in 2012 (Slides
available here):
When I am asked how the challenges around scholarly communication
are different in Africa it always comes back to the issue of teaching load,
because when we speak about the need to develop capacity in African
institutions we always come back to the systemic issue of the need for
education and the need to support the teaching endeavour.
To exemplify her
point, Willmers reported that when academics in Africa were asked recently why
they did research, 82% of respondents in one institution said that they did so not
in order to boost their prestige, or because their institutions expected them
to do it, but in order to enhance and support their teaching activity.
And
this surely also explains why, although UCT has no
institutional repository, it does have a flourishing Open Content repository — which it describes
as a “web portal for accessing open teaching and learning content from UCT”.
Specifically
the OpenUCT Initiative’s mission is:
* To make freely available as many as possible of UCT’s research,
teaching and community-focused scholarly resources to those with internet
access
* To engage with the higher education openness agenda, from the
perspective of the global south
In short, Willmers
told delegates in Cape Town, the boundary between research and teaching is hard
to draw in South Africa. “One of the challenges we have faced in the OER
initiative is that we eventually ceased to be able to tell the difference
between the research and the teaching content. This meant that there were
resources that presented an interesting challenge to us, and they were often
very popular resources.”
All in all, she
added, “We had some interesting insights into the nexus between research and
teaching.”
Less addicted
Second, when
thinking about OA in South Africa we need to keep in mind our earlier point that
African researchers have not historically published much in international journals.
The corollary of this is that — unlike their colleagues in the Global North — they
are less addicted to the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor (IF).
This is viewed as a
positive thing. Calculated by counting citations in a small subset of
international journals, the Journal Impact Factor is now widely viewed as
having had a pernicious effect on the research process.
Due to its use in
the assessment process, for instance, scholars know that when they apply for
promotion or funding the perceived brand value (rank) of the journals in which they
have published (measured by the journals’ IF) carries greater weight than either
their work (the IF measures citations to a journal as a whole, not to
particular articles), the number of people that will have access to that
journal’s contents, or the real-life impact their work has had, or is likely to
have. As we shall see, this is problematic.
We could add that since
African researchers do not generally publish in international journals (and thus
have a lower susceptibility to IF fever) they are more inclined to promote and distribute
their work (on an OA basis) using non-traditional channels like blogs,
repositories, and web sites.
This too is viewed
as a positive thing. As Willmers put it to the Cape Town delegates, “I think in
our drive to share multiple forms of content we are going into a very exciting
open science open/ knowledge space which just isn’t as narrow as grappling over
the relative merits of green and gold journal article exchange, although we
acknowledge that that is a key global issue.”
And we could note
that in responding to my question about the respective merits of Green and Gold
OA below, Willmers replies, “If we consider this model as a repository versus
formal publisher approach we need to first consider what a different place we
are in with respect to both publishing industry and institutional
e-infrastructure development.”
She
added, “The fixation with Green versus Gold at times seems to function as a
distraction from the core challenges of our context — that is, (a) how do we
start to build institutional capacity and mechanisms for regional collaboration
so that we can capture, curate and share the knowledge that is being produced
in our universities; and (b) how do we stimulate discussion at national level
to address sustainable funding mechanisms and a strategic policy approach to
scholarly communication. We need significant investment in both formal and
institutional publishing efforts; both are to be supported.”
This suggests to me
that when Willmers talks about repositories and institutional publishing
efforts she does not have in mind the model of Green OA assumed in the
developed world — where researchers publish in traditional subscription journals
and then make copies of their papers freely available in their institutional
repositories.
It also suggests
that we could see a future in Africa where the repository emerges as a
publishing platform in its own right (rather than an archival service) — a
model ideally suited to an environment in which non-traditional publishing
channels and social media are increasingly used to share research.
In any case, we
must doubt that many researchers in the Global South are currently able (or
willing) to pay up to $3,000 per paper to publish in a Gold or Hybrid OA
journal (as international commercial publishers expect).
It was perhaps with
such thoughts in mind that Willmers suggested to delegates in Cape Town that
the distinctive characteristics of the research environment in the Global South
might see the developing world “leapfrog” over some of the entrenched issues
that currently bog down discussions of OA in the developed world.
Incentivising researchers
In contrasting the
differing research environments and practices of the developed and the developing
world we are encouraged to ask a fundamental question: What is the purpose of doing
research? Is the end game simply to provide employment and a career path for researchers,
or is it to serve the needs of the citizens who fund it, and who pay the salaries
of the scientists who conduct it? Alternatively, is the ultimate purpose to
serve mankind at large, regardless of who funds any particular piece of
research?
In an ideal world,
of course, research would aim to do all these things. Today, however, many
believe that the system that has emerged in the developed world has lost sight
of the end game.
Why do we say this?
Because there is growing evidence that obeisance to hierarchical “journal ranking” (and the impact factor that sustains
that ranking) is having an increasingly negative impact on research quality.
In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, for instance, Björn Brembs (interviewed earlier in this series) and colleagues
examined what they call “the unintended consequences of journal rank”.
Aside from the way
in which “iterations of submissions and rejections cascading down the hierarchy
of journal rank” unnecessarily lengthens the time it takes for research results
to be shared with (and so perhaps benefit) the world, and aside from the fact
that the journal hierarchy allows prestigious journals to withstand calls for
Open Access (while constantly raising the paywalls that separate researcher
from research), Brembs et al. demonstrate that journal rank co-occurs
with (and likely causes) undesirable, and possibly dangerous, phenomena such as
the increase in article retractions we are currently witnessing, the so-called
“decline effect” and “publication bias”.
This leads the
paper’s authors to conclude that journal rank (and its use in the assessment of
researchers) may have turned the research process into more of a marketing exercise
than an effective mechanism for generating useful/valuable research, and then
sharing the results of that research in an optimal way.
As they put it, “It
is conceivable that, for the last few decades, research institutions world-wide
may have been hiring and promoting scientists who excel at marketing their work
to top journals, but who are not necessarily equally good at conducting their
research. Conversely, these institutions may have purged excellent scientists
from their ranks, whose marketing skills did not meet institutional
requirements.”
They add, “If this
interpretation of the data is correct, a generation of excellent marketers
(possibly, but not necessarily, also excellent scientists) now serve as the
leading figures and role models of the scientific enterprise, constituting
another potentially major contributing factor to the rise in retractions.”
The key point would
seem to be that the Impact Factor, and the journal ranking based on it, is
having a negative effect, not just on the quality of the papers being
published but also on the quality of the underlying research process.
Such concerns must have
particular resonance in the context of the Global South, where the need to
improve food security and health, and develop essential new technologies, is
most pressing.
Leaving aside the
concerns raised by Brembs et al., the traditional journal may in any
case no longer be an appropriate publishing vehicle in the age of the Internet,
particularly in the context of the developing world where it is vital that important
evidence-based policy decisions are taken as quickly as possible.
As Willmers put it
in her Cape Town presentation, “Research needs to work harder in the developing
world context, and it turns out that outputs like policy briefs and blog posts
are most useful to researchers in a non-academic context, people in government,
and people who advise governments for instance.”
This suggests that
if the developing world were to abjure the assessment and publishing practices
of the developed world, and develop new ways of incentivising researchers to
produce and share research optimally it could make science work harder for it —
to the benefit of all.
When I asked Willmers
what still needs to be done by the OA movement she answered, “In order for
knowledge to reach government, industry and civil society so that it can have
an optimal effect in addressing development imperatives we need to move beyond
the journal article as the sole prized artefact of knowledge production to a
system that acknowledges and rewards a wide range of output genres.”
Better system?
This does not
necessarily mean abandoning the journal/article model. But we are again tempted
to speculate about possible futures. Might we see a situation emerge in South
Africa, for instance, where the traditional journal — organised and managed by
commercial publishers — is challenged by a new-style repository-based
publishing system owned and managed by universities themselves? This might be journal-based
Gold OA, but OA that is “free to access and free to publish”, rather than pay
to publish. Or it could be something quite different.
As noted in the earlier
Q&A with Babini, for instance, a number of the journals
on AJOL — which is based on the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) developed by the Public Knowledge
Project (PKP) — do not have their own web platforms, but manage
the entire publication process, including peer review, directly on AJOL. It is easy
to imagine a future in which the norm became one in which African research
institutions published their own journals (or some other publication vehicle) using
institutional repositories as the publishing platform. These might be
aggregated by services like SciELO and AJOL, but they would be hosted, owned
and controlled by the home institution.
And if that were to
be combined with new assessment techniques it could perhaps lead to better
research, and to research able to produce more beneficial solutions more
quickly. It might even serve as an example for the developed world to follow. Already
some researchers in the Global North have concluded that SciELO represents
the first steps towards creating a better system.
Whether this
happens will depend on choices that developing countries make today. For its
part, China seems more interested in beating the developed world at its own
game today, aggressively
incentivising its researchers to publish in prestigious international journals —
by, for instance, awarding cash bonuses to researchers who succeed in doing so.
Understandably, the
temptation simply to emulate the developed world is high. But is it wise or
logical? If the aim is primarily to cut a dash on the international stage,
rather than produce useful research, then presumably not.
Right now, says
Willmers, there is a tendency for the reward and incentives systems in research
institutions “to serve a prestige agenda rather than relevance mission.”
She adds, “There
currently appears to be a disjunction between the values and the articulated
mission of many institutions and the reward and incentive systems that govern
the behaviour of academic communities: our values and mission speak to
relevance, while we tend to only reward activity in the prestige realm (that
is, the publication of journal articles in ‘international’ Impact Factor
journals).”
Today, therefore, the
developing could be said to be standing at a crossroads. It can try to compete
with the developed world on terms set by the developed world, or it can set
about creating a more effective system, and perhaps become a leader rather than
a follower as a result.
The question developing
countries might ask themselves is this: Should they seek to replicate what many
now view as a dysfunctional scholarly communication system — where prestige is
prioritised over relevance — or should they try to develop a new system, one that
would incentivise scientists to produce research of benefit to mankind more
effectively?
Challenges
Of course the
latter approach is not without its challenges, and some risk. How, for
instance, would quality be assured in any alternate system? After all, however
flawed the IF-based journal hierarchy might be, it does at least attempt to incentivise
quality, and some still believe that it does a “good enough” job.
The challenge would
be all the greater if any alternative system was based on non-traditional
publishing platforms — where peer review is not currently the norm.
But any risk needs
to be set against the fact that the traditional journal, and the assessment
practices that have grown around it, are not only flawed, but discriminate
against researchers in the developing world — in so far as it is much harder to
get a paper published in an international journal if you are based in the
Global South.
The good news is
that the OA movement has not only alerted the world to the growing access
problem, but it has drawn attention to the serious inadequacies inherent in the
current assessment system. And this has led a lot of discussion about the need
to devise new measures of quality and impact — which in fact are much easier to
implement in an online environment.
So, for instance,
there is growing interest in post-publication peer review, and in a variety of techniques
collectively known as altmetrics — including the use of sophisticated
article download and citation tools, and new ways of aggregating commentary on
social networking platforms like Twitter and web services like Wikipedia.
Willmers acknowledges
that quality is a key issue. “We require serious exploratory engagement with
how we conceive of and administer peer review outside of the formal journal or
book publication process”, she says below. “This entails a new approach to how
we think about impact, and creates a strong imperative for engaging with Altmetrics
and other mechanisms for surfacing data on downstream content use.”
The fundamental
question, however, is whether the developing world can withstand the blandishments
of international publishers any more effectively today that it showed itself
capable of doing when Willmers watched in horror as South African journals sold
themselves to commercial publishers, or indeed any more effectively than the
developed world is still able to do.
It is worth noting
that earlier this year Springer announced that it had signed a five-year
agreement with Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) in order to give students, researchers
and professionals at more than 400 institutions in Brazil access to Springer’s paywalled
content.
Clearly it is
important that Brazilian researchers have access to international research. The
danger of such deals, however, is that the local research community will end up
being sucked into a system dominated by international commercial publishers, by
the traditional journal system, and by the problematic IF-based incentive
system.
Consider also what
Sami Kassab, a Media Research analyst at the investment company Exane BNP
Paribas, told me earlier in this Q&A series. “Despite the noise around OA,
consortia are still signing long term subscriptions contracts with limited
cancellation clauses. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, we heard of an
Eastern European consortium signing a 7-year deal with a major publisher, more
than the usual 3 to 5-year deals.”
The continuing
willingness of the developing world to enter into such Big Deals with large international publishers clearly
opens up the possibility that these publishers (rather than the local research
community) will end up setting the research agenda — much as it already does for
the developed world.
Locked out
It is also against
this background that we should view the recent news that SciELO's citation index is being incorporated into the Thomson
Reuters Web of Science. In response to the news, OA advocate Jean-Claude Guédon commented, “The consequences of this move are
twofold: much greater visibility, and presumably, prestige for SciELO journals,
but also much greater vulnerability to the moves by international publishers
interested in picking up potentially lucrative SciELO publications.”
Finally, we could
note that Open Access advocates have always argued that the Global South will
be the greatest beneficiary of OA, since research institutions in developing
countries are least able to afford the current subscription costs that scholarly
publishers demand. But as international publishers start to embrace OA, and we
see more and more research start to become freely available, there is a danger
that the developing world find itself locked out anew.
Thus where currently
researchers in the Global South are frequently locked out of access (by high
subscription costs), in an OA publishing world dominated by international
commercial publishers who charge thousands of dollars to publish a paper, they could
find themselves locked out of the publication process (by article-processing
charges). While they might have access to all the third-party research they want,
they could find themselves unable to publish their own research.
(I acknowledge that
some researchers in some developing countries can currently get an APC
fee-waiver, but if author-pays OA publishing becomes prevalent I very much doubt
that the waiver system will continue in its present form).
As Willmers puts
it, “OA
offers the developing world unprecedented access to knowledge. It is also
brings with it the threat that unless we mobilise, invest and put systems in
place to protect and support the creation, curation and profiling of local
knowledge we stand to be subsumed in a deluge of knowledge from the North,
further reinforcing global digital and participation divides.”
All
the more reason, one might argue, for the Global South to develop its own
platforms for scholarly publishing, platforms that it owns and controls itself,
and which can facilitate incentive systems more likely to
generate valuable research.
Again,
however, there is some good news to share: it might not have to do this on
their own. As noted, more and more researchers in the developed world are
becoming frustrated with the failings of the current system, and increasingly
keen to — as Brembs puts it — “cut out the parasitic middle men”.
Brembs
believes the solution is to create a global library-based scholarly
communication system outside the control of publishers. And, as also noted, he believes that services
like SciELO should be viewed as a “stepping stone” for the better system he envisages.
The Q&A Begins
Q:
When and why did you become an OA advocate?
A: I became an OA advocate around
2005 when I was working as a publishing manager with a South African journal
publisher. We partnered with local professional societies and published 13
scholarly journals across a wide range of disciplinary areas, many of which
were profiling excellent scholarship but at the time struggling to invent new
business models and approaches to ensuring their ongoing survival.
As
a publishing house we put extraordinary resources into building up a number of
these titles, committing value-add after value-add in the publishing process, producing
a high quality journal product that resulted in a number of these titles
climbing ISI rankings and developing considerable community reputation.
The
net result of this labour was to see international proprietary publishers drop
their nets into local publishing waters and skim the cream of the South African
crop, absorbing these local journals into large pay-walled collections, seducing
often desperate editors with promises of international profile and financial
lifelines, taking knowledge out of the country and then expecting to sell it
back to us at a price very few of us could afford.
Something
in this picture felt intrinsically wrong to me. It was perhaps less of a case
of becoming an OA advocate than having a deep realisation that the local scholarly
communication paradigm was broken. The conversation around how to first
acknowledge and then address this led in the open access direction.
Q:
What would you say have been the biggest achievements of the OA movement to
date, and what have been the biggest disappointments?
A: Globally the recent
government, research council and funder open access mandates stand out as a
core achievement. There has been incredible progress in this area in the last three
to five years.
Also,
the expansion of open access principles beyond publication into the process of
science, driving new approaches to sharing and collaborative knowledge
creation, is very exciting. We are now in the era of open data, open science,
open educational resources and open source technologies — 21st century
scholarly communication.
It
is hard to speak of disappointments. I am continually amazed by the
achievements of small committed groups of individuals.
Q:
There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about the
roles that Green and Gold OA should play. In the context of South Africa and
the developing world, what would you say should be the respective roles of
Green and Gold OA today?
A: I do not think that the tension
between these two approaches exerts in South or Southern Africa in the same way
that it does in the UK. We need both. In terms of operating as a paradigm for
funds disbursement at national level I do not expect that it is transferable to
our context. If we consider this model as a repository versus formal publisher approach
we need to first consider what a different place we are in with respect to both
publishing industry and institutional e-infrastructure development.
There
is a strong argument for the Green route in our local context so that content
can be accessible irrespective of where and how academics choose to publish,
but this raises significant questions in terms of the institutional capacity
and infrastructure development required.
The
fixation with Green versus Gold at times seems to function as a distraction
from the core challenges of our context — that is, (a) how do we start to build
institutional capacity and mechanisms for regional collaboration so that we can
capture, curate and share the knowledge that is being produced in our
universities; and (b) how do we stimulate discussion at national level to
address sustainable funding mechanisms and a strategic policy approach to scholarly
communication. We need significant investment in both formal and institutional
publishing efforts; both are to be supported.
Q:
What about Hybrid OA?
A: This area feels precarious and
difficult to navigate. I have the sense that there is an increasing amount of hybrid
OA activity in the African higher education environment — and, as a result, an
increasing amount of publisher double-dipping.
The
absence of coordination and dedicated institutional capacity to engage
strategically with where our academics are publishing and what we are paying
for makes us particularly vulnerable to exploitative financial practice on the
part of the publishing industry.
I
expect the current headless chicken phase will be judged as expensive in the
long run. That said, a number of local journals are exploring hybrid OA as a
means to transition from closed to open business models and flexibility is key.
Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA in South Africa, and internationally?
A: OA in South Africa is just
entering adolescence. It appears to now be commonplace and accepted in abstract,
but faces the tough task of coming into its own and still needs to prove its
worth as it progresses into implementable adulthood (i.e. uptake by the
academic community).
The
conversation has evolved significantly in the last three years — away from
whether or not it is a good idea to how we make it work — and we now face the
interesting challenge of operationalising and putting our policies into
practice. This task cannot be addressed in isolation of the number of other large-scale
challenges that limit access to knowledge in the African context and define the
local higher education environment.
While
recent developments in OA are encouraging, the challenges facing African higher
education in terms of massification and global competition are sobering, and OA
has a particular role to play in responding to the educational needs of the
continent. We are at a crucial stage in terms of this potential being realised.
Internationally
OA seems a little more evolved than the local context, particularly with
regards to funding mechanisms and national/regional policy frameworks to govern
activity and infrastructure development. I am however weary of generalisations,
and expect that there are pockets of progress and resistance in all parts of
the world.
Q:
What still needs to be done, and by whom?
A: In order for knowledge to
reach government, industry and civil society so that it can have an optimal
effect in addressing development imperatives we need to move beyond the journal
article as the sole prized artefact of knowledge production to a system that
acknowledges and rewards a wide range of output genres.
There
currently appears to be a disjunction between the values and the articulated mission
of many institutions and the reward and incentive systems that govern the
behaviour of academic communities: our values and mission speak to relevance,
while we tend to only reward activity in the prestige realm (that is, the
publication of journal articles in “international” Impact Factor journals).
Research
conducted amongst Southern African academics in the Scholarly Communication in
Africa Programme (SCAP) revealed
that one of the greatest stumbling blocks to unlocking the potential of an
expanded range of outputs was a concern around quality assurance — this
particularly at a time when many African institutions are just beginning to
develop a research agenda and establish an international reputation in the
research arena.
We
require serious exploratory engagement with how we conceive of and administer
peer review outside of the formal journal or book publication process. This entails
a new approach to how we think about impact, and creates a strong imperative
for engaging with Altmetrics and other
mechanisms for surfacing data on downstream content use.
In
order to engage with these issues we require for institutions to acknowledge
the role they have to play in curating and profiling their knowledge for
development. This requires skills and capacity development, which requires
government support.
If
government is serious about seeing knowledge address development, it must
commit resources and provide an enabling policy environment to support the
communication and preservation of the knowledge that is being produced (both
within and beyond academia).
Within
this new framework it is crucial that we run pilot projects, experiment, and
conduct research in order to understand what works in developing country
environments.
We
need to be able to make informed decisions around where investment should be
directed and prospective solutions must be scoped in line with the affordances
of the current system, bearing in mind the culture of the communities these
systems are embedded in.
Q:
What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should
focus on today?
A: In the South and Southern
African context the imperative appears to be for national-level and regional
coordination with respect to policy and infrastructure development; this
ideally to be accompanied by government-fed financial systems for supporting
scholarly communication as a core component of national research and
development.
There
is significant activity at institutional level across the region, but the space
often appears to be characterised by competitiveness that leads to duplication
of effort and inefficiency. In order to scale we are going to need to pool
resources and collaborate.
Internationally
the imperative appears to be for the OA movement to continue the drive to
expand beyond the journal article and in so doing engage in more concerted
conversation with its cousins, open educational resources and open science.
I
think we have reached a stage of evolution in these areas of activity where it
behoves us to engage in meta-level consideration of how the various open
knowledge endeavours link together and what an integrated future might look
like. This is very exciting to consider.
Q:
What does OA have to offer the developing world?
A: OA offers the developing world
unprecedented access to knowledge. It is also brings with it the threat that
unless we mobilise, invest and put systems in place to protect and support the
creation, curation and profiling of local knowledge we stand to be subsumed in
a deluge of knowledge from the North, further reinforcing global digital and
participation divides.
Q:
What are your expectations for OA over the next year?
A: I expect that in Africa we will see the increasing
provision of high-speed bandwidth and the development of national research and
education networks (NRENs) across the continent start to make a tangible
difference in boosting African research capacity, stimulating scholarly
communication activity, ramping up international collaboration, and pioneering
new ways in which we share knowledge.
With this development will come increasing
further realisation of OA as a key mechanism for the optimal functioning of
these systems.
Internationally I expect OA journal publishing
activity to continue to grow exponentially as mandates take effect and academic
communities start seeing demonstrable benefit from investment in open systems.
Q:
Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If so,
why/how? Does cost matter anyway?
A: Preliminary indications seem to suggest that OA will be
significantly cheaper than subscription publishing — or at least that the cost
to benefit ratio will far exceed that of closed access publishing in terms of
promoting development and innovation.
In our local context it does however feel
dangerous to conflate this with an assumption that less investment will be
required. We want instead to argue for reallocation and boosting of current
resources.
Significant ongoing investment is required in
order to develop the skills, infrastructure and strategic approach to scholarly
communication activity required to ensure our participation in global OA
systems.
~~
Michelle
Willmers has a background in academic and scholarly publishing and works as a
consultant and institutional project manager in scholarly communication. She
has experience as an academic journal editor and publishing manager and has
worked in the field of open access and open educational resources (OER) since 2008.
Michelle
was a senior team member in the Shuttleworth Foundation OER UCT Initiative and was the
programme manager of the IDRC Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), a four-country
research and publishing initiative aimed at increasing the visibility of
African research. She is currently the project manager of the OpenUCT
Initiative.
~~
Earlier contributors to
this series include palaeontologist Mike Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, former librarian Fred Friend, SPARC director Heather
Joseph,
publishing consultant Joseph
Esposito, de
facto leader of the Open Access movement Peter Suber,Open Access Advocacy leader at the Latin American
Council on Social Sciences (CLACSO) Dominique Babini, Cameron Neylon, advocacy director for the non-profit OA publisher Public Library of
Science, and Philippe Terheggen, Managing Director, STM Journals at Elsevier.
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