Open Access in African Publishing Industry: Opportunities and Challenges

Authors: By Mr. J. J. Musakali and Dr. D. C. Rotich, Moi University, Kenya

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the development and access to knowledge through Open Access, propelled by emerging technologies in the publishing industry in Africa. The paper further discusses opportunities that present themselves through Open Access and the benefits to scholars worldwide. Challenges that face this practice are discussed and solutions suggested.

The paper argues that scholars require access to relevant scholarly literature to further the development of knowledge. This literature, which is rapidly increasing, is interdisciplinary, global, expensive, digital, and hidden behind technical walls to comply with license restrictions. Scholars with up-to-date technologies still have difficulty accessing the specialized literature that they need, while those in technologically poor institutions barely have any access at all. The current scholarly communication system needs urgent reforms to cope with the rapidly changing technological environment. Open Access, being the permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, web-wide, is free, immediate, and handles multiple users.
This way, society as a whole benefits from an expanded and accelerated research cycle in which research can advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to all the findings they need. Many research findings go unnoticed but with Open Access, they will be more visible and their usage and impact will increase, as the researchers too will find, access and use findings of others. Publishers likewise also benefit from the wider dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation of their articles.

Among the recommendations, the paper suggests that researchers, their institutions and their funders need to be informed and trained on the benefits of providing Open Access, together with establishing Institutional Open Access Repositories. Through this management of knowledge, scholars worldwide will access and benefit from each other’s findings.

Introduction

In today’s heavily wired world, access to information is a pre-condition for becoming a knowledge society. The right of access to information has become the dominant right in the information and knowledge era. Because of this, many people can now be allowed access to the ideas of others and also this presents an opportunity to participate in the global information-based socio-economic and political activities.

Most African countries spend a lot on research, yet only few individuals access the results. As a result, restricting access to knowledge restricts the development of science and has severe effects on the general well-being of people. Libraries in the developed world struggle to purchase access to all the scientific publications they need while subscriptions are prohibitively expensive for institutions in the developing world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Developing countries (DCs) are now posed with the challenge of either becoming an integral part of the knowledge-based global culture or face the very real danger of finding themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Open Access (OA) is about equitable access to information by anyone. This new emergence is based on the collaboration and involvement philosophy and principles that governed the initial developers of the Internet Protocol (IP). OA means that publications are made totally freely available on the Web, without any access restrictions.

Like other widely used terms, defining Open Access has attracted many attempts which somehow agree on how OA is executed. Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) put it this way: "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) statements on the other hand agree that for a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

The Open Access Movement’s Trends

In the 17th century, Journals were an effective way of sharing research with other researchers. Authors did not have to pay to be published nor were they paid for their works. Administration of publications was usually unpaid and publishers were usually academic societies and university presses. Libraries were seen as good places to make the journals available to others besides the subscribers.

After World War II, Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press started buying academic journals and small university presses. He took over what he termed as the ‘burden’ of publishing and administration, ‘so that academics could concentrate on research’. He then charged them for publishing their articles ‘to pay for the administrative costs’. He went ahead and took over author copyright. The result was that prices shot up, especially for libraries but authors and reviewers remained unpaid. Maxwell and other commercial publishers made huge profit margins and their empires grew at the expense of library budgets which became strained. By then, expensive journals became the place to publish. Research councils funded research more highly in this kind of journals, because the readership was wide. In the meantime, universities lost control of their own research and content became gradually less important than delivery. This situation was painfully accepted by academics because of their need to publish their research as promotions and other academic yardsticks were pegged on publications. Above all, it was because there seemed to be no alternative.

In the meantime, the internet was developing and non-journal scholarly communication was already making an impact using the medium to express their ideas. In the early nineties the World Wide Web (WWW) was born, opening up new opportunities and enabling publishing in a new way, and a potentially unlimited audience. Electronic journal publishers saw this as an opportunity to exploit and moved with speed to take advantage of this.

Open Access as a phenomenon emerged in the mid-1990s in the area of electronic journals. This was enabled by the rapid development of the Internet as a means of communication. The open access movement was based on a realisation that the traditional subscription-based publications unnecessarily restrict access to research results, in a field which essentially is a public good. Most of the early open access journals were founded by single academics or groups of academics at a time when traditional subscription-based journals were still published on paper only. Thus, open access journals not only offered free availability of the articles, they also pioneered the use of the electronic medium. Many scholars started to use this new medium to express their ideas. By the year 2000, access to digital scholarly and research material, published and peer-reviewed journal articles was in most cases immediate, free and unrestricted online. Libraries began cancelling print journals in favour of electronic journals and some cancelled for-profit journals in favour of open access journals. OA movement gathered momentum.

Open Access and Open Content Publishing

Open Content is related to OA but open content is usually defined to include the general permission to modify a given work. Open Content is about distributing learning materials for free, but ensuring that the copyright remained with the authors and that the article would be used responsibly (Wiley, 1999). The content accessed in such a manner can be used in infinity of ways restricted only by the imagination of the user.

OA Publication is defined by the Bethesda Meeting on OA Publishing (11 April 2003) as one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organisation that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.

OA publishing therefore aims to provide free online access to all publications in which case a reader will not be asked to pay for subscription fees and therefore increase the mass audience an article can reach and thus promote further creation of knowledge.

Opportunities with Open Access Publishing

Africa still lags behind in the area of electronic information although there have been some pioneering initiatives like African Journals Online, African Digital Library, Database of African Theses and Dissertations, Africa’s Open Knowledge Network, and African Online Digital Library, among the few. Presently, there have been dramatic changes in scholarly publishing field as almost all major journals are now available in an electronic format, often offered to universities as package deals, usually bundling huge numbers of titles from a single publisher. Many big scientific publishers are experimenting with single open access journals or a hybrid form called open choice, which gives authors the possibility of having their papers made openly available in exchange for payment of a basic fee.

Harnard et al (2004) notes that there are many advocates of open access who believe that scholars should continue to publish their articles in traditional subscription-based journals but should at the same time upload open access copies of the papers to subject-based or institutional e-print repositories. This alternative mode of open access is often referred to as the green route as opposed to the gold route of the journals themselves being open access.

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals or OA archives or repositories. The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. In a number of African academic institutions of higher learning, starting and maintaining journals is becoming the order of the day. Once launched, these journals can provide ready material for OA. There are other OA vehicles such as personal web sites, e-books, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and person-to person file-sharing networks. There will undoubtedly be many more in the future. Some African scholars have in the recent past started posting their academic papers and sharing knowledge with others on personal websites, blogs and specific networks. OA journals are economically sustainable because the true costs of peer review, manuscript preparation, and OA dissemination are considerably lower than the prices we currently pay for subscription-based journals. OA archives are economically sustainable because they are so inexpensive. Depositing new articles takes only a few minutes, and is done by individual authors, not archive managers. OA archives only require some server space, usually at a university. These archives benefit the institutions that host them by enhancing the visibility and impact of the articles, the authors, and the institution.
Nwangwu and Ahmed (2009) emphasise the importance of OA in eliminating all the factors that inhibit the flow of knowledge from the South to the North, and vice versa. If embraced, they note, the movement would probably expose the true level of scientific activities going on in Africa and other developing regions, as well as giving them access to those sources that have been hitherto restrictive to them. In addition, OA will strengthen the science communities of Africa, strengthen their national science systems, and very crucially expose those virile local knowledge sources, systems and methods that are yet to find their ways into the international market of ideas, often because they are believed not to meet international standards. The availability of an author’s publication in the public domain not only gives the author satisfaction but is an avenue for the author to interact with others, to be cited and even be invited worldwide for conferences and similar activities. The little success that has been there in OA has enabled some scholars to globe-trot and thus expand their knowledge base.

Proponents of OA argue that price barriers constitute the bulk of the problem for which OA is the solution. Removing price barriers alone will give most OA users most of what they want and need. In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full-text, not just to abstracts or summaries.

Suber (2004) states that when copyright holders consent to OA, they Usually consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work. Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research.

OA will in time improve the global scientific findings by exposing alternative strategies and techniques which already exist but are not part of the mainstream science systems, but which also yield the same or even better results with research executed with standard methods. As noted earlier as in the introduction of the internet, OA upholds the dictum that knowledge should be a Common Heritage of man, a right that should be made available to persons.

In the recent past, there has been an increase in online groups and forums that not only socialise but engage in some meaningful information sharing. These have emanated from alumni, professionals in similar fields and even researchers. In most cases, subscription to such groups is free and administration is by a moderator. The knowledge shared via these groups has no geographical distance as any member of the group from any part of the world can access and post content. E-conferences and networking have also played a major role in shrinking distance in terms of information. Hamel (2005) argues that online or e-knowledge is the best thing ever to happen to African nations. Indeed, internet provides a bonanza of knowledge. It is the new revolutionary instrument for accessing knowledge. Knowledge portals and online knowledge searching and knowledge sharing have grown fast and have considerably broken the isolation of most DCs. Nwagwu and Ahmed (2009) point out that scientists in SSA countries can now freely access hundreds of scientific and professional journals, papers, documents, encyclopaedias, reports, presentations, lectures, etc. This represents a considerable progress in comparison with the situation prevailing only a few years ago. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for instance, is an opportunity where African scholars can deposit their e-journals. This is a projected initiated by Land University Libraries, Sweden. There are many other OA archives and databases available online. An organisation called Bionline provides access to research journals produced in Africa through the DOAJ.

OA has presented many opportunities to all the stakeholders. Suber (2004) dwells on some of the opportunities to different groups;

• Authors: OA gives them a worldwide audience larger than that of any subscription-based journal, no matter how prestigious or popular, and probably increases the visibility and impact of their work.

• Readers: OA gives them barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research, not constrained by the budgets of the libraries where they may have access privileges. It increases their convenience, reach, and retrieval power.
  Teachers and students:  OA puts rich and poor on an equal footing for these key resources and eliminates the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content.

• Libraries:  OA solves the pricing crisis for scholarly journals. It also solves the permission crisis. OA also serves library interests in other, indirect ways. Librarians want to help users find the information they need, regardless of the budget-enforced limits on the library's own collection. University librarians want to help faculty increase their audience and impact and thereby help the university raise its research profile.
• Universities:  OA increases the visibility of their faculty and institution, reduces their expenses for journals, and advances their mission to share knowledge.
• Journals and publishers:  OA makes their articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. If a journal is OA, then it can use this superior visibility to attract submissions and advertising, not to mention readers and citations.
• Funding agencies:  OA increases the return on their investment in research, making the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. OA serves public funding agencies in a second way as well, by providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research.
• Governments:  As funders of research, governments benefit from OA in all the ways that funding agencies do (see previous entry). OA also promotes democracy by sharing government information as rapidly and widely as possible.
• Citizens:  OA gives them access to peer-reviewed research (most of which is unavailable in public libraries) and gives them access to the research for which they have already paid through their taxes. It also helps them indirectly by helping the researchers, physicians, manufacturers, technologists, and others who make use of cutting-edge research for their benefit.

A growing number of studies have confirmed that an OA article is more likely to be used and cited than one behind subscription barriers. There is enough evidence that OA documents are most likely to be cited than non OA documents. This gives OA authors an advantage over other authors who are sceptical about OA. Scholars are paid by research funders and/or their universities to do research; the published article is the report of the work they have done, rather than an item for commercial gain. The more the article is used, cited, applied and built upon, the better for research as well as for the researcher's career.
Open access goes beyond the academic circle and spreads its wings to other areas. An OA article can be read by anyone, including professionals, researchers in different fields, media practitioners, politicians, civil servants, etc. Open Access articles can often be found with a web search, using any general search engine or those specialized for the scholarly/scientific literature.
Many librarians have openly supported Open Access. These librarians believe that open access promises to remove both the price barriers and the permission barriers that undermine library efforts to provide access to the journal literature. Many library associations have either signed major open access declarations, or created their own. At most universities, the library houses the institutional repository, which provides free access to scholarly work of the university's faculty. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play a very important role in responding to open access mandates from funders.

Most African countries cannot afford books. Most of these books are available internationally and quite expensive by African standards. This is where OA comes in. Researchers, students and scholars in general in most cases get material via OA. This way, they are able to get latest, updated materials without necessarily paying anything except may be internet browsing charges if they are not met by their respective institutions.

Challenges to Open Access Publishing

Most African countries have no political or academic willpower to encourage growth in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). This is reflected in budget allocations, government bureaucracy, training and restrictions among others. There is sufficient basis to suggest that part of the reasons for the low profile of scientists in Africa is the poor access to scientific publications from the developed countries, exacerbated by the institution of copyright (Tagler, 1996). African countries scientists require access to scientific publications, which scientists all over the world are always willing to make available at no cost, in order to benefit from and also contribute to the world stock of knowledge. What Africa needs is an initiative or
arrangement that will guarantee access of scientists to scientific publications irrespective of where the sources are developed (Nwangwu and Ahmed 2009). Moller (2004) points out that despite many opportunities that present themselves, many countries in Africa are yet to utilise the privilege offered by these resources to internationalise their research sources. Many African countries and institutions have not encouraged faculty and students to contribute to or access OA materials. Some universities like the University of Western Cape has launched an Open Content project to have students and staff participate in OA. Previously, all other efforts have come from the west. African scholars have continually relied on e-papers from developed countries.

Language is a major barrier in most African countries. Different African countries have different official languages. Most online literature and OA materials for that matter, are in English. Kenya as a country for instance, has 42 tribes with different dialects. It is difficult to avail material in many of these languages. Kiswahili is a major language in East Africa but limited in online presence in terms of publications. Developers of the language are still grappling with other issues like online spelling checkers, e-encyclopaedias and dictionaries etc. It will therefore be a long shot before there is a repository of documents in Kiswahili to even consider OA.

Resistance to change has been seen as another challenge. There are many librarians, researchers, readers and authors who have resisted the change to the e-world. Some of them have no valid reason to back their resistance. Other librarians especially, believe that if they embrace the electronic version completely, their jobs are at a risk. True? False? You tell me. There are researchers and authors out there, especially in Africa who have kept their findings until they are overtaken by time! The findings simply become obsolete because of the fear that others will know about their findings. No wonder an old saying agrees with this that the richest place on earth is the graveyard, where you find many unexploited ideas buried with their owners.

Technologically, many African countries lack the infrastructure to handle OA materials. Telecommunication challenges like bandwidth allocation, weak communication and social infrastructure has not only blocked information flows but ultimately stifled social and economic development. Internet connection is key to OA. Despite having a very rapid rate of internet penetration, Africa still lags behind in internet connectivity (Keats and Beebe, 2003) with barely 1% of internauts being in Africa and the Middle East. This point is very crucial because much of the efforts to free scientific publications from the publisher in the electronic revolution are the internet facilities. Scientists who are not connected to the internet are excluded automatically from publishing in, and benefiting from, a growing number of journals, because many new journals are created online while many old ones now often have online counterparts.

Much has been said about the information rich and information poor. Many developing countries have complained of a deliberate move to isolate them in access to some information. This in turn has created a digital divide in which we have two distant worlds-the information rich and the information poor. Without a proper ICT structure, no country can advance in any sort of development. By digital divide, we refer to inequalities in access to the internet, extent of use, knowledge of search strategies, quality of technical connections and social support, ability to evaluate the quality of information, and diversity of uses (DiMaggio et al., 2001). The digital-divide underpins much of the ongoing discourse on whether ICT can be harnessed for mitigating poverty in DCs with several voices arguing that those who live on less than $1 a day have no need for ICTs. The proponents of ICTs on the other hand however consider ICTs as tools that can be used to provide the poor with economic opportunities and improvement in human well-being (see World Bank, 2001;UNCTAD, 2003). Furthermore, the new ICT products and applications are frequently designed in ignorance of DCs’ realities particularly SSA and fail to address the needs of the most disadvantaged sections of the community (Mansell and When, 1998).

A survey for Africa Tertiary Institutions Connectivity Survey (ATICS) carried out by the African Virtual University in 2005 showed the average African university has bandwidth capacity equivalent to a broadband residential connection available in Europe, pays 50 times more for their bandwidth than their educational counterparts in the rest of the world, and fails to monitor, let alone manage, the existing bandwidth (ATICS, 2005). As a result, what little bandwidth that is available becomes even less useful for research and education purposes. Arunachallam (2002), points out that the gulf in the levels of science and technology between the developed and the DCs will tend to widen further with the rapid expansion of the internet in the West and the speedy transition to electronic publishing, and this can lead to increased brain drain and dependence on foreign aid of a different kind (knowledge imperialism).

Although OA is basically free access to information, there needs to be some funding to take care of subscriptions, designing of tools, management, and availing technology. Most African economies are constrained or have other priorities and would invest in OA only if their budgets have surplus.

Suber, (2004) summarises the major four challenges to the success of OA.

• Filtering and censorship barriers. Many schools, employers, and governments want to limit what you can see.

• Language barriers. Most online literature is in English, or just one language, and machine translation is very weak.
• Handicap access barriers. Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
• Connectivity barriers. The digital divide keeps billions of people, including millions of serious scholars, offline.

What can be done? Recommendations

• Putting in place information and ICT policies

• Instilling interest in scholars to participate
• Heavily invest in education and especially in ICT education
• Expand internet network, bandwidth.
• Constructing websites for all existing journals.
• There is need for African community of stakeholder groups – librarians, authors, researchers etc., to come together to champion the course of OA. This can easily be done through internet.
• Embrace change, not resist it.
• Non-profit foundations like UN bodies seem to be committed to disseminating of information and information-related activities. Stakeholders should take advantage of this and collaborate with such groups.

Conclusion

OA has many opportunities that Africans can exploit. It is a way of bridging the Digital Divide, enabling development and innovation and making sure that researchers working in Africa get visibility in the world, and can be aware of what other researchers in Africa are doing. By putting research results in the public domain, discussion is made possible and further innovation enabled. This is also a way of rewarding Africa after too many years of research resources exploitation.

References

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Useful Links

1. Budapest Open Access Initiative and its FAQ, February 14, 2002

2. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, June 20, 2003
3. Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, October 22, 2003