The SA government must lead the Open Access movement to develop a national policy position and strategy
There is an urgent need for the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) in partnership with the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) to assume a leadership role in consolidating Open Science and Open Access initiatives into one South African national project.
This suggestion was made by Professor Ahmed Bawa (right), former Chief Executive Officer of Universities South Africa (USAf), and now Professor of Higher Education at the Johannesburg Business School of the University of Johannesburg.
He made this proposition at the USAf-hosted workshop that gathered key role players in South Africa’s Open Access initiative on Monday, 4 September. The aim was to collectively assess the current situation, chart a path forward and determine the coordination role on the national Open Access landscape.
In attendance were senior representatives of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), the Committee of Higher Education Libraries of South Africa (CHELSA), the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the National Research Foundation (NRF) including the African Open Science Platform (AOSP), the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC), the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and USAf’s Finance Executives’ Forum (FEF).
While acknowledging the inroads made on Open Access to date – thanks to the leading negotiator role played by SANLiC over the years, Professor Bawa said with the Open Science platform now firmly in place at the DSI, Open Access could be built onto this platform that transcends universities and research houses. It was therefore imperative to make Open Access a national and continental project galvanizing African governments to speak in one voice to make the necessary impact on the global Open Access arena.
“We cannot have policy dissonance, where different policies pull in different directions. While we would need to suggest a specific role for the DSI, in principle, we need to bring together major African counterparts to a common conversation.” said Bawa.
The stakeholders in attendance expressed full support for Professor Bawa’s suggestion, with Mr Imraan Patel, Deputy Director-General (DDG): Research Development and Support in the DSI, seeing this as an opportunity to enhance a Cabinet Memo and the Open Science strategy that is under consideration within the cluster system of government.
Accompanying Patel at this workshop was Dr Sagren Moodley (left), Director: Basic Sciences in the DSI, who added that he was seeing Open Science as a massive undertaking requiring a radical restructuring of the national research enterprise. He said it was easy for the DSI to be overwhelmed if it were to tackle this project in isolation. “The multi-stakeholder approach will be very useful in designing a flagship initiative that will have resonance in the National System of Innovation.”
USAf’s current CEO, Dr Phethiwe Matutu, also expressed her full support for a systemic Open Access approach while Dr Nokuthula Mchunu, Deputy Director: AOSP at the NRF, moved that in proceeding in that fashion, the views of universities and other entities who pay to publish be consolidated towards the desired model.
Science as a public good
Professor Bawa rooted his talk, titled International Trends; Lessons for South Africa; What is beyond the transformative agreements, on the work of the International Science Council (ISC). The ISC is a global body that convenes scientific expertise and provides counsel on topical issues of interest to science and society. It gathers a unique global membership of natural and social scientists who, together, bring their expertise to bear on global science policy. Ultimately, the ISC seeks to advance science as a global public good.
Himself a member of the ISC Steering Group on Open Access, Professor Bawa said the ISC, in its work on the Open Access initiative, had been instrumental in building a global discussion on scientific publishing that goes beyond the current transformative agreements in response to requests from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The reason was that the transformative agreements were simply designed to perpetuate the enrichment of corporate publishers and a concentration of resources in the Global North.
To address these concerns, the ISC established a Steering Group which identified several important issues and concurred with the observation made by African, Latin American and Asian colleagues.
Professor Bawa declared his support for the ISC’s position that society is best served when science is regarded a public good. Acknowledging that the bulk of science circulating in the world is funded by society, the ISC believes that knowledge generated in that context must rightfully be regarded as a public good. This encompasses knowledge derived from all natural (i.e. physical, mathematical and life) sciences, social (including behavioral and economic) sciences as well as humanities, medical health, computer and engineering sciences.
The national context
He said the South African national context was characterised by unequal access to scholarly journals and information databases, notwithstanding considerable growth in postgraduate education and research outputs across the sector. He noted that growing unaffordability was being driven by the inherent escalation of costs exacerbated by foreign exchange instability and the publishing industry’s preoccupation with maximising profits at all costs. South Africa was having to contend with subscription costs exceeding R600million annually, excluding article processing charges (APCs).
The global context
Notwithstanding thatCoViD-19 had thwarted the Open Access progress in many respects, “it also reminded us that the advancement of knowledge is essential to all modern societies and economies, particularly when application-driven and intended to address specific societal challenges.” Professor Bawa intimated that humanity’s grand challenges are simultaneously local and global by nature. They require transboundary research that transcends not only knowledge and disciplinary domains but also societal sectoral domains. He therefore suggested that the advancement of knowledge should not benefit only those who can afford to pay for it. Instead, the scientific enterprise must grow globally for universal benefit.
Noting that just as Open Science had captured many governments across the world, Professor Bawa said global scholarly communities must also allow Open Access to thrive.
To that end, he said the ISC was exploring how the scholarly publishing system can best maximise benefit for all. For that purpose, the ISC had adopted the following eight principles:
Principle One – calls for universal and prompt access to authors and readers without barriers based on ability to pay, institutional privilege, language or geography.
Principle Two — champions open licences that permit reuse and text and data mining.
Principle Three – rigorous and timely peer review must play a role in creating and maintaining the public record of science.
Principle Four — data on which scientific claims are based must be subjected to scrutiny and supported by the necessary metadata.
Principle Five – the record of science should be maintained to ensure Open Access to future generations.
Principle Six — science must be accessible across regions and disciplines; must facilitate interoperability between different disciplines and regions and must provide for multi-lingual interoperability.
Principle Seven – publication systems must be designed to continually adapt to new opportunities for beneficial change rather than embedding inflexible systems that do not add value, into the future.
Principle Eight — governance of processes of dissemination of scientific knowledge should be accountable to the scientific community.
Transformative Agreements versus ISC Principles
Professor Bawa surmised that the current system of Transformative Agreements (TA) goes against the requirements of the principles above. He said funding of publishing should ideally be internationally coordinated, and that publishing standards should be guided by these principles. By implication, universities and science councils should publish only in journals subscribing to the ISC’s eight principles.
What South Africa needs to do
South Africa needs to do her bit in ensuring that global Open Access debates are not dominated by the Global North. “We did not shape the development of the current TA system — but now we have an opportunity to shape the future,” he counselled.
He cautioned against using impact factors (i.e. quantity) as a proxy for research quality. “We need to have a conversation on how to measure quality, which might be very different from what we’re currently using,” he advised.
In summary, Professor Bawa said the Open Science initiative must speak with a very loud voice on Open Access – accepting that the latter is never going to be devoid of costs. It was time now for South Africa to adopt a national approach instead of leaving it to individual researchers to fight their own isolated battles in funding the costs of publishing.
His views on research quality were echoed all-round, with USAf’s Dr Matutu (right) moving for the re-examination of especially the NRF’s current publishing incentives. “The bedrock of the NRF is to advance high-publishing scholars and therefore encourages volume. At the core of things, we need to overhaul our system and explore more creatively than we used to do in the past: prioritising quality over quantity.”
Ms Faranah Osman, Executive Director: Information Communication Technology & Knowledge Resources at the NRF, said the issues around research quality were a global problem. “People assume that publishing in high impact journals is a measure of success. The impact factor is not necessarily a measure of quality or excellence and can be driven by other factors. The result of this trend over years is that the system has incentivised the incorrect behaviour. Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) must become an area of focus for the scholarly community.
“Germany has already started running programmes to look at alternate metrics for research quality within the ambit of RRA. There are similar movements unfolding in Canada and the United States as well”.
On the regulatory front
From the DSI, DDG Patel (left) said this workshop was a timely intervention which provided an important platform for a deep-dive consideration of the status and future of Open Access as a critical policy imperative.
“Perhaps we need to introduce a focused deliverable within the Open Science strategy on Open Access, especially considering the need to enhance returns on public funding. It would be ideal to factor such a deliverable in the 2025-2030 strategic plan of the DSI and its entities, particularly the NRF and ASSAF. For now, there is a lot of ideas in play but these need to be crystallised into a clear deliverable for DSI.”
Patel further reflected on global developments including the recent successful BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] summit and noted that “there are opportunities for such an issue to be driven strongly by the expanded BRICS bloc as the bloc assumes a greater role in science and technology”.
Still on the development of the Open Access aspect to existing policy, DSI’s Moodley suggested the need for an Open Access Code of Conduct as a set of incentive schemes to encourage Open Access nationally. He encouraged continued collaboration with USAf to facilitate uniformity in the application of rules and reducing duplication of effort and conflict among higher education actors. He also cautioned that “Open Access is not going to solve all problems in academia. It is simply addressing a specific niche area.”
From the NRF, Ms Osman (left) said the Foundation was working towards a policy on Open Science and Open Access both from the perspective of a funder and a research performer. In addition, the NRF was keeping a close eye on what was happening. “Alongside looking at existing policies to inform the Open Science Policy as it pertains to the NRF, we are keen to work with the community on Responsible Research Assessment, Citizen Science and the development of an equitable costing model to support Open Access.
She said as a funder, the NRF continues to be concerned about the exorbitant Article Processing Charges and the lack of equitable solutions in the area. “The current cost of publishing poses a serious challenge to researchers. To address this challenge, we will be exploring equitable costing models and will need to engage with partners in the global south as well as key contributors to this discourse like the ISC and UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation] who also call for equity in scholarly publication.
Said Professor Bawa: “If we consider scientifically produced knowledge as a public good, the cost we should be concerning ourselves with is the cost of research which includes publishing. In our system, research money ultimately comes from one pot. We need to find a system-wide solution by reviewing particularly the way we manage research.”
As the meeting ended, Ms Ellen Tise (right), Chairperson of the SANLiC Board and Senior Director: Library and Information Services at Stellenbosch University, extended her gratitude to USAf for convening this dialogue and reviving the momentum from where things were left off before the CoViD-19 pandemic.
She also expressed hope that it would not be too long before the next round of engagements took place, to maintain the impetus and keep South Africa advancing on this discourse.
‘Mateboho Green is Universities South Africa’s Manager: Corporate Communication.
