Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central had organised the third Open Access Africa conference at the University of Cape Town (UCT) last week. This was followed by the Berlin10 open access meeting at the University of Stellenbosch. Jonathan Harle of the Association of Commonwealth Universities has provided commentary on the events.
Open Access Africa was seen to have offered a refreshing chance to take a detailed look at the implications of OA for African research. UCT offered representation from projects such as the OpenUCT Initiative and the Scholarly Communications in Africa Programme. Complex issues were explored through the presentations and discussion amongst the speakers and delegates.
The event kicked off with an explanation of OA through a video. Deborah Kahn, Publishing Director, BioMed Central, pointed out that OA journals employ different business models but the same editorial quality standards as other journals.
The use of the Impact Factor to assess individual researchers was condemned a number of times, with Eve Gray describing it as a 'car crash' for African researchers, partly due to the lack of developing country research in the database that is used to make the calculation.
Michelle Willmers spoke about incentive and reward systems for achieving impact through research, and the current focus on prestige instead of relevance. There was also encouragement to think beyond the journal in terms of how research is communicated.
The importance of African journals is said to have come through strongly. Susan Murray of African Journals Online (AJOL) pointed out that development of publishing capacity was often overlooked in work to strengthen research capacity in African higher education. Marcel Hommel, Editor-in-Chief of Malaria Journal, showed that 90 percent of malaria mortality was in Africa but less than 2 percent of malaria articles were published in African journals. Conrad Ononhinmin, co-ordinator of the Nigerian open access group, questioned the effect on African journals of policies employed by OA publishers based in the North to waive article-processing charges for authors from developing countries.
The power of students as advocates for OA was demonstrated by Daniel Mutonga from the Medical Students Association of Kenya (MSAKE). That was backed up by Laura Czerniewicz, pointing out that students are often the most ardent advocates as they realise that when they leave university they will lose access to subscription content.
The Wellcome Trust, the World Bank, and the Department for International Development (UK) reportedly demonstrated the progressive thinking of their organisations in realizing the value of making their research and data openly available. It is expected that more organisations will take this approach in the future.
