Rector and Vice-Chancellor of Stellenbosch University, Professor Russel Botman;
Vice-rector: Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, Professor Eugéne Cloete;
Director of IT Services and Communication at Stellenbosch University, Dr Reggie Raju;
Representatives from the Academy of Science of South Africa;
Dignitaries and delegates from abroad;
Ladies and gentlemen
I am honoured to be here with you tonight. Thank you, Professor Botman, for the very kind words of introduction.
I would like to commend Stellenbosch University on hosting this conference, along with a number of partners including the Max Planck Society and the Academy of Science of South Africa. As this year has been declared the German/South African Year of Science, allow me to extend a particularly warm welcome to officials from this eminent Society. Stellenbosch University was the very first Sub-Saharan higher education institution to sign the Berlin Declaration, and the university’s institutional repository known as SUNscholar ranks amongst the best in the world.
So it is fitting for Stellenbosch to host this Open Access Conference, being held for the very first time on the African continent. The hosting of this conference will undoubtedly enhance the international recognition of Africa as a significant contributor to the world’s knowledge production. This makes it vitally important for conference delegates to identify issues that would boost the inclusion of African countries in the knowledge economy.
Academic libraries, especially those in Africa, have limited access to critical research information. This stifles the growth of African research and its capacity to find solutions to the plethora of problems confronting the continent. Access barriers sometimes even result in critical, relevant knowledge and research outputs generated in Africa being published in journals overseas – journals that are not affordable to African academic libraries. This means that Africa is in fact deprived of its own knowledge production, relegating the continent to the status of silent and invisible contributor to research output. The adoption of open-access principles, which can help to remove these financial barriers to access to information, is one of the most progressive ways of growing and showcasing African research.
The idea of the Berlin Open Access was, as you know, initiated by the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in 2003, with the signing of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. In signing the Declaration, governments, funding agencies, research institutions, libraries, museums and archives made a commitment towards actively promoting the internet as a medium for disseminating research findings and global knowledge.
Globalisation often has negative connotations, but few would deny its positive influence on the movement of people, knowledge and ideas across national borders. Researchers, who find themselves at the core of this growing global knowledge society, recognise the importance of interconnectedness to accelerate the pace of research and to engage collaboratively in the production of knowledge and innovation by openly sharing research output by, for example, publishing directly in open-access journals. This trend towards open access and increased collaboration is primarily driven by the growth of Information Technology and particularly the internet, which provides unimpeded access to scientific information.
So, one may ask, what significance does this have for us, especially here in Africa? We all know that the days of referring to Africa as a dark continent are thankfully now over. Ours is a continent of possibilities and high economic growth potential. As a continent, we are working towards a knowledge driven African economy which thrives on education and training. This economy will depend upon an educated and skilled population and a dynamic information infrastructure. The worldwide web is pivotal in facilitating effective communication, dissemination and processing of information from and to a network of research centres, universities, think-tanks and active citizens.
Ladies and gentleman, I’m sure you all know by now that Africa was selected to host one of the biggest science projects the world has ever seen, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Through the SKA, scientists from all over the world will collaborate in trying to unravel the mysteries of our universe.
Information will need to be shared around the clock between Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.
Open-access literature will be key to the success of this project. It serves the interests of many groups, giving authors a global audience larger than that of any subscription-based journal and increasing the visibility and impact of their work. Open access means that readers can get the information they need for their research, unconstrained by budgets or a lack of access privilege. It helps academic libraries and universities, reducing their expenditure on journals and catapulting the reach of their research. Open access also helps journals and publishers in that it makes their articles more visible, retrievable and useful.
The South African Government invests substantially in the nurturing of a culture of research production. Allow me to cite a few examples. The Department of Science and Technology, through our partner, the Academy of Science of South Africa, supports the Scientific Electronic Library Online South Africa, more widely known as SciELO. This is an open-source software-based system that ensures that work published in local journals becomes more visible through search engines and bibliometric tools. For journals to be loaded on the SciELO platform, they must go through a quality assurance process which is essentially a peer review of disciplinary groupings of South African scholarly journals.
South Africa's higher education system is dependent on access to widely used publication platforms - academic journals and books. Access to these resources is necessary if our postgraduate students, researchers and academics are to function at the cutting edge of global knowledge in their respective fields. A critical component of the design of the SKA will be the challenge of the transmission and processing of huge volumes of data. The DST has requested the Academy of Science of South Africa to investigate the electronic information needs of academic staff, postgraduate students and researchers within universities and research councils in South Africa. The DST, together with the Department of Higher Education, is currently exploring ways in which institutions can access scholarly journals in commercially funded databases through a system of nationally centralised subscriptions to e-publications.
This is one of the two joint collaboration priorities and the results will guide us as to the information needs of established and emerging researchers in the Research and Development system in South Africa. The investigation will also provide us with a list of relevant databases which may be considered for special licensing support. Scenarios for the funding of a set of national or institutional licences for core e-Journals will be explored, as well as funding and the identification of possible participating stakeholders.
The second priority is ensuring that access to high-quality and impactful commercial databases is seen as an emerging pillar of the envisaged ‘National Digital Library’ as proposed in the 2011 Green Paper for Post School Education and Training. The two departments, DST and Higher Education and Training, are working jointly on this project and we look forward to positive outcomes in this regard.
The question of who pays for academic research is of course another key issue that will inevitably be discussed at this forum. The UK government announced in July 2012 that it plans to make all research open access by the year 2014, a move that has its fair share of both supporters and detractors. A year after the idea of Berlin Open Access was initiated by the Max Planck Society, the former Guardian newspaper editor Donald MacLeod described open access as the practice that “would make scientific research freely available on the internet.” Now, of course, the question has moved on from whether or not open access will be introduced, to how it should be introduced. The so-called “gold” open access will require authors to pay a publishing fee, whereas the “green” open access strategy will, according to Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample, “allow researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals.”
My mention of these two options should not be seen, however, as a trivialisation of the complexities of moving to an open access approach to scientific publication. Associated with the established, commercial publications process is a systematic peer review system, whose essential contribution to quality assurance of scientific output must be maintained as a cornerstone of the global science system; the move to open access publishing will need to ensure this highly systematised and valued function is not undermined, especially in light of the vast volumes of completely un-vetted claims and reports awash on the internet.
Earlier in the week, the EU Commissioner, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and I gave closing remarks at an event organised to promote cooperation between our young researchers and those from Europe. It is my view that without open access our young scientists will be disadvantaged in their collaboration with European counterparts. We therefore need to unite to ensure that the playing field is levelled through access to new knowledge without financial and infrastructural barriers.
It is now indeed the right time to talk about open access with growth in internet and broadband accelerating in Africa at an unprecedented rate due to improvements in infrastructure. Over the last decade internet use on the continent has grown at a staggering 2000%, will over the global average of 480%. But while the wave of Africa’s development in terms of economy, growth and other social indicators moves forward, we need to ensure that education and science do not get left behind.
Turning now from food for thought to real food, I am sure that you are all as eager as I am to enjoy the main meal. If the starter was anything to go by, we are all in for a true indulgence in fine cuisine. To conclude, though, I’d like to concur with Nasbitt, whom Prof Botman quoted last night – indeed “the new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of the many.”
Thank you.
