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Open Access, Schorlarly Publishing and Knowledge Production in Sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities and Challenges

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Open Access, Schorlarly Publishing and Knowledge Production in Sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities and Challenges Open Access, Schorlarly Publishing and Knowledge Production in Sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities and Challenges Ondari Okemwa 0 1. Introduction The Internet has fundamentally changed the processes of scholarly Publishing and hence, production of new knowledge, which according to Crow (2008), now takes place through blogs, social networks, and social media sites. Included in this evolution is the way scholarly communication is now conducted. The open access movement is increasingly guiding the publishing practices of scholarly research. Publishing can now be an immediate process accessible by anyone in the world with internet connectivity. Hide (2010) attributes the dramatic changes of how researchers access and use information over the last few years to technological innovations, changes within the publishing community and the need to enhance research impact. In recent decades, academic libraries all over the world have been struggling to provide access to all of the journal titles needed by their users owing to inadequacies of library budgets and skyrocketing journal subscription prices. Added to this, the current publishing models limit the access and re-use of research findings, potentially hindering the return on research investment. These changes have triggered an ongoing international debate on issues including ‗open access‘, ‗open data‘ and alternative models of scholarly publishing. These discussions have resulted in a number of initiatives and statements around the globe by various groups and organizations. Some Published information has been made free to read, sample and remix, as well as to create something new without fear of reprisal. New forms of scholarly communication are beginning to impact the way the publishing industry operates, a trend which may have lasting effects. Open access has been touted as an alternative to making scholarly publishing and access to knowledge and information easier in sub-Saharan Africa but its implementation may take long before it is fully realised (Nwagwu and Ahmed, 2009). The Public Library of Science (2015) looks at open access as a situation where everything that is published should be freely available online throughout the world, for anybody to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish. No permission is required from any quarters. Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data, metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material. It is argued that whether one is a patient seeking health information, an educator wishing to enliven a lesson plan, or a researcher looking to formulate a hypothesis, making papers freely available online provides one with the most current peer-reviewed scientific information and discoveries. The most current peer-reviewed scientific information and discoveries are supportive knowledge production elements. Nicholson (2015) argues that more than 850 enlightened publishers around the world now facilitate access to knowledge by allowing institutions to deposit their final PDF published articles onto open access institutional repositories. They will benefit from sharing knowledge; their publications will get more readers; the authors will get more citations and increased impact. This kind of move may also enable scholars in sub-Saharan Africa to benefit from sharing their knowledge, having access to knowledge produced in other regions of the world, getting more citations and of course increased impact. Open access publishing serves to question the fixtures in scholarly (book) publishing that we have grown accustomed to, especially those established as part of the modern system of 1 | P a g e scholarly communication and the mostly print-based media ecologies of the 20th century (Adema, 2015). Open access publishing as a mode of knowledge production, distribution and sharing has been seen to function as a critique of the traditional mode of publishing. However, open access publishing as a mode of knowledge production and distribution is not totally without criticism. Adema (2015) further argues that radical open access constitutes an integral critique of openness, both of the strategic openness of the wider open access movement, but also of the more neoliberal incarnations of open access that favour business logic and that promote the existing hegemonic power structures and vested interests of the scholarly publishing system. Both are in their own way very anxious about questioning or disturbing the object-formation of the book. Striphas (2010) tries to find out how, through experimentation, scholarly practices can be performed differently in order to rethink those practices that are pertinent today, both in theory and practice. Scholars‘ socially constructed habits and honoured ways of doing things lead them to engage with repetitive practices in the way they read, write, do research, publish and assess their research findings. Striphas (2010) is of the opinion that scholars need to think more creatively and expansively about the fixtures in scholarly communication and how they might work otherwise, like peer review and authorship, for instance. Striphas (2010) makes use of his Difference and Repetitions wiki to experiment with new, digital, and collaborative writing practices that challenge the accustomed tradition of single authorship and the idea of ownership of works and ideas, trying to not give in to the compulsion to repeat and merely produce more of the same. For Striphas, the open wiki experiment is not meant to function as a new type of institution but as a thing to think with, ongoing, changing, and uncertain. He points out this experiment has thought him, and can teach other scholars ‗a great deal about the types of questions they might ask about their performances of scholarly communication in general, and of academic journal publishing in particular‘ (Striphas 2011). 2.0 Scholarly Publishing Scholarly publishing is mostly associated with scholars that teach and/or conduct research in institutions of higher learning and other institutions of research. Castells (2004) looks at the university as being critical for the generation of knowledge, technological innovation and the development of human resources. Scholarly publishing normally refers to published research output of the higher education sub-sector as well as that of government and science councils (De Beer, 2005). Some corporations in the private sector are also involved in research and publication. Maher (2006) argues that when a research university decides to hire or promote a faculty member, the university has to make sure it is hiring or promoting a very good scholar and a person who will do a very good job in both research and the instruction of students. Maher further argues that those evaluations of a good scholar are not easily separable from the evaluations of the quality of the scholarship in journals, given that it is the scholarship that the particular faculty member puts into journals that will give the best measure of how that faculty member is contributing. The four main parties usually involved in scholarly publishing are scholars, editors, publishers and subscribers. Large academic and/or research institutions are the major subscribers of scholarly publications. 2 | P a g e In the 21st century, scholarly publishing should be expected to serve the purpose of disseminating knowledge besides the traditional purposes of communicating results of research and enabling scholars to keep abreast of the latest developments in their disciplines or sub-disciplines. Scholars seeking promotions are also evaluated on the strength of the number of scholarly articles they have published and the reputation of the journals in which they publish their research findings. Journal rankings may also be used by university authorities to gauge the progress and impact of faculty members. World university rankings also take into account the number of articles published by faculty members of each university ranked. Scholarly publishing is an important manifestation of knowledge generation and diffusion (De Beer, 2005). 2.1 Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa The United Nations Institute of Statistics, Bulletin on Science and Technology Statistics (UIS, 2005) indicate that the whole of Africa represents 1.4% of the world scholarly publications in 2000. However, scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa is faced with challenges in the 21st Century. Scholarly publishing does not have a long history in sub-Saharan Africa and the larger African continent. Journals have been largely acknowledged by scholars as the most effective means of disseminating scholarly research findings. The twenty-first century also brings with it technological, political, social-economic challenges that scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa must contend with. Challenges aside, the twenty-first century is also expected to present numerous opportunities to the scholarly publishing fraternity in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Information and communication technologies are poised to make digital access to scholarly resources more easily accessible. Digital publishing, preservation of information and fast access to scholarly resources are all being made possible by new developments in information
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