Commercial publishers and epistemic coloniality

This article was originally published in French on Hekima. Philosopher à partir de l’Afriquehttps://hekimaphilosopher.com/2019/01/18/editeurs-commerciaux-et-colonialite-epistemique-partie-1-2. This is a translation authorized by the author.

There is a need to face the terrible reality of Africa-based researchers who are constantly faced by paywalls, ruthlessly expensive access, and publication fees. While Africanists in western universities benefit from their institutional subscriptions, the rising costs of scientific journals are unsustainable even for Canadian universities, let alone for under-funded African academic institutions.

https://africasacountry.com/2018/12/the-gentrification-of-african-studies

Some time ago, a note by Haythem Guesmi entitled « The gentrification of African studies » appeared on the analysis and criticism website Africa is a country, from which the quotation in the epigraph is extracted.

The text provides a diagnosis that deserves to be read in its entirety. If my attention has focused on the accuracy of several of the conclusions drawn, I mention it here mainly to introduce this post on free access that I have been wanting to write for a long time. I am always surprised by the lack of enthusiasm of most researchers scientifically committed to the decolonization of knowledge to actively promote and adopt open access as a key issue.

Multinational knowledge companies

On the fingers of one hand, we can count the number of university publishers who, alone, share half of the scholarly publishing market. Between 1986 and 2011, not only did they increase the price of the journals they publish by a factor of four, but they also succeeded in imposing indecent conditions on university libraries as a result of the digital transition. Publishers no longer authorize the purchase of « piece-rate » magazines or at such prohibitive costs that establishment budgets prohibit them from making such choices.

Instead, they are offered subscriptions by « bouquets », each containing a set of journals of unequal quality and prestige. So that instead of acquiring, for example, three highly coveted journals, librarians are forced to acquire several dozen additional journals of relative interest in order to ensure access to the three journals, at a cost corresponding to the increase in acquisitions. It should come as no surprise, the periodicals most in demand by researchers are scattered in a wide range of packages whose prices are also increasing by 10 to 20% annually.

In 2017, the authors of UdeM published 2544 free articles in the five major commercial publishers Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Sage. Still in 2017, UdeM libraries nevertheless had to pay $3.8 million to access the periodicals of the same five publishers…

Their business model (as lucrative as that of pharmaceuticals) is however entirely based on the unpaid production of articles produced by researchers ($), most often financed by public funds ($$), which in passing leave their copyrights to the journal ($$$), see their submission evaluated by peers solicited to carry out a voluntary review ($$$) which, in the end, are only accessible via a subscription by libraries ($$$$) ! What is virginly called the « knowledge economy » is based on a rent-geared-to-income economy (if not a cartel?) made possible by the predation of distribution channels. With such leonine practices, it is safe to say that most institutions in the South are out of the running in transnational research circuits from the very beginning, and that the work produced by their researchers is not surprisingly under-represented at the global level.

Hopes and disappointments of free access

Within this ecosystem, open access seeks to break this privilege and for-profit publishers have quickly understood it: it is indeed increasingly common for them to make outright proposals to authors to pay additional fees (which can amount to several thousand dollars, depending on the discipline) if they wish to make their work freely accessible. The formal definition of « free access » does not fit so easily into this small development: « open access » implies complete free access, whether monetary or informational (when the site requires your registration, names, institutions, contact details, etc.). In principle, therefore,Academia.edu or ResearchGate.net sites, while they certainly give visibility to the work and make it possible to network a large number of researchers (and as such, are structurally unavoidable) are not strictly speaking open access resources, even in their free version. Their analytical systems have the nasty flaw of encouraging the impoverishment of the field of possible scientific discoveries by making what the members of your network have read the boundaries of the literature review that should have been covered.

From the North, where an increasing amount of work is being produced on the decolonization of knowledge or on themes of interest to diasporas and their native communities, we have a responsibility not to lock our publications if we give emancipatory value to education and knowledge. If what will be exposed below will certainly not resolve the imbalance in the relationship of scientific reciprocity that we should aim for, unless we advocate for the « dropout » of globalized research, of the research ecosystems of the South (a defensible strategy, even if I do not share it), at least in the North we can oppose the trade-oriented options with two alternatives, called « golden » and « green » paths.

The golden path is to publish directly in an open access journal that publishes articles under either Creative Commons license. The Directory of Open Access Journal indexes thousands of quality open access scientific journals that follow a rigorous peer-review editorial process.

The green path consists in self-archiving your own publications on your personal website, blog or institutional archive (of a university, national research centre, etc.). Even with a paid journal, publishing contracts generally allow the archiving of one or other version of the text (print, pre-pub, pre-print, etc.) subject sometimes to a certain delay between publication and archiving. In some cases, it is even possible to make his text available in advance of official publication in the journal. In case of doubt about the possibilities contained in the publishing contract, you can consult different directories such as Sherpa/Romeo (English), Heloise (French), Dulcinea(Spanish) or even check with the publisher himself.

Because institutional archiving is carried out by professionals in the field of knowledge preservation, enhancement and dissemination, it is to be preferred where possible: thanks to them, 93% of institutional archives are indexed on the Google Scholar search engine, for example, which self-archiving will never achieve.

With its Horizon 2020 programme, the European Union has embarked on a binding path by requiring holders of European research funds to make their work freely available, subject to financial penalties if non-compliant with the conditions. These principles also officially apply to recipients of funds from Canadian granting agencies, but I know countless researchers who ignore this advice without any consequences.

Predatory publishers

We cannot conclude this post without mentioning the existence of another perverse phenomenon born as a result of the globalization of the university: predatory editions. Have you ever received a message from a publishing house that you have never contacted and that, wearing the respectable epithet of « academic », announces that it is looking forward to publishing your thesis? While there are certainly new inexperienced publishers who seek to build their catalog and go fishing for candidates, so-called predatory publishers are most often malicious and abuse both the naivety (or pride) of young authors, and academic pressure to publish at all costs (publish or perish). Not interested in the quality of either the manuscript or the final publication, these publishers do not follow the usual procedures of scientific evaluation**, put very little effort into revision and layout, do not fulfil their promises to distribute, require money to publish you, etc.

In such a way that a publication in this type of publishing house, instead of playing in favour of the candidate in a CV, discredits him/her in the eyes of those who know the phenomenon. In case of doubt, the tool created by Brock University can be consulted to facilitate the identification of these counterfeiters.

Notes and references

The information contained in this post are a synthesis of the knowledge acquired by attending various conferences or training sessions on the subject at the Université de Montréal. To go further, see in particular the work of Vincent Larivière, (associate professor at EBSI (UdeM) and holder of the Canada Research Chair on Transformations and Scholarly Communication) and Jean-Claude Guédon.

*Press release dated October 26, 2018 from the Bibliothèques de l’Université de Montréal.

** which can certainly be contested, but not without first proposing alternative models that guarantee a certain scientificity to science.

Featured image: Pixabay

Open Science in Africa – Challenges, Opportunities and Perspectives

Justin Ahinon and Jo Havemann, both founders of AfricArXiv, talk in this article about the development of Open Science Services in Africa, initiatives, the current situation and chances in the future.

This article was originally published at elephantinthelab.org (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1492745)

Open Science is becoming increasingly popular globally and provides unprecedented opportunities for scientists in Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America. African scientists face several difficulties when attempting to get their work published in peer-reviewed journals  – there is a small number of publication platforms, a lack of knowledge and access difficulties related to existing journals (whose visibility on the web is not very good) (Piron et al., 2017). There are also obstacles related to the functioning of the journals themselves ( notably the duration of the revision process and the cost of publications)  and the result is that science and scholarly publishing are often perceived as a prerogative of the Northern countries. The methods and techniques (including the peer-review process) that are being developed for its dissemination are not necessarily adapted to the contexts of other regions of the world, including Africa. Indeed, many African-based peer-reviewed scholarly journals are unable to host their content online due to resource limitations and the digital divide (Agaba et al., 2004).

In this article, we provide an overview of the most important initiatives and actors in the Open Science movement in Africa. We further identify three major challenges for Open Science on the African continent and offer perspectives for African researchers to actively contribute to the global scientific community and share knowledge to meet the challenges we all face.

OPEN SCIENCE IN AFRICA, WHERE ARE WE NOW?

The Open Science movement first appeared in the early 1990s in the United States, then very quickly spread to other regions of the world (North and South) in the 2000s (Decung & Mukuku, 2016). But this movement has not been received in the same way in the different regions of the continent. While the Maghreb countries have embarked on policies to open up public data since 2010, the momentum has been less spontaneous among French-speaking sub-Saharan African countries (Olivier, 2015). As for the English-speaking countries, they very quickly became involved in the movement; this is reflected in theprominent position they occupy on the continent in the ranking of countries in terms of data openness.

According to a study by the African Journal Online published in September 2014, of 319 journals listed on the African continent, 197 had open access publication policies. This study also reveals that the vast majority of the journals and archives surveyed (289) had English as their main language of publication. Only 13 used French as their main language of publication.
In the last decade, the need to promote and make the content produced in Africa or on topics related to Africa on the Internet more visible, has increased. Several initiatives have emerged from this growing need, all of which aim to reverse the trend in terms of Africa’s visibility on the scientific web:

OPEN ACCESS ADVOCACY

  • The SOHA project, launched in 2015, aims to make Open Science as a collective tool an essential development tool in French-speaking Africa and Haiti by developing empowerment and cognitive justice.
  • The African Open Science Platform (AOSP) is an initiative to better understand what is happening on the African continent, and to promote the value and exploit the potential of specifically Open Data.

OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN AFRICA

PREPRINT REPOSITORIES

OPEN SCIENCE HARDWARE

  • Open Science Hardware focused initiatives such as AfricaOSH promote the use of Open Educational Resources (OER), scientifically contribute to the makers’ movement, and facilitate collaboration between the different Open actors on the continent.
  • Scientists from Oxford University work with African colleagues to conduct LabHacks as engaging and educational events where multidisciplinary teams of students compete around design challenges to build low-cost laboratory equipment.
  • The TReND in Africa team works with African universities to teach research methods in Natural Sciences.

3 KEY CHALLENGES REMAIN

According to Nkolo (2016), three key challenges remain to be solved for Open Access – and consequently for full adoption of Open Science on the African continent. These are 1) Internet penetration, 2) political governance, and 3) the standardization of services and platforms.

ACCESS TO HIGH SPEED INTERNET

Internet access is one of the most recurrent hindrances for scientific research in Africa and remains very low in some regions and  internet penetration remains low across the continent (Attanasio, Giorgi). According to Internet World Stats, in 2016 there were about 453 million active Internet users in Africa. This gives a penetration rate of about 35%. In the field of education, progress in terms of Internet access varies from one country to another. For example, according to a May 2017 Internet Society report on Internet use in education in Africa, in countries such as Botswana, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal and South Africa, efforts to improve connectivity have enabled key actors in the education system to have better access to the Internet.

GOVERNANCE OF OPEN SCIENCE IN AFRICA

The Open Science movement in Africa could only benefit from a better or greater involvement of educational and political decision-making bodies. According to figures from the Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR), in 2018, the number of open access policies on the continent is evaluated at 31, the majority of which are from East African countries (17) and South Africa (9) (roarmap.eprints.org). In regions of the world where the Open Access movement has strong impact, such as India, Argentina and China, laws and policies are in place to promote Open Access and have played an important role (Hameau, 2015).

STANDARDIZATION AND INTEROPERABILITY

The establishment of standardized open directories or archives through digital libraries to increase the visibility of content produced by Africans, or on subjects related to the continent on the scientific web are needed. In addition, these will require coordination in the functioning of these different content distribution platforms. African scientists will gain a lot if the various initiatives to bring Open Access to the forefront collaborate.

WAYS FORWARD FOR OPEN SCIENCE IN AFRICA

Improving the quality of service and the Internet penetration rate on the continent will help to disseminate and share knowledge more effectively at the global level. National and pan-African policies for Open Access and collaboration between the various actors in Research and Economic Development will play a key role in the process of making science more visible within and outside Africa. This can be achieved strategically by creating an environment conducive to the implementation of Open Science practices on the one hand, and by making the above mentioned initiatives and services complementary, interoperable and thus more effective on the other hand.

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D’Eggis, Gilles (2013) Les archives ouvertes pour valoriser la recherche africaine : HAL — Francophonie, Afrique et Océan Indien. Le français à l’université. Bulletin des départements de français dans le monde(18–02)LINK. (accessed: 20th November, 2018)

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Piron, Florence, Antonin Benoît Diouf, Marie Sophie Dibounje Madiba, et al. (2017): Le Libre Accès vu d’Afrique Francophone Subsaharienne. Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication(11)LINK.(accessed: 20th November, 2018)

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AUTHOR INFO

Justin Sègbédji Ahinon is a web developer with a background in economic and financial statistics. He is strongly interested in open access issues in Africa as well as in the dissemination of knowledge and the means by which it is carried out on the continent. He is a fellow and recently a mentor of the Mozilla Open Leaders program where he worked on the place and importance of “informal” sciences in Africa. Justin is also the co-founder of AfricArxiv, an open access pre-publication directory for African scientists.

Jo Havemann is a trainer and consultant in Science Communication and Science Management with a PhD in Evolution & Developmental Biology. Her working experience covers NGOs, a science startup and international institutions including the UN Environment Programme. Since 2014, Jo offers courses and trainings with a focus on digital tools for Science through her label Access 2 Perspectives and aims at strengthening Research on the African continent through Open Science.

Ahinon, J., & Havemann, J. (2018). Open Science in Africa – Challenges, Opportunities and Perspectives. Elephant in the Labhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1492745