Tom Olyhoek, Miho Funamori, Iryna Kuchma, Kathleen Shearer, Ivonne LujanoAbstract: This year’s course has changed its focus away from last year’s focus on PlanS to spend more time discussing the developments of different aspects in scholarly communication that were set in motion by the continuing global rise of open access and open science. This will be done in three sessions on bibliodiversity and multilingualism; community governed infrastructures; and research assessment reform.
We will discuss the publisher-dominated scholarly publishing system in the North – subscription and open access, maintained by publisher-controlled metrics and ranking – versus the community-controlled open access publishing system in Latin America and the society-based subscription system and governmental infrastructures in Japan and other Asian countries. Publishing in Africa is much less developed, but we will discuss steps that have been taken there toward a community-controlled infrastructure.
The current system promotes the communication of research in English because of the artificially imposed need to publish in highly ranked journals form the major Western publishers. Ranking and English language requirements are the major obstacles for more bibliodiversity.
A community-controlled system for indexation of quality open access journals in all languages and without ranking would be able to increase bibliodiversity and equity in scholarly publishing globally. DOAJ is such an infrastructure and the criteria and policies of DOAJ will be discussed.
Another obstacle in getting a more equitable publishing and research system lies with the research community itself. Many researchers hold the belief that open access is of lesser quality and that their local-language journals are always inferior to Western English language journals. We will discuss the need for communication in the researcher's own language, especially for the SSH disciplines.
In order to achieve more equity and diversity across borders, the current evaluation of research and researchers needs to be transformed. DORA has a crucial role in this process, as has the Plan S initiative, which has research evaluation reform as one of its major goals.
In Europe there is the creation of a coalition for research assessment reform (
https://ec.europa.eu/info/news/process-towards-agreement-reforming-research-assessment-2022-jan-18_en) in individual countries, universities, and research organizations that subscribed to the DORA principles are developing new ways of research assessment.
The effects of Plan S are felt worldwide, but outside of Europe – i.e., in the United States, Africa and Asia – the outcome is not always what is wanted.
In African countries there is a wealth of local knowledge that could contribute to solving local and global problems. African open access journals and open repositories in English, French, Portuguese, and local languages play a crucial role in unlocking this hidden knowledge.
It requires a change of mindset from researchers in Africa and elsewhere as well as from policy makers worldwide in order to identify responsible research assessment from a uniquely African perspective and to set up standards for quality assurance and integrity in African research practices with open science as an underlying principle instead of trying to adhere to current Western standards of journal ranking and research assessment. A number of organizations are working toward this goal in Africa, notably AJOL, ASREN, EIFL, UbuntuNet Alliance, WACREN, ASSAf, and TCC Africa-AfricArxiv.
Audience: Researchers, librarians, faculty/scholars and publishers.
LIVE ZOOM SESSION SCHEDULE (All times Pacific UTC-7)Tuesday, July 267-9AM
Wednesday, July 277-9AM
Thursday, July 287-9AM
