Biodiversity remains relatively unknown and understudied in many parts of the developing world with significant information gaps, in stark contrast to many areas in the developed world, where knowledge about biodiversity can approach encyclopedic. Access to resources, such as funding, data, information, expertise, and biological collections (often collected by colonial-era scientists from across the developing world), is often quite limited for developing-world scientists. The life of a biodiversity scientist in the developing world is therefore one of manifold dilemmas and challenges, as well as numerous opportunities. Although collaborations exist between developing-world scientists and developed-world scientists, too many of those collaborations are not deep or permanent, and developing-world scientists are too often relegated to a subordinate role. The focus in this contribution is on providing suggestions for how to open and build access to resources for developing-world scientists. Everyone benefits if developing-world and developed-world scientists work together collaboratively to pose interesting and novel questions, generate new data, update existing data, carry out analyses, and arrive at interesting insights and interpretations. In this way, the biodiversity science community can replace “parachute” science with “global science.”

Replacing “parachute science” with “global science” in ecology and conservation biology

In this paper, we locate open access in the South African higher education research context where it is, distinctively, not shaped by the policy frameworks that are profoundly changing research dissemination behaviour in other parts of the world. We define open access and account for its rise by two quite different routes. We then present a case study of journal publishing at one South African university to identify existing journal publishing practices in terms of open access. This case provides the springboard for considering the implications – both positive and negative – of global open access trends for South African – and other – research and researchers. We argue that academics’ engagement with open access and scholarly communication debates is in their interests as global networked researchers whose virtual identities and online scholarship are now a critical aspect of their professional engagement.

/pdf/open-access-in-south-africa-a-case-study-and-reflections-2tzzh2m4xs.pdf

Open access in South Africa: A case study and reflections

Subtidal research presents numerous challenges that restrict the ability to answer fundamental ecological questions related to reef systems. These challenges are closely associated with traditional monitoring methods and include depth restrictions (e.g. safe diving depths for underwater visual census), habitat destruction (e.g. trawling), mortality of target species (e.g. controlled angling and fish traps), and high operating costs (e.g. remotely operated vehicles and large research vessels).

/pdf/new-possibilities-for-research-on-reef-fish-across-the-5gez9c7t0y.pdf

New possibilities for research on reef fish across the continental shelf of South Africa

A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant.  In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling. This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.

/pdf/bottlenecks-in-the-open-access-system-voices-from-around-the-2my0jajnv0.pdf

Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe

This is the final published version of the article. It was originally published in Communications of the Association for Information Systems (Kingsley, Danny A. and Kennan, Mary Anne (2015) "Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 37, Article 14. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/14). The final version is available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/14

https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3879&context=cais

Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing

A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant. In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple disciplines in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as diverse political and economic situations. We believe that this global sampling of researchers can provide the nuance and perspective necessary to grasp this complex problem. The group was assembled without an attempt to achieve global coverage through random sampling. This contribution differs from other approaches to the open-access problem in several fundamental ways. (A) It is scholar-driven, and thus can represent the ‘other side of the coin’ of scholarly communication. (B) It focuses on narrative report, where scholars were free to orient their responses as they saw fit, rather than being confined to binary or scalar choices. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, (C) it distinguishes among institutions and countries and situations, highlighting inequalities of access among wealthy and economically-challenged nations, and also within countries depending on the size and location of particular institutions.

Imre Szilágyi

Papers

Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe

Ozka grla sistema odprtega dostopa: glasovi iz sveta