NEWS BITS

This leadership summit was held to bring together the leaders from public universities of Southern Africa with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners of open access from around the world. The summit was organized and prepared by the African Access to Knowledge Alliance (AAKA). In particular special thanks goes to Dick Kawooya and Denise Nicholson from the Alliance for their advice, time and invaluable assistance, and Susan Veldsman for her encouragement.

This was our opportunity to test the waters of Open Access, weighing the pros and cons, review the implications for our institutions, and to consider the way forward. The meeting had in attendance about 90 people from different parts of the world with majority from the African continent. Countries represented included: South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, the Netherlands, Canada, Nigeria, Britain and the United States of America.

Open access is one of the pillars in Southern African Regional Universities Association’s (SARUA’s) strategies focus on Information Communication Technology (ICT), and presents us with a number of exciting challenges and pivotal opportunities for the revitalization of our tertiary institutions and our core mission of generating new knowledge and nurturing our future leaders.

Open access is an international movement that seeks to safeguard and facilitate access for all to knowledge, new and old as right. This movement is understandably spear-headed by higher education but includes a large and ever increasing alliance from a whole variety of backgrounds, discipline and faith. These were comments made by the CEO of SARUA, Piyushi Kotecha. This leadership summit was a successful with a number of presentations from the different participants.

The meeting began with a brief comment and welcome remarks from the vice chancellor of the University of Botswana, Prof. Bojosi Otlhogile who appreciated the Open Access system as a way of sharing knowledge through ICTs.He went ahead to say that they have recognized that the internet and associated digital technologies are creating new opportunities for developing alternative models of publishing and disseminating scholarly work. With this in mind, he noted that the theme of the University Leadership Summit, Open Access in Southern Africa is most pertinent.

An official address was also given by the Honorable J.D Nkate who is the Minister for Education in Botswana . He appreciated Open Access as a vital bridge to knowledge, skills, and competencies to contribute to socio-economic and cultural development: not only for our nation, but also for the Southern African region. He went ahead and appreciated research and innovation, and tertiary education as the basis for a society to adapt and advance in this era of modern technology.

Despite billions of dollars being spent by various governments on research and development every year, relatively little policy attention has yet been paid to the dissemination of the results of all that research through scientific and scholarly publishing.

Rural Outreach Programme is proud to be associated with an online journal that is available to all. The organization was well represented by Laura Byaruhanga, who with the help of the Editor-In-Chief and other Technical Assistants run the organization journal, AJFAND. Open Aceess is our initiative as an online journal. Our journal is available free of charge to all African and non-African readers. We as AJFAND being an internationally peer reviewed journal and published in Africa, basically targets the authors/researcher who do not have enough funds to publish in other journals that require money. We are glad to be associated with Bioline International which also provides us with electronic space so that our articles are available online, accessible to all at no fee. We have grown from strength to strength moving from print versions to going online. That has made it cheaper and much easier to run the journal online. Our cost charges have reduced and we are able to release four issues in a year. Our readers to the site have increased and articles coming in for publication are numerous. This is a boost to the journal because we are assured that being an open access journal we have managed to enlighten many scholars around the world.

A number of participants were selected by the organizers to spearhead and discuss way forward and how effective open access can be made to take foot effectively.  With an official closing remark from Piyushi Kotecha, CEO of  SARUA, she said that she was delighted to see the meeting end very successfully with contributions and presentations from all over the continent. She concluded that open access is the way forward to address the capacity and research needs of the SADC higher education institutions. It could also be a way to address the social, cultural and economic development priorities of the region.