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CONTINUING EDUCATION FOR AJFAND STAFF::

OPEN ACCESS AND THE EVOLVING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT
SEMINAR HELD ON FEBRUARY  17 – 19, 2010 AT NAIROBI UNIVERSITY
By Emily Kaveza, Editorial Assistant, AJFAND

The seminar was jointly organised and  facilitated by Bioline International and eIFL.net and was hosted by Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium.

Research fora and deliberations therein create a multi-dimensional approach in implementation of various proposals from stakeholders.This gives scientists and scholars a platform to share, improve and advance their research methodologies and innovations.The emerging digital research repository is a major tool in research that is now adopted my scientists globally. These repositories collect, preserve and provide free, unrestricted online access to all research outputs.

The seminar agenda
The open access seminar was held with a defined agenda to:

• Address participants’ concerns
• Teach publishers new approaches in utilising and packaking Knowlege, Information and Technology (K.I.T)
• To draw the attention of  researchers on the need to publish their work
• To address the impact factor as far as authors are concerned
• To encourage participants to digitalize their work

Numerous outstanding contributions  from a section of participants were made. Daisy, the Editor-in-Chief of Marine Science Journal, who is also a communication officer at the United Nations Kenya, admitted that although most people are going online, there are glaring challenges that face African online journals.

The aforementioned challenges have hindered the positive progress of  Science journals in Africa . Policy makers need this information but is not readily available to them. Authors publish their research work without considering availability, accessibility, sharing, utilisation and ultimatedissemination of their information. The  impact factor must be fully exemplified.

Hon.Prof. Ruth Oniang’o,  Editor-in-Chief of African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development(AJFAND) was one of the facilitators. According to her, she started with print version and produced only three volumes before going online. Print version made it difficult to correct  errors that appeared in the final document in the journal publication. Internet has opened up opportunities to expand views and digital work can be corrected. The journal used to produce two issues per year under tight resources but because of internet facilities the journal has grown and now an issue comes out monthly.
The journal production is at times constrained due to insufficient funds to facilitate its publication and remunerate reviewers. With the  issue of impact factor, the journal refers its readers to Bioline, which hosts  a number of journals including  AJFAND. They give statictics on how people access it.

The journal has its way of maintaining the reviewers. Guest Editors are invited from the available selected reviewers, and this has encouraged them to uphold their association with AJFAND, at the same time enriching their CVs. AJFAND also carries short profiles of the  some of the  reviewers on the website and they are seen by anyone accessing the site. This has made many people send in requests to be included on the board and the list of volunteers has grown. Her concern is how to  bridge the gap between  the policy makers and researchers, by fostering good relation and understanding between them. Most policy makers do not comprehend the real nitty-gritty issues in research, and they must be highlighted to them.

We had also a discussion on emerging issues amongst African researchers and it was led by Prof.Abukutsa Mary, who is one of  AJFAND reviewers. The available statistics show that there are  25,000 peer reviewed journals in the world, but many African researchers are not  publishing their work in good number. The participants discussed why African journals are not competitive.

Constraints in publishing African Journals

• African scholars limit their publications to an African context. Most are yet to embrace the new and evolving ICT advancements, and still harbour the fear that developed  countries may not accept their  research work.
• Impact factor. Many researchers do not understand the expected impact of their research work and consequent publications.
• Sustainability of African journals.Of the many African journals available, very few are consistent and up-to-speed with their publications.
• Quality. Poor writing skills and lack of  Impact factor  ends up  in poor quality work,  a major concern to Africa journals as they are not understood by many.
• Lack of information.
• Financial constraint for authors. Many authors who are sitting with their research work because they do not have funds to publish.
• Lack of recognition and appreciation thereof by the government
• Lack of communication between researchers and policy makers. Some of our policy makers are not aware what the researchers do thus they are uninformed, and most of them are inaccessible.  
• Inadequate  peer reviews. The few  reviewers availbale are either not well paid or simply work as volunteers. This, coupled with their own seperate tasks can be voluminous and thus stressing.  
• Lack of proper collaboration and discipline.Some researchers don’t uphold the professional ethics and discipline when collaborating with the publishers.
• Lack of appreciation of our own work. Some Africans still despise the quality of  work done by African Journals as they deem Western publications superior.
• ICT challenge for some researchers. Old researchers find it hard to cope up with the new technology and use the old methodology of printing, which is expensive and limiting in the number of end user.

Resolutions to the emerging issues
Numerous proposals with regard to the way forward, as pertains the said constraints were raised, the most notable being to:

• Sensitize and train reserachers on publishing and open access
• Inform and lobby for more funding for dissermination
• Fundraising through proposal writing
• Orgainize information literacy program
• Create links for reviewers and authors
• Initiatives to enhance collaboration between relavant collaboration among stakeholders
• Develop proposals for capacity building
• Registering articles to GPO to protect it from copyright
• Changing policies in the institutions
• To collaborate with National Council of Science and Technology (NCST)
• Create database of professionals and avail it to the insitutions.

The facilitator of the seminar, Leslie Chan,  who is the Program Supervisor Bioline International, gave his lecture about Open Access. It’s composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. No restrictions are impossed on their use by readers. The service is freely  available online to download, read, copy, distribute, print, search, pass them as data to software without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable of gaining access to the internet itself. But Open Access is not self publishing, it is the means to make research results freely availabe online to the whole research community.

A researcher can place a copy of each article in an open access repository or publish in Open Access journals. Authors are encouraged to provide open access to their work because according to the research, articles that have been self archived are cited more than those that have not. It is important for institutions to create repositories. There are digital collections of the outputs within universities or reseach insitution.  The purposes of the repositories may vary according to  insititions and we had 1300 repositories around the world at the beginning of 2009.

Benefits of a repository to an institution

• Opens up the outputs of the university to the world
• Maximises the visiblity and impact of these outputs
• Collects and curates digital outputs
• Manages and measures research and teaching activities
• Provides a work space for work in progress and for collaborative or large scale projects
• Enables and encourages interdisciplinary approaches to research
• Facilitates the development and sharing of digital teaching materials and aids
• Supports student endeavours, providing access to theses and dissertations and a location for the development of e-portfolios.

According to Iryna Kuchma, Eifl.net open Acess program manager, digitital repositories offer many practical benefits as follows:

• More exposure. They make your work  available to everyone who may be interested.
• Universal access. The work is available to all
• Easier information discovery.
• New computational research techniques. Repositories open door to new computational research techniques. 
• Persistent access. By providing your work in a repository, they will have persistant URLs (reference URL) that will never change.
• Long term preservation
• Wide range on content. Digital repositories collect more than just journal publications.

The repositories are administered by libraries, which make use of the existing library infrastructure and technology to host the repository and provide support for the academic community. Eifl.net is working together with 4000 libraries in 47 countries to enable access to knowledge. African members include: Zambia. Ghana, Botswana, Camerron, Senegal, Malawi and Kenya. Copyright restrictions may impact whether you can deposit a published article into a digital repository. E.resources allows acess of journal and database and improves affordability while eifl-ip deals with copyright and libraries to ensure that there is fair and balanced copyright laws.

Group discussions
The last day, we broke into small groups for discussion. We had to set a respository and the following were the guidelines:

• Come up with a plan
• How to set up the repository
• Contents
• Servises
• Management
• Promotion

In our group we formed a repository called Akiba Space. It entails:

• Plan: A team consisting of IT specialists, researchers, administrator and libranians to be constituted.

Akiba space has a vission of making information known to open access globally.
The mission is  to digitalize, preserve and share the knowledge. We also set goals of digitalizing the contents, provide access and promote objectives

• Set up: In the set up, we need hard ware, soft ware, funds and skilled staff
• Content : The content will have research report, speeches and lectures, exam papers, multimedia and journal articles
• Services: Usage statistics, access, need assessment, reports that people require.
• Management: We need people who will manage. This includes IT system administrators, technical person, metadata control, researcher/faculty.
• Promotion: We will register with haversters, avail google or linkages, provide bronchures.

The challenges that the repository will face are digitalizing equipment scanner, sustainability of Africa journals, funds, capacity and joining efforts.