■ OA repositories with archived copies of articles that are published in regular journals (the so-called OA Green option), whether subject specifi c, such as arXiv, or institutional, provide additional access and visibility. This has advantages for readers who do not have subscription access or who cannot pay the pay-per-view fee, as well as for authors who achieve greatly enhanced visibility.
■ OA repositories have to be created, branded, managed, marketed and maintained. The costs to archive are minimal, but ongoing curation costs will accumulate. The barriers for changing the commercially oriented communication system have been greatly underestimated and need to be managed.
■ OA is signifi cantly devalued where harvesting of the published material is sub-standard: this very important activity should be planned for if impact is to be maximized.
■ The barriers to changing the commercially oriented communication system were greatly underestimated and this needs to be managed.
■ Vested interests are emerging – the ‘commercial’ publishers have a business with a profi t motive, while governments/other funders are resisting ongoing copyright “raiding” by publishers.
■ Parallel print with electronic (delayed or immediate) OA has been demonstrated as no real threat to conventional publishing from the viewpoint of declining subscriptions, and has shown evidence of increased citation.
Online publishing initiatives presently under way
The dominant player on the South African scene is Sabinet Online, which launched a platform, SA ePublications (http://www.journals.co.za/ej/), in June 2004 with 40 online journals, from a universe of 700 that already existed in print and which they considered to be suitable targets for e-publishing. To date (September 2005), 192 journals have been signed on, and negotiations are underway with the publishers of another 300. (Their original plans included other African countries but two unsuccessful experiments relegated this effort to the background).
■ 84 of the 192 appear on the DoE list of accredited journals.
■ Fifteen of these journals are in the ISI database, although only one of these (Perspectives in Education), is accredited by the DoE; seven are in the International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS).
Sabinet Online adds value by aggregating the titles from many different publishers under one interface and search system, while simultaneously increasing market awareness of the publications and growing their revenue streams. They do not play any role in peer review and content defi nition which is left in the hands of the organisations to which the journals belong, which makes them the real publishers. Sabinet Online contracts with publishers are not exclusive, and the right to publish in an OA repository is granted by the publisher. Publishers must, however, adhere to a negotiated publishing schedule and they retain copyright.
Sabinet Online prices its input at 10-20% of the publishing cost, which includes:
■ abstracting the content of each article by indexing it according to keyword, broad subject, author(s), and title categories;
■ making all articles fully searchable, with complete ease of access;
■ marketing the publications both locally and internationally, making them readily accessible not only to the present core of subscribers, but also to the vast global population;
■ acting as intermediary between publishers and subscribers; and
■ compiling articles in PDF with metadata in XML.
JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org) and LOCKSS (http://lockss.stanford.edu/) are considered as possible platforms for eventual preservation of back numbers in fully indexed and accessible formats.
From 2002 – 2003 there was a doubling in downloads from the Sabinet Online e-journals, which is a good indication of use although it is also infl uenced by increased content.
Subscribers can subscribe to the entire package or to any of the following 6 collections:
Business & Finance, Law, Medical and Health, Religion, Science, Technology and Agriculture, Social Sciences and Humanities. Subscription prices are not standard and are negotiated in each case. In the case of a library, the subscription model is similar to that of ScienceDirect, ie the licence fee is based on the cost of the journals to which users can subscribe in hard copy.
Many of the journals are free. Six overseas universities subscribe to one or more packages. An extensive international marketing campaign is being planned.
In fi nancial terms, most publishers have gained a lot from going the e-route. Journal subscriptions have increased, and in 2005 Sabinet Online paid out in excess of R1 million in royalties to the publishers, many of whom had never been able to make any margin.
Another prominent player is NISC-SA in Grahamstown. In addition to being the online publisher of ten South African journals they also host African Journals online (AJOL) and a number of other databases with South African and African content. Two of these NISC-SA journals are listed by the ISI, while another three appear in the DoE accreditation list.
The South African Journal of Science Website (www.nrf.ac.za/sajs/index.stm), as an example of the local situation, is not yet on par with the best international journals. The online version is on the SA ePublications platform. A few observations:
■ The existence of the online version is mentioned as an announcement on the index page, but not on the subscription page; it looks as though it is something totally different.
■ The current online copy is not synchronized with the current print copy creating the impression that it is not the same publication.
■ Linking to the full text of the articles is more or less non-existent unless subscribers enter through another route.
■ Online versions of the articles are in PDF only, and the journal lacks the vibrant feel of a Community of Practice of Scientists that is visible in other online sources, e.g.
CHAPTER 5: GLOBAL ERESEARCH TRENDS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICAN RESEARCH PUBLISHING
– www.nature.com/index.html
– www.sciencemag.org/content/current/
– www.sciencemag.org/
– www.scienceonline.org/
To sum up: the modern trend for a fl agship journal is to offer:
■ quality content collected as part of a process with integrity;
■ publication online (in addition to a print copy);
■ each article available as an abstract, full text (HTML) and PDF, sometimes even with supporting online material;
■ CrossRef to link content between journals and publishing platforms, and other forms of static and dynamic linking, including links to data;
■ strong customized linking from all web sites taking the reader directly to full text entitlements;
■ additional journal web sites or portals acting as a meeting place for the community of interest around the journal or group of journals, and providing tools and services;
■ a fl exible policy regarding OA archiving and any embargo period; and
■ indexing in major bibliographic databases, preferably inclusion in ISI.
Dissemination of the content of South African journals
South African research fi ndings need not only to be published: they should also be discoverable by search engines and “crawlers”, and should be included in leading bibliographic databases as far as is possible.
South African journals are included in international databases on the EbscoHOST, Proquest and Infotrac platforms as well as in numerous subject-specifi c databases. It may be worth the effort to determine the extent of inclusion in these databases and the impact it has on article usage. Guidelines on how to have a journal listed in databases other than the ISI suite may also be of help to SA journal publishers. NISCSA in Grahamstown publishes a number of databases particularly aimed at disseminating African research (http://www.nisc.com).
African Journals Online (AJOL) (http://www.ajol.info) is an initiative of INASP3 to increase the visibility of African journals amongst the global research community. The service consists of an online catalogue and current awareness system, as well as document delivery on a per article basis. The journals owners receive $5 for each article delivered. Participation is free for all SA journals. Currently there are 195 journals from 21 countries comprising 13000+ article abstracts. The entire operation was recently relocated to NISC-SA in Grahamstown.
At present, these two entities (Sabinet Online and NISC/AJOL) are seen as competitors. It may be in the interests of SA Research to encourage collaboration.
Open Access institutional repositories in South Africa
Locally the success rate for archiving in institutional repositories is thus far extremely low, although a number of initiatives are underway. No local university as yet has an institutional repository for archiving locally produced journal articles either as pre- or post-prints although a number of institutions are in the process of setting up repositories. The UCT Computer Science Department has a Research Document Repository that contains journal articles as well as other documents. OA repositories for theses and dissertations exist at the Universities of Pretoria and Johannesburg, while the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Rhodes University, the University of the Free State and the University of South Africa have non-OA thesis repositories.
There is an arXiv mirror site at Wits. In most cases, there is as yet no formal requirement by institutions for Masters or Doctoral candidates to lodge digital copies of their theses in repositories, although this model has been adopted widely elsewhere in the world.
Comprehensive harvesting of South African OA repositories has not received any attention so far, but a few repositories are listed in the Registry of Institutional Open Access Repositories
3 With fi nancial support from UNESCO, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Swedish International Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the UK Dept of International Development (DFID)
(http://archives.eprints.org/) and are harvested by OAIster and the NDLTD Union Catalog (http://alcme.oclc.org/ndltd/index.html).
Another possibility arising from OA repositories is that of overlay journals. These virtual