The SCAP implementation initiative
SCAP’s research design called not only for the collection of data from our various pilot sites, but the active stimulation of these sites through customised implementation initiatives (or “interventions”) that sought to improve the state of scholarly
communication within them. Five principal assumptions underpinned these initiatives.
They would:
1. Be treated as experiments.
2. Address a challenge articulated by project participants in pilot sites and other institutional stakeholders.
3. Be publishing-oriented, addressing content profiling and dissemination through new tools and technologies.
4. Utilise open approaches (including open source software and publishing platforms) wherever possible.
5. Yield insights that could be extrapolated to the rest of the institution, developed in line with current institutional strategy, e-infrastructure, and international standards and protocols around interoperability.
SCAP scoped and fulfilled the implementation initiatives during our four site visits to the institutions. The first visit aimed to surface the contradictions in the scholarly
communication ecosystem, while the latter three visits sought to create consensus around the nature of the initiative, identify stakeholders and policy frameworks, and implement the agreed-upon pilot process.
While the formulation process was participatory, the principal investigation (PI) team played a considerable role in interpreting and translating the desires of informants into a feasible intervention. This was due to two factors. First, while informants had a clear sense of institutional challenges, they were often unable to articulate desired solutions to them because they were unaware of the new technologies that might overcome these challenges. Second, the PI team also had the responsibility of protecting the funder’s interests and ensuring that the implementation activity adhered to open access principles.
While the Faculty of Commerce (Comm) served as SCAP’s research site at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Southern African Labour Development Research Unit
(SALDRU) served as our pilot site for implementation activity. As an independent research unit, which draws its members largely from the UCT Economics Department, it offers a unique vantage into a “mode 2” academic entity within the university. It is one of many at UCT, thus we hoped that our engagement with it would offer insights of use not only to other comparable units, but to other departments and faculties across the institution.
In this chapter, we will examine the process and results of our implementation initiative at UCT. We will do so by identifying scholarly communication challenges within the unit, determining the focus of our intervention, putting the three elements of the initiative into action and considering what lessons were learned through this engagement.
Identifying scholarly communication challenges
In 2010, SALDRU – a high-profile research unit with global standing – underwent an external review (one year prior to the SCAP engagement) in which one of the critiques levelled at it was that it lacked online visibility. While the unit had a well-designed and functional website, it was falling short in terms of detailed search functionality and ease of use in content navigation. SALDRU’s problem of online “findability” was compounded by the fact that, as a research unit tasked with engaging government and civil society in the poverty alleviation debate, it produced a wide range of outputs besides journal articles and book chapters (content that would traditionally be available through publisher websites). The wealth of research contained in its working paper series, for instance, was largely invisible and unfindable via an internet search.
The unit was conscious of this deficit and its executive managers had a list of core areas they wanted to address by the time of the first SCAP change laboratory workshop in June 2011. They identified three main areas of activity that they felt could improve their scholarly communication:
1. Make content more accessible. SALDRU had a great deal of research output to its name, but it was not visible on the internet. Even on the unit’s website, content was often difficult to find. An important sub-component identified within this was the need for standardised staff profile pages. At the time, some staff members had profiles while others did not; some also shared varying kinds of content via their profile pages but this content was not centrally curated and was therefore not searchable. The sharing of content appeared haphazard.
2. Produce more popular writing about the unit’s research. This was a particular challenge in the SALDRU structure, given the diffuse nature of the unit and its egalitarian management style. There was an absence of hierarchical managerial entities that could function as the “official mouthpiece” of the unit. This made delivery of a cohesive “SALDRU perspective” on a policy issue a challenge.
3. Boost informal communication amongst the SALDRU community. Given the unit’s cyclical grant funding structure and fluctuating staff cohort, the unit required a more regular internal communication system so that staff could be kept aware of the work their colleagues were engaged in.
Participants in the first SCAP workshop highlighted the fact that, even though they wanted the unit to have a stronger public impact, this objective was not even reflected in its mission statement. Participants felt that this would need to be incorporated into the formal mission so as to shape and reflect the scholarly communication strategy of the unit.
During our research, SALDRU was one of 72 UCT-affiliated research units conducting work in a wide range of often niche and interdisciplinary areas. These units enjoyed varying levels of support from the university administration, and while those units situated on any of the UCT campuses would receive the standard information technology (IT) service provision afforded to the rest of the university, few (if any) received any centralised support aimed at addressing content curation and visibility. SALDRU’s challenge was therefore not unique, but a shared feature of many units, departments and faculties.
This problem was made more acute by the fact that UCT did not have an institutional repository at the time of the SCAP initiative. This type of infrastructure would have provided an avenue for units such as SALDRU to profile their work online. The absence of an institutional repository was, however, not identified as an explicit challenge by SALDRU participants, because they had for some time been profiling their research on the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) site, an online content aggregator designed to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. In the minds of many SALDRU members, they already had a repository in RePEc, a fact that accorded with their own discipline’s norms and practices. This, combined with the fact that they hosted and administered their own website, meant that they did not look to centralised institutional e-infrastructure for scholarly communication opportunities.
Determining a focus for SCAP implementation activity
Based on the input SALDRU members, the PI team proposed a pilot intervention process comprising three core objectives:
1. Improve content curation to address the findability of SALDRU resources via internet search engines and the unit’s website. (Some website redevelopment would form part of this work.)
2. Establish a round-table forum for developing an organisational perspective on policy issues and experimenting with various methods of engaging with policy discourse in a more coordinated manner.
3. Develop internal communication tools (with particular focus on the website and an electronic newsletter).
Increasing findability and visibility through improved content curation
In an investigation into the online visibility of South African poverty alleviation work, Czerniewicz and Wiens (2013) found that much of it was comparatively invisible because it lacked metadata and institutional repository connection that the more visible work enjoyed. This exemplified the importance of the relationship between research,
publication, content curation and social development. The principle of content visibility
on the internet being largely contingent upon good content curation and metadata practice informed the SCAP implementation approach and process of optimising the functionality of the SALDRU website. Boosting online visibility was therefore intrinsically viewed as an indexing and metadata exercise.
Our preliminary investigation indicated that there was a significant amount of SALDRU content online, but that it was hosted in disparate locations and was poorly indexed. In order to explore the best means to address the situation, SCAP resources were utilised to bring a part-time content architect from UCT’s Digital Libraries Laboratory (a
postgraduate research unit in the Computer Science department) on board. The SALDRU content architect, reporting directly to the SCAP programme manager, would function as an intermediary to translate the desires of the community, assess the affordances of current e-infrastructure, and work with stakeholders in the SALDRU community to implement new curatorial systems and processes. The content architect would also be tasked with ensuring that systems were as open and interoperable as possible.
The desire for interoperability in SALDRU content systems not only revolved around linkages to international content aggregators and indexing services, but also to institutional e-infrastructure and content services. The SCAP programme saw itself as having an important role in brokering this improved cohesion, as SALDRU members appeared disenchanted with institutional systems (according to their statements in the change laboratory workshops) and were reluctant to pursue any strategy that would make them beholden to institutional systems, particularly with regards to IT service provision.
Despite this legacy of disenchantment based on prior experience, SCAP reopened the dialogue between SALDRU and the central information and communications technology services based on the notion that the preservation and sharing of content via secure, institution-based infrastructure, which could be linked and shared elsewhere, was preferable to the investment in building content collections with third-party organisations. The issue of depositing content in external or discipline-specific repositories such as RePEc would therefore be examined.