The Scholarly Publishing Unit of the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), has created an open accessible Institutional Repository(IR) for theses resulting from TWAS, the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World and OWSDW (Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World), particularly for those by African students or carried out in African institutions.

TWAS is an autonomous international organization, based in Trieste, Italy, that promotes scientific excellence for sustainable development in the South.

The repository was developed by using the DSpace software. Currently 22 theses have been loaded onto the repository covering the Heath, Medical, Natural and Agricultural Sciences,  and more to be added on a monthly basis. Theses accessible on the database were produced from countries like Nigeria, Sudan, Brazil and South Africa.

The purpose of the IR is to:
a)      showcase the TWAS funded research as a collection
b)      make them easily accessible for the TWAS community
c)       serve as a record what has been funded over the years by TWAS
d)      ensure open accessibility of research to all users

To visit and search this site : http://twas.assaf.org.za:8080/jspui/                   
To learn more about TWAS:  http://www.twas.org

The report looks at: why clinical research is important, it’s history in SA, the national culture supporting it, the public’s engagement, the ethical issues, the funding issues, the published outputs, the workforce and the institutional arrangements. It also looks at what kind of interventions have been successfully used elsewhere in the world to address the kind of challenges SA clinical research is facing.

Based on the report’s findings it is clear that clinical research in SA needs to be revitalized.

The panel then proposed recommendations/solutions and also identified which stakeholders/government departments need to attend to these. The overall recommendations state that there’s a need for:

1. National Strategic Planning, Regulation and Co-ordination of Clinical Research
2. Human Infrastructural Capacity
3. The creation of Clinical Research Centres and Research Institutes as national hubs in the academic health complexes and other sites
4. National Funding Schemes for Clinical and Health Research
5. Monitoring and Evaluation of the Clinical and Health Research Enterprise

The report has been positively received and stakeholders are currently being engaged in order to ensure that the recommendations are implemented. The concise version of the report is available on ASSAf’s website.

Land-cover transformation poses one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity and, in light of extensive land-cover change, protected areas are often viewed as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for conservation. However, there has been growing awareness that formally protected area systems are failing to protect global biodiversity effectively.

Conservation initiatives have had to look beyond reserve fences, to the actual management of the surrounding landscape, to enhance the functioning of protected areas. Land-cover transformation beyond the borders of the protected areas may have potentially devastating impacts on the ongoing conservation efforts undertaken within these, should it continue unchecked.

Given the current government’s emphasis on socio-economic development, conservation has had to evolve in order to be politically acceptable. Conservation decisions cannot occur in isolation any longer; future conservation initiatives must explicitly acknowledge proposed socio-economic development agendas. The challenge now is how to rectify the failings of the current protection area system in order to maximise biodiversity protection, while addressing the unavoidable land-cover modification that is associated with economic growth. In order to ensure the best use of limited conservation resources and promote enduring biodiversity protection, conservation efforts need to be directed at areas that will remain intact and secure from future transformation.

In a first step towards such a conservation plan for the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve, the largest in South Africa and the third largest in the world, Coetzer et al. quantified land-cover changes in this landscape and found that 36% of the reserve underwent land-cover change between 1993 and 2006. Settlement areas increased by 40%, while the vegetation remaining intact in the surrounding areas declined. This loss of intact vegetation could result in fragmentation, which would affect ecosystem functioning. Although there were small declines in forestry and mining, agricultural usage in the reserve increased by 52%. These land-cover data, together with economic and biodiversity data, can help to reconcile the spatial requirements of socio-economic development with those of conservation in future conservation initiatives.

Read it in the July August volume of the South African Journal of Science: Coetzer KL, Erasmus BFN, Witkowski ETF, Bachoo AK. Land-cover change in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve (1993– 2006): A first step towards creating a conservation plan for the subregion. S Afr J Sci. 2010; 106(7/8), Art. #221, 10 pages. DOI: 10.4102/sajs.v106i7/8.221.

Two representatives from SciELO Brazil Solange Santos (the SciELO supervisor) and Roberta Takenaka (SciELO System Analyst) visited ASSAf from 24 May to 2 June 2010 for SciELO IT and SciELO workflow training. The following Scholarly Publishing staff attended the training: Tawanda December (Systems and Database Manager); Louise van Heerden (Metadata Librarian) and Zweli Ndayi (Project Officer). The training has enabled the SciELO-team to understand the SciELO network and how it is set up; as well as the SciELO methodology, including the markup and conversion of articles and sending them to the public SciELO site.

 The SciELO SA and SciELO Brazil teams will work in parallel for a few months.

The first person to describe a new fossil gets the rights to name it. This has got be done at the time of the first publication as the privilege is not retrospect. Hesitate and someone else will pip you at the post. The payout is pretty impressive because the once the fossil has been named, the name is there forever with your priority stamped all over it in Latin.

But not everything in the name game is about priority and bragging rights. The whole system of classification is an art, not a science, and the choice of name tells you as much about the researcher as it does about the fossil.

Lee Berger and his team have just had the rare opportunity to name a new hominid species.  They have chosen the name Australopithecus sediba for the debut of the fossils from Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind and the new taxon is on the tip of the tongue of lots of South Africans, from the Deputy Minister of Technology to the kids in school who have been given the chance to give a popular name for the fossils.  

So what is in the name? What statement has Lee Berger made with his choice?  In fact, he has made two statements, one that concerns the genus name Australopithecus and the second concerning the species name sediba.

Let’s start with the easy one: sediba.  The language is seSotho and the meaning is ‘wellspring’ or ‘fountain’. Not a bad choice at all. Making use of one of the indigenous languages of South Africa is a smart move if South Africans are going to ‘take ownership’ of this new specimen. If Berger really wanted to go back to ‘roots’ for the name, he could have chosen one of the ‘Bushman’ languages for inspiration in the same way that we have for our national motto. It reads: !Ke e: /xarra //ke, and means “Unity in Diversity” or more literally “Diverse People Unite” in the extinct language of the /xam. In fact, an extinct language is exactly what is needed for national motto as you don’t want confusion about the precise meaning and a dead language never changes. But seSotho is not only very much alive, it is the first language of 4 million South Africans and a second language of nearly the same number. This is about claiming heritage for the living, not the dead, and Berger’s selection is a good one.

The choice for the genus name needs to be viewed from a cold scientific perspective. Choosing a genus name is about linking the specimen to other discoveries and it plants a flag at a point on the evolutionary road. The specimens from Malapa were clearly related to other fossil forms from around the same age, so the choice was not about a new name, but it was about deciding which name to link it to. In the end Berger chose Australopithecus rather than the more controversial Homo. It doesn’t sound like it, but this is pure philosophy, not science.

Had Berger chosen Homo, he would have been recognising human-like attributes in the bones implying that they were ‘real men’ and not ‘ape men’.  The accepted consensus is that Homo had the ability to make tools, manipulate the environment, probably used speech, and, in Phillip Tobias’s words, was at a “new level of organisation”. But Berger has chosen to lump his new fossils into Australopithecus, meaning that his new discovery had not yet reached Tobias’s new level of organisation.  

But Berger hasn’t quite excluded his new specimens from the human line because the species name sediba implies that his species is at the point of transition from Australopithecus to Homo. Berger is quite up front about this. In his opinion, his discovery is the root of humanity as we know it.

Well this is where the fun in science begins. There has already been some debate about Berger’s claims. The fossil seems too late in time to be at the origin point for Homo. There are also other candidates and the anatomically oriented anthropologists will need to discuss the meaning of the morphology of the new specimens in the light of the detailed anatomy of its predecessors and contemporaries. As I have always told my students, the best thing to do is to wait when a new discovery is made and affinities are proclaimed. It will take at least 5 years for the consensus to develop and much academic blood will be probably be shed in the process.

Note: Read Prof Morris’s article on Australopithecus sediba appearing in the South African Journal of Science.

From almost every corner of the Anglophone world, the complaint is the same: “The Humanities are under threat”. I use the qualifier because, sadly, my ability to access other language worlds – beyond  the Dutch-Afrikaans link – is limited.*

The question is what is to be done to recover and revive the Humanities?

Research and deliberations into ASSAf’s own Consensus Report on the Humanities in South Africa is well under way and the hope is to issue a preliminary report in late October, 2010. My own view of this issue is framed by an understanding of political economy – the rise of neo-liberal economics has emphasized economic growth and efficiency and, in this particular universe, the Humanities have no place ( the State of Science in South Africa, pg 210). This is a fallacy, of course. Take the creation of jobs. In this country alone, right now, one of the strongest areas of economic growth is Afrikaans cultural production – most of this is both creates jobs and pushes economic growth.

But this ignores a series of issues into which the Humanities can shed light – the planetary crisis – known as ‘Climate Change’ – which is generated by mindless economic growth is perhaps the most obvious example. Another example, of course, is the financial crisis of late-2009: here, reckless speculation on money markets helped to generate the most severe financial crisis for 80 years and raised serious questions about the discipline of Economics which remain to be addressed.

But re-igniting interest in the Humanities (which for these purposes includes the Social Sciences) cannot be the responsibility of academies and of Blue Ribbon Panel-types alone. The responsibility falls upon us all – even upon Natural Scientists many of whom have a deep appreciation for the importance of the Humanities but, as the battle for resources in academia has intensified over the past three decades, have turned away from what we might call a ‘dual loyalty’ to intellectual life.

It is certain so that in many instances the Humanities are themselves to blame for the reversal in their fortunes. But the test of their viability should be quality and excellence, through peer-review, not whether they can generate economic growth.

Writing in London’s The Guardian, on these issues, the acclaimed journalist, Simon Jenkins, Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts (an article by Simon Jenkins, 25 March, 2010; The Guardian) recently issued a warning to Natural Scientists. Any hope they might have that sweeping the Humanities to the corners would benefit them, was a risky proposition. For one thing, budgetary savings might encourage successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats that further cuts could be made in research funding – this would certainly come from the Natural Sciences.

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* Incidentally, in 2009, the Dutch issued a Blue-Ribbon report called “Sustainable Humanities”.

‘It’s also a saving of 400 tons of carbon dioxide, 224 tons of coal and some 576 kilolitres of water’, says Dr Steve Lennon, Eskom’s MD for corporate services. If more people pledge to switch off their lights this year and maybe even their geyers, which consume more energy, imagine the amount of not only energy but also water and other resources we can save. It can be a small stepping stone to creating awareness for achieving Low Carbon Cities in our country. For more information please see http://www.earthhour.org.za

The workshop will bring together disease experts, community leaders, policymakers, and patient advocates to examine the state of MDR TB in the South Africa, to learn from the experiences of the South African public health community in its fight against MDR TB, and to draw lessons regarding best practices and novel approaches that can be applied both within and beyond the country.

Over 20 expert papers will be presented at this workshop [which be will attended by both national and international experts]. The focus of the presentations will be on:

1. epidemiology;
2. diagnostic & preventive therapies;
3. treatment;
4. transmission & infection control;
5. paediatric TB;
6. health economics & policy.

Proceedings of the workshop will be published and disseminated globally.

Tuberculosis [TB] is today one of the leading causes of death in the world, approximately 4500 people die daily from the disease. Although many cases of TB can be cured by available antibiotics, MDR TB is a major threat worldwide. Strains of TB resistant to even the second line therapies, i.e. extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis [XDR TB] are documented in over 50 countries, including the US, and we are seeing the emergence of strains that are fully resistant to treatment. And while the epidemic of TB is still primarily centered in the developing world, the reach of MDR TB extends to every continent, including both rich and poor countries.

The global battle against TB, once thought won is today very real.

ASSAf is proud to have a new member on the team – Zarina Moolla. Zarina has taken the position of Project Officer, focussing specifically on the Low Carbon Cities Project, and the Water Project.

Born and raised in KwaZulu-Natal, Zarina completed her BSc (Hons) in Environmental Management at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006.

She then worked as an intern at GroundWork, a non-governmental organisation based in that province, where she conducted research on landfill sites in South Africa.

Thereafter she pursued a MSc in Environmental Management, focusing on forecasting GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions for the City of Durban. During this time, she also worked as a climate change intern at Golder Associates, working specifically on energy and carbon-related projects. Zarina is passionate about nature and the environment.

Welcome, Zarina – we hope that you will be very happy with us!