We are excited at the work ASSAF is doing to increase access to journals on-line and to increase the visibility of South African research. The implementation of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Online) SA open access platform has provided free access to SA scholarly journals. 22 journals are on the platform and there are plans to grow to 180 SA journals. Statistics show that the site is visited over 1000 times a day, with over half the visits coming from outside Africa. The South African Journal of Science has had nearly 130,000 articles downloaded since May 2009. The ASSAF consensus studies have proven to be very important evidence based studies for policy makers. The recent consensus report on the Future of the Humanities in South Africa has signalled the need for action. I agree with ASSAF that more must be done to support renewal in the humanities, and I have asked the department to work with the NRF to develop new and responsive approaches. However, I believe the greatest success and renewal will result from universities restoring the important intellectual status of the humanities in higher education to one of critical importance and not marginalisation. I hope the consensus study and the Sitas report will be catalysts for the renewal of the humanities and that it will be academics leading the charge. I also welcome the creation of the Young Academy of Sciences of South Africa and look forward to working with the Young Academy to create opportunities for young scientists to collaborate and strengthen their research outputs.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) makes available funding to the Human Capacity Building Programme of the National Research Foundation (NRF) to administer an internship programme for unemployed graduates in the Science field.

The purpose is to offer an opportunity to acquire practical work experience through mentoring and exposure to a research environment for 1 year. ASSAf’s Scholarly Publishing Unit hosted two Information Science graduates for the 2011/2012 DST-NRF Internship programme. Their internship at ASSAf ends on the 31st of March 2012.

These two interns have helped the Scholarly Publishing Unit with the e-publication of journal issues on the SciELO SA database which has boosted the growth of the database. As from the beginning of April another intake of interns will start at ASSAf.

Comments from Mohau Moja on the value of the internship programme:

Few university graduates are fortunate enough to get full-time employment on completion of their degrees. The transition from university to occupying a challenging job is not automatic. An internship is ideal for graduates to meet with the realities of their chosen career paths. Through the programme interns are presented with opportunities to:

• Acquire real-time working experience
• Demonstrate strengths or capabilities through practice, more than a CV can do
• Attend short courses aimed at developing qualities necessary for employment
• Network with people from related work or study fields
• Increase their likelihood of employability.

To conclude I would like to agree that the DST/NRF Capacity Development Programme is empowering our graduates.

From left: Louise van Heerden (ASSAf), Adèle van der Merwe (CSIR), Hettie Groenewald (UP), Ria Groenewald (UP), Zweli Ndayi (ASSAf) and Susan Veldsman (ASSAf)

On Wednesday, 23 November 2011, the Scholarly Publishing Unit of ASSAf hosted a ‘Community of Practice’ meeting focussing on Digitisation. The meeting was arranged by Louise van Heerden, SciELO SA Database Coordinator and Zweli Ndayi, Project Officer and Institutional Repository Coordinator.

Twenty six people attended the meeting. They were from University of Pretoria (UP), North-West University (NWU), University of Johannesburg (UJ), Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), Sabinet, Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), Vaal University of Technology (VUT) and the National Research Foundation (NRF). The first speaker was Adèle van der Merwe, the Records Manager and Archival Services Manager of the CSIR Library who gave a presentation on “Digitisation and migration activities at the CSIR: a case study”. The second speaker was Ria Groenewald, the Digitisation Coordinator of the E-Strategy Unit in the University of Pretoria Library who gave a presentation on “Digitisation and digital preservation sustainability issues to consider when digitising“. This was followed by time for questions and sharing experiences at the various organisations.

It emerged in 2003 from a conference on open access hosted in Berlin by the Max Planck Society. Organisations who share the vision of Open Access to Knowledge expressed in the Declaration are invited to sign the Declaration, committing their organisations to the promotion of Open Access to Knowledge. By 10 November 2011, 344 organisations had signed the declaration internationally. In South Africa the University of Pretoria, the University the Free State and the University of Stellenbosch signed the Declaration during Open Access events.

Susan Veldsman, the Director of Scholarly Publishing at ASSAf, was invited to speak on Open Access at the Open Access Week events held at the University of the Free State (24 October), the University of South Africa (25 October) and the University of Pretoria (27 October).

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was signed by Prof Jonathan Jansen, the Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State and an ASSAf member. Speakers at the Open Access event were: Front: Ina Smith (US), Prof Jonathan Jansen (UFS), Elsabe Olivier (UP), Monica Hammes (UP). Back: Wikus van Zyl  (SunMedia), Pierre de Villiers (AOSIS), Susan Veldsman (ASSAf) and Huibre Lombard (UFS)

The Scholarly Publishing Unit of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) is in the process of adding the following prestigious scholarly journal titles to the SciELO SA Open Access platform:

- Historia; and
- The Journal of the Southern African Journal of Mining and Metallurgy.

This will bring the total number of titles on the platform to 22. Approximately 1 additional title and 100 articles are added to the platform per month. During the last month the platform has, on average, been visited 1 020 times per day. At this stage the countries that visit the platform the most are South Africa, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Visit the SciELO SA database : www.scielo.org.za

The SciELO SA open access database project falls under the Scholarly Publishing Programme of ASSAf.    The programme is funded by the Department of Science & Technology; and endorsed by the Department of Higher Education and Training.

Susan Veldsman, the Director of Scholarly Publishing at ASSAf was invited to speak on Open Access at the Open Access Week events held at the University of the Free State (24 October), the University of South Africa (25 October) and the University of Pretoria (27 October).

  Susan Veldsman

The participants outside the conference venue

Zarina Moola (Policy Advisory Programme) and Louise van Heerden (Scholarly Publishing Programme) from the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) were invited to participate in the Programme Officer’s Training Course organised by the Network of African Science Academies (NASAC), in collaboration with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. The training was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 3 to 6 October 2011. There were representatives from the academies of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Senegal, Morocco, Ethiopia and South Africa. The course was made up of four days of lectures and practical exercises designed to provide participants with practical skills and knowledge useful for the designing, planning and managing of academy activities and the dissemination of results. Participants were also familiarised with the functions, organisation and operations of other African academies and fostered an exchange of ideas on how science academies in Africa support policymaking in their countries. 

The training facilitators were Lauren Alexander Augustine (The National Academy of Science, U.S.A), Jackie Olang (NASAC), Doyin Odubanjo (Nigerian Academy of Science) and Nthabiseng Taole (ASSAf). The training was made possible thanks to generous support from the Royal Society (U.K.) and the National Academies of Science (U.S.A.) through the ASADI programme.

Louise and Zarina at ‘Lucy’s Restaurant’ (named after Lucy, the famous partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis  found in Ethiopia)

There were 24 participants comprised of editors of local and regional scholarly journals from southern Africa (Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland). The aim of the workshop was to enlighten journal editors about the challenges and benefits of open-access publishing and empower them to adopt an open-access publishing model for their journal. 

The themes discussed and presented by the editors were:

• Challenges and problems facing journal editors today
• Sharing best practices in the editorial process
• Current open-access journals and developing an open-access model and business plan

The last session was devoted to a demonstration of Open Journal Systems, which is an open-source manuscript management and publishing system used to publish journals online – a gateway to open-access publishing.  

Presenters shared the challenges they face as editors of scholarly journals and in considering and adopting an open-access model, as well as possible solutions to these challenges.  

Whilst all editors in principle accepted the benefits of open access, it was acknowledged that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. A sub-committee of editors will be convened to discuss how some approaches can be implemented within South Africa.

The theme this year was: “Changing landscapes of academic research and publishing”. 

The day-long Editors’ Forum was divided into two sessions; the first session was a closed meeting between ASSAf and Forum members or their representatives. ASSAf gave a progress report back on the activities/projects undertaken in the past year. 

The agenda for the closed session included report back and discussions on five topics:

1. Introduction and explanation of the role of the Organizing Committee and the further evolution of the Forum
2. National free-online e-publication platform: SciELO SA update 
3. Relationships/contracts between journals and SciELO
4. Ministerial project: Possible national licensing of core commercial databases
5. Discipline-grouped peer review of South African journals 

The second session included a discussion on the open access business models and a panel discussion on open access themes. 

The meeting was attended by 90 people, made up of scholarly editors, publishers, members of the Committee for Scholarly Publishing in South Africa and ASSAf staff.

The vision and mission of the National Scholarly Book Publishers’ Forum is to make the Forum a significant new stakeholder in the South African national innovation system (NSI), with a voice that helps shape policy and promotes excellence and high visibility of the country’s research activities through the promotion and proper resourcing of scholarly book publishing in and from the country.

The objectives of the National Scholarly Book Publishers’ Forum will be generally to support and promote high-quality scholarly book publishing in South Africa, and especially to assist in the efforts of the Academy bringing about the following:

I. the establishment of a set of parameters for the promotion of scholarly books, based on the findings of the ASSAf report (see clause 2) and further developments;
II. an improved mechanism for the accreditation by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) of scholarly books or individual chapters in such books (collected works);
III. the development of a new generation of excellent, publishing scholars;
IV. to enhance the visibility of scholarly SA books, and to promote collaboration with scholars everywhere, through the expansion of electronic platforms where appropriate (possibly but not necessarily including an expansion of Open Access publishing);
V. the establishment of sustainable business models, among others in relation to Open Access publishing;
VI. a sustainable national system of harvesting scholarly books in institutional repositories; sustainable, appropriate and transparent subsidisation mechanisms of high-quality scholarly books and collected works in South Africa; and
VII. information systems about scholarly publishing that are useful in planning and accessible by all.

An initial focus of the Forum will be to tackle the issue of public funding for scholarly books, and therefore, resolved that it would propose a beneficial and viable funding model that would improve intellectual capacity to the Department of Higher Education and Training.

In the long term the Forum will examine ways to accommodate other academic book publishers, such as textbook and discipline-based publishers, because of overlaps in the system. In an effort to ensure that the Forum operates smoothly has ASSAf offered to take responsibility for managing and ensuring that the mandate of the forum is carried out.