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PKP Blogger Team

Say "YES!" to OPEN ACCESS

Marxist Media Theory Rox!!!

"Indian biomedical journals and Open Access: a case study at Indian Medlars Centre (IMC), New Delhi, India"

was presented at the Public Knowledge Project conference on July 12, 2007 at the SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver, Canada. The presenters, Ms. Naina Pandita and Mr. Sukhdev Singh from the National Informatics Centre, India, discussed the transition of Indian biomedical journals to an “open access” model.

OpenMED@NIC is an open access archive for Medical and Allied Sciences where authors can self-archive their scientific and technical documents. The goal of OpenMED is to provide free access to academics, researchers, and students working in the area of Medical and Allied Sciences and promote self-archiving. It is designed to archive peer-reviewed publications (preprints, postprints and accepted theses) in the following areas: Bio-Medical, Medical Informatics, Dental Nursing and Pharmaceutical Sciences, currently offering a bibliographic database of over 70 peer reviewed journals.

Important aspects of the open access database:

• involvement and training of journal staff
• file organisation and naming policy that follows the medIND site design
• content page layout browsing and searching along with implication on IndMED database and cross linking

"Using a Tetradic Network Method and a Transaction Cost Economic Analysis to Illustrate an Economic Model for an Open-Access Medical Journal"

"Using a Tetradic Network Method and a Transaction Cost Economic Analysis to Illustrate an Economic Model for an Open-Access Medical Journal" was presented at the Public Knowledge Project conference on July 12, 2007 at the SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver, Canada. The presenter, Dr. Michael Mills, Ph.D., MSPH from the University of Louisville shared some of the challenges that scholarly publishing is facing today. He identified the money and profit associated with access to scholarly information as the current crisis, and the need for a revolution to address this crisis. The traditional scholarly publication model allows scientific societies and large publishers to have a substantial financial gain, whereas universities who finance scholarly research have to pay again to obtain access to published results. Mills suggests that scholars not surrender their copyrights and publish on-line. Those that hold the copyrights retain all the power in scholarly publishing.
In Mills, Esterhay and Thornwill’s study, a Tetradic Network Technique (TNT) and a Transaction Cost Economic analysis (TCE) were applied to a traditional subscription-based, print medical journal, Medical Physics, and a web-based open-access medical journal, the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics, identifying stakeholders and considering transaction and production costs. Production cost was found to be approximately the same for the traditional and open-access journal, however total transaction costs were shown to be reduced by a factor of 5-10 for the open-access journal.

Tetradic Network Technique views the world as a tetrahedral (four components) complex adaptive network (TCAN), where each component can also be analysed as a TCAN – four components making up one component of a larger TCAN; and this process can continue indefinitely until desirable level of presicion:4X, 16X, 64X, and 256X…
Starting from the top and circulating clockwise, the TNT model begins with Purpose → Inputs → Processes → Outputs. For the scholarly publication model: Libraries (dissemination of information) → Scholars (input research) → Societies (process and validation of research) → Publishers (output research).

Dissemination of knowledge is an integral part of scholarly activity. Transaction costs increase the cost of distribution of scholarly information. Lowering such costs would benefit everyone. Open-access is the way to go! Not only it drastically reduces transaction costs and increases dissemination of scholarly articles, but also allows scholars to retain their copyright, preventing obscurity.

"Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century: challenges and opportunities"

was presented at the Public Knowledge Project conference on July 12, 2007 at the SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver, Canada.

The presenter Mr. Ezra M. Ondari-Okemwa, from Moi University Eldoret, Kenya, shared his views and ideas on how to improve sub-Saharan Africa’s visibility in scholarly publishing. Bordering Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda, Kenya is an important link and a positive stabilizing influence in the sub-Saharan region.

In his recent study, Mr. Ondari-Okemwa examined scholarly publications produced in the sub-Saharan region from 1997 to 2007. The aims of this study were to examine the role that scholarly publishing plays in the generation and sharing of knowledge, describe the challenges in scholarly publishing, and discuss ways of enhancement in production and distribution of knowledge. The study found that the sub-Saharan region lags behind in scholarly publishing when compared to other parts of the world. For example, 6,661 publications were produced in Kenya in 1997-2007 as compared to 59,271 publications produced in Canada in 2006*.

According to Mr. Ondari-Okemwa, the challenges in scholarly publishing that the sub-Saharan region is faced with include:

• Low rate of scholarly publishing and dissemination of knowledge


• Little generation of knowledge


• Impaired access to digital scholarly resources (very low due to lack of Internet access)


• Technological (information and communication technologies are still under-developed and the region cannot support electronic knowledge transfer)


• Political challenges (limited freedom of expression, corruption, nepotism and tribal clashes)


• Socio-economic challenges (scholars are not well supported financially, many research facilities are outdated, poorly-funded libraries, absence of organized library networking, inability to afford journal subscriptions, and dated books – all makes it difficult for scholars to make scientific progress.
  
• Lack of incentives for scholars, non-attendance of academic conferences, migration of scholars to foreign countries, and language barriers

• Invisibility of scholarly publications emanating from sub-Saharan Africa

Looking optimistically towards the future, Mr. Ondari-Okemwa believes that open access will greatly contribute to the quality and dissemination of research and possibly affect economic, environmental and social development issues, not only in sub-Saharan Africa region in twenty-first century, but globally.

*According to Ondari-Okemwa’s study findings, see Table 2: Countries with 235 records plus between 1997 and 2007.