Browsing by Author "Gray, Eve"

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    Open Access
    Academic spring – open access policies take the world by storm
    (2012-04) Gray, Eve
    If we really want to emulate the best practices of global scholarly publishing it is now very clear that open access publishing is something that we have to embrace. This is doubly good news, because open access offers African researchers, their universities and governments the opportunity to overcome the barriers that face dissemination of African research in its attempts to penetrate the dominant commercial scholarly publishing block. OA has the promise of real reach and impact – locally and internationally – and it now has the unequivocal backing of major international organisations. But there is also going to be some work to do to ensure that the policies we develop conform to our own needs, not just those of developed countries.
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    Open Access
    Access to Africa's knowledge: publishing development research and measuring value
    ( University of the Witwatersrand, 2010) Gray, Eve
    This paper reviews, critically, the discourse of research publication policy and the directives of the regional and global organisations that advise African countries with respect to their relevance to African scholarly communication. What emerges is a readiness to use the concepts and language of the public good, making claims for the power of technology to resolve issues of African development. However, when it comes to implementing scholarly publication policies, this vision of technological power and development-focused scientific output is undermined by a reversion to a conservative research culture that relies on competitive systems for valuing and accrediting scholarship, predicated upon the systems and values managed by powerful global commercial publishing consortia. The result is that the policies put in place to advance African research effectively act as an impediment to ambitions for a revival of a form of scholarship that could drive continental growth. While open access publishing models offer solutions to the marginalisation of African research, the paper argues that what is also needed is a re-evaluation of the values that underpin the of scholarly publishing, to better align with the continent's articulated research goals.
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    Open Access
    Access to knowledge – the times they are a'changing
    (2011-09) Gray, Eve
    In this blog I will try to track the broad landscape of change and will then engage with the different threads in a series of blogs, to spell out what I think the implications are for South Africa, Africa and the developing world. What I fear is that we in Africa are all too often, in our attempts to be ‘world class', chasing last year's – or rather last century's – vision. As Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor, Saleem Badat, wrote in the UNESCO World Social Science Report 2010, there is a danger for developing country universities in ‘uncritical mimicry and ‘catching up' with the so-called world class university in order to further socio-economic development'. With the current rate of change, this is a clear and present danger and we risk being stuck in last year's paradigms.
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    Open Access
    Access to learning resources in Post-apartheid South Africa
    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology & International Development Research Centre, 2018-05-01) Gray, Eve; Czerniewicz, Laura; Joe Karaganis
    Any inquiry into how university students get the learning resources they need for their education in post-apartheid South Africa must deal with three interrelated subjects: the legacy of apartheid, which continues to structure educational opportunities in important ways more than twenty years after the first democratic election; the organization and increasingly radical transformation of the commercial publishing market, which has been the primary source of textbooks and other materials in the system; and— common to all of the chapters in this book—the mix of new-technology-enabled strategies through which students do their best to get the textbooks and other materials they need. We track three decades of tensions around these issues, as post-apartheid leaders struggle to reform an educational system originally designed primarily to control and oppress rather than educate the majority population. Because the old system had grown up around numerous (and often colonially grounded) accommodations of the global publishing business, international copyright law, and—most important—a structural disregard for whether the system worked in more than a minimal sense, the pressure for reform has produced tensions on all of these fronts.
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    Open Access
    Beyond the repository? The CERN Innovation in Scholarly Publishing Workshop (OAI7). June 22-24 2011
    (2011-07) Gray, Eve
    The road map needs to include technology solutions for linking wider data sets to scholarly publications; the formulation of the arguments needed get support for emerging models of scholarly publication; and expanded metrics for measuring the reach and real impact of research. Most of all, though, the question is how we can link and integrate the different research processes and their outputs in an open and collaborative system, to deliver the development impact our governments keep asking for.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Feminist Africa
    (2009-02-28) Gray, Eve; Willmers, Michelle
    This case study describes the use of ICTs in the publication of a journal, Feminist Africa, in the context of an academic department at the University of Cape Town. The journal is of particular interest, because, being situated in the African Gender Institute (AGI), it provides insights into challenges and opportunities that are faced when a university unit takes on the role of journal publisher. This case study is enriched by the fact that the journal aims to pull together the research dimensions of the AGI’s interests in the development of curriculum and teaching materials for African feminist studies in the context of its outreach work through the GWS African feminist network. The case study reveals the difficulties faced by volunteer editors in a university departmental context. While the journal received donor support, the main difficulty transpires as the lack of support from the university for publishing activities. This leads to a level of ‘invisibility’ except when it comes to bureaucratic control and to levels of overwork in dedicated staff trying to juggle multiple roles.
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    Open Access
    Case study: South African Review of Sociology
    (2009-02-28) Gray, Eve; Willmers, Michelle
    This case study describes the use of ICTs in the publication of a scholarly society journal, the South African Review of Sociology, in a context in which the Scientific Editor is a senior member of an academic department at the University of Cape Town. It provides insights into the challenges and opportunities that are faced in society publishing in a South African context.and explores the problems faced when editorship of a journal is held by a senior academic who receives little or no institutional support in the publishing endeavour. The case study reveals the difficulties faced by small society publishers struggling to ensure the survival of established journals that represent significant knowledge capital, but which are undermined by an environment characterised by a lack of national and institutional support for scholarly publishing; rapid technological development; shrinking library budgets and increasing international competition.
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    Open Access
    Case study: UCT Press
    (2009-07-31) Gray, Eve; Willmers, Michelle
    The University of Cape Town (UCT) Press was established in 1994. The modern-day university press presents an interesting mix of challenges and conflicting agendas. The OpeningScholarship project chose UCT Press as a subject for case study in the hope that an examination of the operations and dynamics of such a press would throw some light on the tensions inherent in the academic publishing exercise. UCT Press is unique among South African university presses in that it is owned by a private company – namely, Juta and Company Ltd. Private ownership of a university press which enjoys a close, synergistic relationship with its parent institution is not unique in the global academic context, but it does present interesting challenges in terms of commercial and non-commercial entities working side by side, often with very different markers of success.
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    Open Access
    The Changing Journals Landscape
    (2011-10) Gray, Eve; Czerniewicz, Laura
    Journals, exchange of ideas and sharing of knowledge in a community of scholars are all important in effective communication with a wider audience. The journal crisis – increasing cost of publishing and subscribing - is a growing issue for universities and researchers. With scholarship going digital and journals moving online, linking to data resources becomes important and this connected and open system allows for more collaboration and interdisciplinary research. Open access emerges.
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    Open Access
    Degrees of openness: the emergence of open educational resources at the University of Cape Town
    (University of the West Indies, 2009) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Gray, Eve
    Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways that are not yet fully understood. In an extraordinary development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as 'open education resources' (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling some senior level support for the notion of OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide roll-out, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make them more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term “open” hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER, namely social, technical, legal and financial openness in an attempt to make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. While acknowledging the potential value of content, we contend, however, that it is the opening up of educational processes, which we are calling Open Pedagogy (OP) enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies that are set to play the more transformational role in the collaboration between students and lecturers.
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    Open Access
    Delivering a research mission in an ICT-mediated information age: The case of the University of Cape Town
    (2009-08-31) Gray, Eve; opening scholarship; ICTs; scholarly communication; UCT
    This report provides an overview of policies, practices and infrastructure at the University of Cape Town (UCT) related to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for research publication. The report will primarily be concerned with the extent to which UCT is aligning its scholarly communications with its research strategy and with national priorities for higher education. In other words, are the ways in which UCT is publishing its research truly fulfilling its research mission? And are the new possibilities for the publication of research results being used effectively to deliver the targets set for the university in national policy? Is the potential of ICTs being effectively harnessed to reach the range of audiences that UCT research aims to address? Is UCT taking maximum advantage of the potential of communication technologies to demonstrate the ways in which its research impacts on national development goals? Is it taking best advantage of the potential to position the university in a competitive global higher education environment?
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    Open Access
    Demystifying Open Access
    (2011-10) Czerniewicz, Laura; Gray, Eve
    This presentation provides the fundamentals about open access as part of the broader open agenda and locating it within changing scholarly communication and new forms of research dissemination. Adds a developing country perspective.
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    Open Access
    From the IPA 2012 Congress to the Finch Report – publishers and open access
    (2012-07) Gray, Eve
    The Finch Commission report was released in the UK on 18 June. Entitled ‘Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications', this report, by an independent working group headed by Dame Janet Finch, tackled ‘the important question of how to achieve better, faster access to research publications for anyone who wants to read or use them.'
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    Open Access
    Green Paper for Post-School Education and Training in South Africa
    (2012-02) Gray, Eve; Kinderlerer, Julian
    This Green Paper, launched by the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training Dr Blade Nzimande in January 2012, identifies the key challenges facing South African higher education and sets out a path for overcoming these obstacles. Here SCAP Programme Director Eve Gray (with the input of Professor Julian Kinderlerer, Head of the Intellectual Property Law and Policy Unit at the University of Cape Town) highlights key issues contained in the paper as pertains to ICT, IPR, access to knowledge and open innovation.
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    Open Access
    International environmental scan of the use of ICTs for community engagement in higher education
    (2009-02-28) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Gray, Eve; Willmers, Michelle; Steenkamp-Fonseca, Raymond
    This position paper provides a brief overview of how higher education institutions (HEIs) internationally are using ICTs to enhance their engagement with the broader community and highlights some applications which could be useful for South African HEIs.
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    Open Access
    Lies, damned lies… and metrics
    (2011-11) Gray, Eve
    Two contradictory things are happening side by side in discussion of scholarly publishing right now. On the one hand, the discourse of open access – seeking to remedy the failures of the current system – bases itself overwhelmingly on the value of the journal article as the artefact to be made open, while at the same time, stronger and stronger criticisms are levelled against journals as an effective mode of scientific communication. Questions are also being asked about the appropriateness of the metrics that are used to make judgements on the quality of the articles published, determining the reputation of authors and their institutions. It is well known that this system consigns developing country research to the periphery of a ‘global' system, marginalising very important research issues – such as ‘neglected diseases' that apply to large percentages of the world's population. These concerns now appear to have a strong echo in the mainstream, even if the perspective of the global South is not clearly articulated in the discussion.
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    Open Access
    National environmental scan of South African scholarly publishing
    (2009-04-30) Gray, Eve
    Undertaken as part of the OpeningScholarship project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), this position paper reviews the national environment for the use of ICTs for research dissemination and publication in the South African higher education sector. Taking UCT as a case study, the paper reviews the use of ICTs for scholarly communications for research, teaching and learning, and community engagement in the university against the background of international developments and best practice.
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    Open Access
    OER in the mainstream – South Africa takes a leap into OER policy
    (2012-01) Gray, Eve
    2012 looks as if it might be the year that OER and open access reach the mainstream, globally and in South Africa. In the last few months in South Africa, the national department responsible for schools had announced the take-up of a major OER science and maths resource and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has included in a new Green Paper a recommendation for the widespread use of open educational resources.
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    Open Access
    Open access in Africa – green and gold, the impact factor, ‘mainstream' and ‘local' research
    (2012-09) Gray, Eve
    I have been following the debate raging in the UK and beyond about whether the Finch Commission and the Research Councils UK - and then the EC with a slightly different emphasis – were right in opting for support for the ‘gold route' of open access publishing rather than prioritizing only the ‘green route' of open access repositories. There seems to have been a general consensus in the commentaries that I have read that this will disadvantage the developing world, which will be faced with the barrier of high article processing fees and become increasingly excluded. The green route, through continuing creation of institutional repositories, would be better for us, we are told.
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    Open Access
    Open Everything at UCT Open Education Week
    (2012-03) Gray, Eve
    The first global Open Education Week took place from 5-10 March. One of the questions that I found myself asking when I was asked to participate in some of the UCT events was ‘What is open education?' Is it the use of OER – putting course materials online – or something broader? The answers that emerged from panelists at the University of Cape Town moved well beyond the narrower frame of courseware to a challenging and interesting discussion of the interconnectedness of communications for the university's different missions in a rapidly evolving digital environment.