Rethinking Development in an age of Scarcity and Uncertainty

Report of the Panel at the EADI Conference, York, UK

Tags: Worldwide , Knowledge Platform
Additional tags: Scarcity , Uncertainty , Development , Knowledge

The session, facilitated by Wendy Hartcourt of SID,  was conducted as an open discussion on the new publishing arrangements with the coming of the digital age among development journals looking at both the opportunities and the current squeeze for resources.The discussion looked at the new possibilities offered by on-line and digital publishing. The discussed focused on how to ensure scholarship and rigour while using the new open forms of communication through social networking and new forms of media. The discussion was considered a step in encouraging editors of European based development journals to work together through the current dilemmas of development journal publishing.

The following persons contributed the session:

Kees Biekart of Development and Change gave the background to the journal which was established as an independent journal in 1970 and is now published by Wiley Blackwell 6 times a year with1300 journal pages and is one of the top ranked journals. He underlined that quality is essential and there is a rigorous referee process with credibility.

Brian Pratt explained that DiP has developed a niche in its 20 years of existence from publishing papers of Oxfam field staff to 8 issues a year and a very large subscription base with half academic half non academic working with Taylor and Francis.

Sarah Cummings: Knowledge management for development is a community of practice journal that began in 2005 documenting what was happening as a purely voluntary journal using the OJS open journal system.

Caroline Sweement spoke about the experience of Routledge publishing Gender and Development using both open access and print subscriptions.

Robert Cornford of Oxfam Publishing: The scholary kitchen website has an interesting response to Monbiot.In the end all content you can find for free if you look for it on the web, through academic depositories. The problem is if you want material to go beyond academe as ngo resource centres find it hard to access cannot be subsidized.

Read the full report here below:

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Report of the Panel at the EADI Conference ‘Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty’, York, UK

‘From the Editor’s Desk: The Changing World of Development Publishing in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty ‘

22 September, 2011 9 – 10.45 am

Report Wendy Harcourt 26 September 2011

Convenors Wendy Harcourt SID, Rome, Italy, Kees Bierkart ISS, University of Erasmus The Netherlands

Facilitator Wendy Harcourt Editor Development journal of the Society for International Development Italy

Speakers Kees Bierkart Editor of Development and Change, Brian Pratt Editor in Chief Development in Practice, INTRAC UK

Discussant Sarah Cummings, Editor in Chief Knowledge Management for Development Journal The Netherlands

Contributions from Oxfam and Codesria,

The session was conducted as an open discussion on the new publishing arrangements with the coming of the digital age among development journals looking at both the opportunities and the current squeeze for resources.

The discussion looked at the new possibilities offered by on-line and digital publishing. The discussed focused on how to ensure scholarship and rigour while using the new open forms of communication through social networking and new forms of media. 

The discussion was considered a step in encouraging editors of European based development journals to work together through the current dilemmas of development journal publishing.

Wendy Harcourt of Development Society for International Development

Wendy Harcourt opened the discussion with a reference to George Monbiot’s article The Lairds of Learning: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? Published in the Guardian 30th August 2011. The article is highly critical of the monopoly of academic publishers. She proposed it is important that editors engage in a debate with publishers about how best to reach different publics and to understand the potential use of digital publishing in new ways. Above all how to ensure developmental goals rather than market goals are the aim of development journals. She mentioned that she did invite publishers to attend but they were not able to come.

Development is the oldest development journal which began with the Society in 1957. It has moved from being a Society journal reaching only SID members to an editorially independent journal published by Palgrave (after Blackwell and Sage) with most of the income being derived from institutional and on site licenses. She spoke about the successful partnership arrangement of the Society with Palgrave and also the support of other donors for individual themed issues such as Hivos. Palgrave supports marketing and production and editorial costs.

The aim of the journal is to bridge activism, research and policy around key issues of development practice and vision. The editorial line is set by an independent editorial board.

As an editor she finds the problem is with accessibility for contributors from the south and to ensure readership among civil society groups in both the south and north working to take advantage of the new digital age, ensuring quality and accessibility.

She found Monbiot’s article very challenging in relation to the role of publishers and asked how editors could respond to it.

Kees Biekart of Development and Change 

Kees Biekart gave the background to the journal which was established as an independent journal in 1970 and is now published by Wiley Blackwell 6 times a year with1300 journal pages and is one of the top ranked journals. He underlined that quality is essential and there is a rigorous referee process with credibility.

He felt that publishers helped to ensure quality, accessibility and measure the usefulness of the journal to readers. D and C has editorial independence and management structure and requires. D and C require publishers’ royalties in order to pay the editorial management team. The Editorial team does not cost but they rely on the marketing and outreach provided by publishers

With the digital age there is now an increasing readership. He understands that research councils are pushing for accessibility but in response to Monbiot he is not sure if is possible to move to total open access and by pass the publishers.

One way is to have the last version of the article before it is in a publishing depository with a link to the final published version. Many institutes including ISS are doing that. There is also free access to libraries in developing countries 

He does not like the open access model where authors pay 1,500 pounds to publish and then the articles are available for all through open access. He does not think people in development can pay such a fee. He feels it would be difficult to move from the tradition of subscription to open access unless you start a new journal and build it up. He sees it as difficult for the journals that are currently publishing traditionally.

There is a gap between what is now and what is still possible that needs to be explored for example the need for more contributions beyond Europe and USA and to include the development community in the BRICS.

Brian Pratt, Development in Practice

Brian Pratt explained that DiP has developed a niche in its 20 years of existence from publishing papers of Oxfam field staff to 8 issues a year and a very large subscription base with half academic half non academic working with Taylor and Francis.

There has been a change of editors and they are currently pushing quality with increased rigour of the refereeing process They have mostly southern contributors with 26% Africa 16% Asia authors. From his experience southern people want to publish in internationally known journals, they want the access to these journals.

They need the publishers to pay for the production and packaging. He felt that public funds only pay for only certain types of knowledge. And there are different forms of material that can package knowledge differently using the web-based system.

Sarah Cummings, Knowledge management for development

Knowledge management for development is a community of practice journal that began in 2005 documenting what was happening as a purely voluntary journal using the OJS open journal system 

They decided to move to Francis and Taylor in 2007 as they required help from a commercial publisher as on their own it proved difficult to market and they required discipline and deadlines that a publisher gave them.

She sees the journal as linking academics and practitioners and the different knowledge cultures. part of the deal with the publisher is that 400 free copies go to the community as NGOs in the south or north cannot access easily development articles.

She pointed to the problem of imbalance between north and south, there are enormous gaps between who can get published. DiP stands out as publishing more from the South. She felt there is a need to discuss who is writing and deciding who publishes from north and south and there is a need to have better deal for people in the south. 

There is also a need to use layered marketing to reach different constitutions and keep asking how developmental are our journals? We need to ensure participation of people from the south and changing the model of development publishing to make it more sustainable and more development 

The issue is not so much the publishers but the current system. Publishers do have value as editors we need to talk to them about our concerns. 

 Caroline Sweetman Gender and Development, Oxfam

Caroline Sweement spoke about the experience of Routledge publishing Gender and Development using both open access and print subscriptions

The aim of the journal is to Translate the new theoretical insights into another content for practitioners. There is not a refereeing system but she has top academics writing for her journal and she commissions articles and works with authors to get them publishable. Her journal is themed so peer review is an open question. The journal gives free access in the South, and she argues this gives added value to the journal as northern writers want their work to be seen as useful to the south. 

Robert Cornford Oxfam Publishing

The scholary kitchen website has an interesting response to Monbiot.

In the end all content you can find for free if you look for it on the web, through academic depositories. The problem is if you want material to go beyond academe as ngo resource centres find it hard to access cannot be subsidized. Everyone is using google so should we give it all to google?

Library acquisition claim to be driven by what users want but 64% of material published after 2001 has never been accessed, publishers using packages and bundling up journals so you have to buy them together. 

Issue about quality needs to be raised, are journals thegate keepers of quality?

What is the good standard for a good journal article?

We know it when we see it how far you edit?

Edited books are useful and serve a different purpose.

One problem that is happening is the concentration of publishers however there is a lot of space underneath to experiment with knowledge access in different forms.

CODESRIA

An editor from Codesria pointed out that it is very hard to publish outside of Africa

He questioned the so called international journals as in reality it means UK and US. CODESRIA has decided to go with SAGE but the issue is with the readers in Africa how can they have access?Even if it is put on line for free it is hard to make it available to the community

Many questions need to be asked about ranking journals. For example in Nigeria 200 journals only 2 are taken by ISSC ranking. Not taking them into account makes the research in Africa invisible. However if an author moves to Cornell then they will be published.

We need to acknowledge these asymmetries and problems for publication as well as our prejudices about what is good knowledge what do you look for

International review. It is an extractive industry. It is not just a question of language but what do you recognize as valid experience. The other problem is that international journals poach good locals as they go to international publications and by pass local journals so the capacity never builds up.

Conclusion

1. Editors need to approach publishers to explore a mix between open access and subscriptions

2. We need to decentre Oxford as the centre of development publishing (!) and look at ways to work together to ensure a developmental approach to our journals. 

3. We need to have good quality articles but also openness about what is a good article according to the aim of the journals, and different ways of deciding what form of knowledge an article can be published (academic, for practitioners, for activism, for policy etc.)

4. We need to ensure access to writers and readers in the South, could we consider a system where people publish locally in the south but then the same article is published in the north? 

5. We need to open up the system to scrutiny looking at academic, publishing concerns and aims of development as a whole. The question was raised as to who counts as south and who counts as north? The whole issue of brain drain is a critical one. 

6. Participants were invited to continue the conversation by contacting Wendy Harcourt and ISS will explore the possibility of a further discussion involving other journal editors and publishers.