Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Bandwidth and Copyright: Barriers to Knowledge in Africa?, page 4

Ihe notion that textbooks could cost almost as much as tuition is staggering, but Twinomugisha thinks part of the solution may lie in a “collective bargaining” process similar to the universities’ bandwidth consortium that would negotiate lower fees from publishers. “I think if we come together we can guarantee publishers $1-to-$2 million in fees in exchange for pretty unfettered use at all the universities.”

Twinomugisha also encountered copyright-related problems with publishers after creating a virtual library. “Publishers and database vendors say we must guarantee that we will know exactly who is accessing the information at all times at all the universities in the consortium so that appropriate fees can be charged. My position is, why do you care how many students will have access? How can they be sure that if we bought the hard copy book half the village won’t just copy it?”

Tusubira also sees copyright issues as a true barrier to development. He says, “I don’t think we in developing countries can afford to get caught in the trap of this global intellectual property regime, which strongly favors the West, where most of these laws are made and enforced. For Africa, ICT has become a question of survival. Anything that stands in the way must not be tolerated, especially when we have so many other challenges. It’s like President [Yoweri K.] Museveni [of Uganda] says about the environment. If a man is cold, he will chop down the trees for firewood and if he’s hungry, he will kill and eat the wildlife. He can’t be expected to be willing to debate the nuances of conservation policy.”

Aminu Ibrahim of Nigeria’s National Universities Commission sees another problem and, perhaps, a potential solution. “The worst thing that can happen to any nation,” he says, “is to become a total consumer of information. The property rights issues are becoming barriers that prevent Africans from placing their knowledge in the global stream. We have unique cultures, languages, histories, environments, fauna, flora, archeology and increasingly valuable information in the hard sciences. We have to figure out a way to barter African intellectual property for access to others.”

Meanwhile, many African scholars are voicing growing concern about their inability to access Internet resources because of copyright issues. Professor I.S. Diso, vice chancellor of Nigeria’s Kano University of Technology, says, “ I am very much concerned about copyright and how it affects access to Web resources and documents in Africa.” Diso is heading a French-funded investigation into the alleged harmful restrictions copyrights are placing on African scholars, scientists and researchers. They expect to release the findings later this year.

In Africa, though, concern about copyright as a barrier is—not surprisingly—mirrored by a growing realization of the part it can play in preserving unique African knowledge and protecting its ownership. In this regard, university officials across the continent report a reluctance on the part of many African scientists and scholars to place their work on the Web because of fear that it might be stolen in developed countries.

Virtual libraries present one way of meeting that challenge by allowing the dissemination of knowledge while still maintaining some measure of control over its distribution. In fact, UNESCO, The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recently conducted a study and found, for example, a “compelling need” for the creation of virtual libraries in Nigeria. Virtual libraries, UNESCO found, are “crucial to the survival of [African] heritage, dialects, languages, cultures, value systems and collective memory/history, which will otherwise be subsumed by the more dominant languages or cultures of the world.”

The study recommended that the creation of virtual libraries “should be a cornerstone of Nigeria’s attempts to rejuvenate its educational system, as they would contain a variety of national and international content, including curricula, learning materials, books, journals, magazines, newspapers, new online services, and services traditionally offered by libraries.”

One virtual library already being used by some African universities is a project run out of the University of Iowa called eGranary. Cliff Missen is the director of the project, which he describes as “an Internet substitute. We use really large hard drives to store nearly two million documents that publishers and authors are willing to share. We hope to raise that number to five million documents eventually. Once the hard drives are installed locally, people can access the material much faster than trying to use the Internet. We’ve got everything from a virtual hospital with thousands of pieces of patient literature to full textbooks.”

There are nearly 50 eGranaries installed in sub-Saharan Africa. “I got an e-mail from a professor at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, who told me that eGranary has been installed at a high school at Mt. Kilimanjaro,” Missen reports.

Cliff Missen believes that even if African universities overcome the bandwidth barrier to online access, they will continue to be haunted by other problems. “Many of their systems are unreliable, either because of power outages or other reasons,” he notes. “We ‘ping’ machines at African universities all the time, and many of them are running only four hours a day. Either the power is out, or the modem is broken or someone hasn’t paid the bill. Researchers can wait two days to download a large file and only find out later that the file was corrupted because online access was interrupted. How many times does that have to happen before a scientist just gives up?”

JSTOR (www.jstor.org)—which was originally created and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and now receives support from Carnegie Corporation—is another organization working to provide copyrighted scholarly material to African universities. It started as a way to electronically store back issues of many scholarly journals so that U.S. university libraries could free up some shelf space. Eventually, JSTOR came to realize they had a valuable resource for developing nations.

Bruce Heterick is JSTOR’s director of library relations. He says, “We have digitized 17 million images of the pages of 400 of the most prestigious journals in 45 different disciplines. Scholars around the world use us for research. We’re the only place scholars can find the text of previously published journals.” When it comes to African universities, though, most just don’t have enough bandwidth to effectively access JSTOR’s resources. Says Heterick, “We would like to be more helpful to universities in Africa, and explored putting much of the material on local servers for them, but the publishers object to that. They don’t believe that the kind of security controls and abuse monitoring we have on the Internet would be maintained on local servers, and they’re probably right.” But on the other hand, he says, “A lot of the publishers really do want to help out with developing countries. They cut their fees or donate works to a lot of sites like ours that have databases in health, agriculture, and the humanities, etc. They probably would be open to some system of local servers if they were convinced that the universities had systems in place and trained people monitoring access.”

The debate about how to make copyrighted Web-based resources available to African scholars is a subset of an international controversy over access to information. There is a so-called “Open Access Movement,” a growing, but loose collection of intellectuals, academics, personnel at nongovernmental organizations and government officials who believe that knowledge should be free. Some believe that owners of copyrights should be more generous in making information available while others believe that there should be some formal acknowledgement that the Internet, ultimately, makes it impossible to enforce such copyrights.

Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a Carnegie Corporation board member, is sympathetic to the access movement, although he believes in intellectual property rights.

“The world now has the opportunity to make the kind of knowledge that we have in the best libraries in the United States available for free to anybody in the world,” Alberts says. “From what I see already, I am certain that there will be, within the next 10 years, plenty of invaluable knowledge available to anyone who is well-connected to the Web.”

Next page: From the earliest days of the printing press, publishers were wary of the idea of a central facility offering free access to books that people would otherwise be compelled to buy.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5