Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | >Bandwidth and Copyright: Barriers to Knowledge in Africa?, page 5

Universities in developed countries are fighting this battle perhaps even more aggressively than those in poorer countries. Academic and scientific journal publishers are coming under increasing criticism because of their regular, substantial subscription price increases, and their use of bundling, which forces libraries to subscribe to journals they don’t want in order to get the ones they do.

Even Ivy League universities in America are facing a crunch. Last year, Cornell University announced that it would have to cancel more than 200 subscriptions to journals from the publishing colossus Reed Elsevier, which produces more than 1,600 publications and journals. Other major research universities have done the same.

Duke University recently announced that it would cancel $400,000 worth of Reed Elsevier titles. “We just don’t want to tie up that much of our resources with one publisher,” says Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. The journal cancellations, she says, are “what it will cost us to buy our freedom.”

Tension, even hostility, between publishers and libraries is nothing new. 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. But soon, libraries became the publishers’ best customers.

Committees in both the British and American legislatures have passed resolutions demanding that government-sponsored research be available for free. In a report accompanying a budget bill for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 2005, the House committee said that after an article has been published, researchers who are financed by the NIH should make their final manuscripts available via PubMed Central, a popular digital archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

Responding to growing pressure, Reed Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, announced that authors publishing in its journals would be allowed to post articles in institutional repositories. Another development favoring the Open Access Movement is the recent announcement by Google, the world’s most popular Internet search engine, that it has reached an agreement with some of America’s leading university research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Internet. Michael Keller heads the library at Stanford University, which is participating in the project. He says, “Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries.”

Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long vowed to make all of the world’s information accessible to anyone with a web browser. But actually, their recent deal with research universities hardly does that. While it will be possible to search, download, print and copy works that are in public domain (meaning, their copyright has expired), under the Google initiative, searches for works still under copyright protection will only produce a few paragraphs of the work.

Still, Google, and its competitor Yahoo, as well as others such as Amazon.com, are in a mad dash to get
a piece of the $12 billion scholarly journal business. Google has created a separate site, called Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), for academic researchers.

These rapidly percolating developments may ultimately work to the advantage of developing countries like Africa. First, all the increased attention is forcing a growing international debate over copyright laws, according to Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and the founder and director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “There is no Google for determining what works are protected by copyright,” Lessig has written. “There is no Google for tracking down current copyright holders.”

Second, just as the marketplace is creating advances that bring down the costs of technology, some believe the same dynamic is likely with scholarly information.

MacArthur’s Raoul Davion believes that will happen. “How long do you think it will take Google to figure out they can do the same thing with scholarly information that Apple is doing with music? Sell every individual small amount of information for next to nothing.”

Davion thinks these are the kind of innovations that will prove the salvation of African universities. “The kind of progress people expect in Africa,” says Davion, “is the speed of light compared to how long it took the rest of the world to take these same steps. It took the West more than 100 years to build its technology infrastructure. Yet Africa has only been engaged in this issue for a few years. In any other context, these expectations would seem totally unrealistic. The kind of pace we are looking at expects the production of a computer literate population out of students who’ve never seen an e-mail.

“But everyone I know in Africa who works on these issues is optimistic,” Davion continues. “African universities feel they’ve been shut off for so long from the global knowledge community, and they are so hungry and thirsty, they are just full speed ahead. There is probably some limit to the human ability to adapt to new situations and to incorporate new information. But there’s no indication we’re anywhere close to reaching those limits in Africa.”

Kenneth Walker, who currently runs Lion House Productions, a South African strategic communications firm, has had a distinguished career as a journalist. In the U.S., he worked for ABC News, covering the White House as well as the U.S. Justice Department and also served as a foreign correspondent. Before that, for 13 years he reported for The Washington Star newspaper, which assigned him to South Africa in 1981 where his work earned several of the most prestigious awards in print journalism. In 1985 he won an Emmy for a series of reports he did on South Africa for the ABC news program Nightline.