I have recently returned from Uganda. From 27 to 29 May 2008 I participated in the PALM Africa Workshop on alternative publishing models in Africa, which was hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU). The participants in the workshop represented a wide range of types of organisations, including public and private sector publishers, and an equally wide range of competences, and attitudes toward alternative publishing models. The organisers of the workshop are to be congratulated on patiently and persistently explaining the potential benefits of alternative licensing. Experimenting with alternative publishing models offers a low cost, low risk way of testing the opportunities available to developing country publishers.
I introduced copyright and alternative licensing, a novel subject for most participants. The remainder of the time I participated in the workshop, fielding any question on copyright and licensing. I’ve made a short list on what emerged from the workshop for me.
Learnings:
The participation of Gary Rosenberg, who heads the HSRC press, was incredibly useful. His practical experience of running a very successful open access publishing house enabled participants to consider how open access as an enterprise strategy, rather than a technocratic subject.
There are a number of opportunities emerging:
- The opportunity provided by the need to measure dissemination of CC licensed material. People contemplating or already using Creative Commons licences on material need ways to measure how this disseminated. There are two aspects to this, simple ways of approximating how many times material is copied or downloaded, and the far more complex process of understanding the socio-economic impact of sharing material. Content disseminators who use Creative Commons licenses to share material often need to demonstrate to funders, advertisers and administrators how open licensing increases dissemination. There are existing ways of measuring how CC licensed material is spread. There is however a gap between the skills involved in using a fairly disparate set of tools. An easy to understand framework, which explains both the tools and their limitations, together with the tools, or links to the tools would constitute a useful toolbox. The process of evaluating the impact of sharing content is more challenging, involving qualitative questions of the value of knowledge. Open access proponents can’t allow the difficulty to intimidate us, its important to begin developing an understanding now. While there are obvious measurable efficiencies from adopting open licences, ranging through exponentially increasing distribution of copies, while decreasing costs, to increased citation and sales, the greatest benefits are less tangible, increasing the number and extent to which more people can contribute to knowledge production. If we don’t engage now with the challenge of value rather than number, there is a significant risk of perpetuating the broken Modern paradigm that only things which can be numbered are real.
- The opportunity provided by the need for basic research on how users respond to free alternatives in developing countries. While there is research on way in which users will, despite the availability of a “free” alternative, nevertheless elect to pay for a “value added” version of a work, that research has been conducted primarily in the developed world.
- In order to address the unfounded but pervasive claim that because of the paucity of discretionary income in developing countries, entire populations will prefer a free alternative to paying for a valued added alternative. For example, how will the small pool of users in a least developed African country respond to a free offering of the text of a book, coupled with a sale of the same book as an attractive physical artefact? Would additional material in the hard copy work affect behaviour?
- There is a need for local or regional partner to provide basic e-commerce services.These should be sufficiently affordable so that small and medium enterprises can make use of them, it seems that the best way to achieve that would be to devise profit sharing schemes, so that partners providing ordering and payments systems would share risk and profit. One potential problem is that these partners, likely to be banks or ISP’s may be at risk from poor legal advice, as a result of which they try to own the content, effectively destroying the business model.
- An opportunity to aggregate Creative Commons licensed content which is specifically useful to development. I spent some time explaining how the participants could find, and use Creative Commons licensed photographs on flickr. This could involve both hosting, and indexing Creative Commons licensed content, and would greatly increase the use of Creative Commons licensed material by non-profit, inter-governmental and governmental agencies at this point in time.
Edited to add: Mark Surman posted a comment that one should not forget the opportunity for appropriate technology, and business models for easy, cheap, print on demand. Even though I hadn’t mentioned this is my post previously all the participants expressed an interest in print on demand.