Angela Okune, "2019 CODESRIA/ASAA pre-conference publishing workshop" [Fieldnotes], 2020, Research Data Share.

2019 CODESRIA/ASAA pre-conference publishing workshop fieldnote excerpts

Workshop Convened by Divine Fuh (CODESRIA) and Stephanie Kitchen (International African Institute)

October 22, 2019

USIU (Nairobi, Kenya)

10 AM - 4:30 PM

• Plan S - "from 2021, if you receive funding from this group of funders, you have no choice. Funding tied to the dissemination model. We need to be able to develop infrastructure and an ecosystem to participate and compete. Otherwise it will further marginalize. Many publishers will not qualify. Plan S will select a number of journals and publishers and you have to qualify. I don’t see Yaounde Press, USIU Press, etc. on their list. I don’t see any of these people. It will further marginalize."
• “Open Access will further marginalize people.” Open Access comes after all of this infrastructures exists. You need to invest in infrastructure. For your higher education to actual yield, you need to invest in building the basic infrastructure. Highest growth of young research is on the content. Every journal is running to the continent to pick researchers to publish outside. Content and knowledge production, the future is right here.” If UoN does not have a printing press and doesn’t think that investing in the UoN press is a political project to give it a voice, it is a problem. It is doing what Paulin Hountandji called scientific extroversion. While we have all these people from Kenya, they are existing here as if they are existing in Oxford. Once you build that infrastructure, then open access can kick in. It can be a public good. How many research countries have that foundation?”
• Everyone working at CODESRIA went through CODESRIA. Successfully created community of people who believe in it and keep coming back. Consolidation and renewal. There’s always more consolidation than renewal. That’s the project. In terms of capacities - struck every time on this continent when people talk of capacities to be developed. That is the project of the West. This is a place where capacity needs to be built up. It is so popular here. We embrace these projects here. Even though it is important, it does something to the psyche. We are always inadequate. Just when we catch up, always something else. Good learning happens through apprenticeship. We have lost that apprenticeship. SAP was partly responsible of that. SAP in 80s destroyed. Why we have a problem now is because we had profs who were badly trained. It is not their fault. The system was so badly destroyed. Your capacity to think was taken away and your capacity to think depended on development projects. Until we have apprenticeship system, we will be repeating the cycle over and over and over.