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SSP-1_GS.Opening.Session
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Segment:1 ADRIAN STANLEY: Introduction.
ADRIAN STANLEY: All right. Welcome, everybody. My name's Adrian Stanley, the current SSP president. Welcome to San Diego for the 41st annual SSP meeting. Just a few little facts about San Diego to put in context that hopefully you know. But San Diego has 267 days of sunshine, 344 days are hotter than 60 degrees. They have zero inches of snow and only 25 days a warmer than 80 degrees.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So you could say it's a sort of perfect climate ecosystem. One could draw conclusions is that is that similar to our publishing environment. Maybe, maybe not. But I actually do think it is a very similar ecosystem environment to what SSP is. So I am welcoming you. I'll hear you for that. The other interesting fact about San Diego is it's a gateway city for both Central America and Asia.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So we really use this location and the annual meeting program team to help set the theme for this meeting, which is shaping the new status quo-- global perspectives in scholarly publishing. And really, what we're aiming to do with this theme throughout the whole meeting is bring together diverse voices and points of view, not just for one single discussion, but to help bring a new paradigm of sharing, and scholarship, and scholarly publishing.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I hope you'll embrace this theme throughout the whole meeting and join. Just a little background to my very first SSP was in 2004 in San Francisco. I was given some great advice by one of the founding members of SSP, Barbara Fort Meyers. She said get involved, work on committees, get to know people. I literally moved here straight from China. I didn't know anybody.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Within a number of times-- I have so many friends and people in the audience, I know them well. So I'd courage first time attendees to get involved, see how you can work and support SSP. Experienced people who've been here for a long time know and will hopefully say hello to the new attendees. We'll just make everybody welcome. That's the environment we have.
ADRIAN STANLEY: That's what we want to create. And I really do think SSP has got a nice pay it forward culture where people support each other. We're an organization that's made up of over 250 volunteers that actively work together. And we break down a lot of barriers-- internationally, nationally, and regionally.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I'm very proud to be the president. Of course, we can't put on a meeting like this without recognizing the sponsors and people that help support this event. So just a quick heads up-- and I think there should be a rolling slide deck of all the sponsors and people. But our diamond level sponsors are Aries, Cenveo, and HighWire.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Platinum level are Cabells, Silverchair, and Cadmore Media. Gold level are Web of Science Group, Copyright Clearance Center, and 3Play Media. So is there some slides we can put up rolling the-- I don't know where they AV is. But while they're doing that-- and I'm only asking the slides to go up because hopefully you've all seen and downloaded the annual meeting app, the Wi-Fi, the SSP Twitter tag, and things like that that are-- There we go.
ADRIAN STANLEY: There we go. So if you have any questions, there are people at the membership booth and the registration desk that'll ask you, but you'll find all the information there. A big thanks to all our other sponsors, as well, and exhibitors. Please do take time to go down to the exhibit hall and see them.
ADRIAN STANLEY: We have-- this meeting, we have over 67 exhibitors and companies that help make this meeting what it is. But we actually had 10 exhibitors on the waiting list who couldn't fit in. So that's testament to our development committee. But first of all, I want to just thank-- I want you to all know the three annual meeting program chairs who really made this event with with their team and committee possible.
ADRIAN STANLEY: They've been planning probably for 10, 11 months this event, now. So I'm just going to ask them to stand there and way that you all. But Cason Lynley, Yael Fitzpatrick, and Ben Mudrak They're all here at the front. They've put in some stellar work, and we really appreciate it.
ADRIAN STANLEY: There's some really great themes and tracks for the annual meeting. Hopefully you've seen in the program. But following the overall theme of the program, the different tracks of inviting new voices, external pressures on publishing, going to market, publishing on a smaller scale, tools and technology, and some very interesting non-traditional sessions.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I hope you'll all enjoy. I always find, when I come to this meeting, I can never go to all the meeting. I want to go, but thankfully, they are recorded and will be shown afterwards on the website after a few weeks. I also just want to thank our development co-chairs, Mike Mudrak, and Paul Yaga. If you're around and you're in the audience, if you'll wave.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yep. Great job doing the exhibits and making this meeting possible, so thank you. You've seen the Wi-Fi, meeting apps, and housekeeping. Just obviously, show respect to speakers with turning your phones off and things like that. SSP does have a code of conduct, so I just wanted to just remind people of that.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I think you should have all ticked a box when you registered, but SSP is committed to a diverse-- diversity, equity, and providing a safe and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free for sharing of ideas, free of harassment and discrimination. So I'm sure you're all wonderful people, but do respect the speakers when you're giving your comments. And my last point to note-- again, just on the theme of the global voices, we have people from over 20 different nationalities here at this meeting.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So we have people who have traveled all the way from Australia Bahrain, Colombia, Nigeria, South Africa, Japan, China, Singapore, and many other locations. So again, please make them feel welcome. I hope you'll really enjoy the meeting when you've come and you'll bring your global perspectives to the meeting. So with that said, I'm going to now introduce Miles McNamee from HighWire, who's the kind sponsor of this keynote, to come and say a few words.
ADRIAN STANLEY:
Segment:2 MILES MCNAMEE: HighWire sponsorship introduction.
MILES MCNAMEE: Good afternoon. Oh, hi. Good afternoon, and thank you, Adrian. I'd like to add my welcome to you all. The HighWire team is very proud to once again be a sponsor of the SSP. Our relationship with SSP and this annual meeting is a longstanding one. And I don't think I'm alone in saying that this year's event feels a little bit more significant than others in recent memory.
MILES MCNAMEE: It's a time for disruptive change in our industry, and this meeting remains at the forefront, just as Adrian was explaining, of sharing best practices to facilitate discussion and collaborate to advance change. I think we agree that SSP is a must attend event. There's lots on the calendar, but this is a must attend event. The caliber of participants at SSP ensures rich knowledge exchange and debate, which we at HighWire enjoy contributing to.
MILES MCNAMEE: We know that this forum provides everyone here the opportunity to share their thinking, no matter whether you're a librarian, a publisher, an academic, or a technology services provider. I urge you all to speak up. It's only through doing so that our sector will emerge strong in the challenges and opportunities that we'll address in the next year ahead. The HighWire team is involved in a number of panels this week.
MILES MCNAMEE: And I'll just point out one. Our founding director, John Sack will moderate and speak during session 1C on publisher's preferred options to address plan S-- that's a whole mouthful right there-- which we developed with our publishing partners earlier this year in a workshop with members of the HighWire community, including several in this room. We look forward to working with our clients and our future clients-- I am the sales guy, after all-- During this SSP event.
MILES MCNAMEE: On behalf of HighWire and SSP, I'm pleased to introduce our keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Mariam Yeshak. And annual meeting program committee chair Ben Mudrak will share a bit more about Dr. Yeshak and her choice as the keynote speaker. And again Adrian, thank you for having us. See you.
Segment:3 BEN MUDRAK: Keynote Introduction.
BEN MUDRAK: Hello, everyone. Thank you to Adrian and Miles. I'm very excited to be introducing Mariam to everyone tonight. To tell you a little bit about her, she completed schooling in pharmacy in Ethiopia, received a PhD at Uppsala University. She is assistant professor of pharmacognosy at Addis Ababa university, where she leads a research group called Bioactive Secondary Metabolites for Improving Life.
BEN MUDRAK: I thought it was a really nice name. That's why I wanted to put it in here. She studies indigenous knowledge systems and the clinical application of traditional medicine. She's also very active in fostering the next generation of researchers as a fellow and chair of the Ethiopian Young Academy of Sciences, an inaugural ambassador for the next Einstein Forum, and young affiliate of the World Academy of Science.
BEN MUDRAK: As we settled on this year's theme, which Adrian mentioned, the other co-chairs, the entire committee and I-- we really focused on programming that would embody that theme. And in that vein, we were delighted when Mariam accepted our invitation. She brings perspectives that are rarely featured in a setting like this. And I know she's going to jump start the conversation about how scholarly communication can be a truly global endeavor with worldwide impact.
BEN MUDRAK: Before I turn the mic over, I do want to extend special thanks to Sean Harris and Andy [INAUDIBLE] for helping connect us with Mariam. We greatly appreciate their assistance and their efforts in the global academic community. And now, I am delighted to present Dr. Mariam Yeshak giving a presentation entitled Scholarly Publishing in Africa-- Impact Factor Versus Societal Impact.
BEN MUDRAK:
Segment:4 MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Scholarly Publishing in Africa.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mariamawit. My full first name is Mariamawit. And I'm here today to talk about scholarly publishing in Africa-- the cost between impact factor and having actual impact on society. To tell you a little bit more about myself, I come from Ethiopia, one of the nations [INAUDIBLE]..
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a country located at the Horn of Africa, a little bit north to the equator, and with a population of about 102 million people. And we like to call it the land of origins for apparent reasons, the first one being our close human ancestor, the famous Lucy, comes from Ethiopia. And also, it showcase the origin of the Blue Nile-- the longest river, which flows all the way up to Egypt, and with that, follows the Nile civilization.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: We had a very ancient kingdom-- the Aksumite kingdom, which has given the world one of the oldest known coins. And we also have our own alphabet, with a very ancient language called Ge'ez. And today, also, the official language of Ethiopia is written with these scripts. And Ethiopia is also known for its civilization and architecture, especially with single rock hewn churches and obelisks registered as UNESCO heritage sites.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And probably, very importantly, Ethiopia has given a life companion-- an important life companion-- that's coffee. Sorry. Probably have heard the story of Kaldi, the shepherd who observed the mood change in his goat after they grazed upon the berries. And he collected the berries and the story went on. But finally, the coffee was there.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And today we have a very touristic and socializing coffee ceremony, which we almost do every day. And if you visit Ethiopia, you are very welcome to attend one. And before going deep into my subject, I want to tell you the moment-- the life changing moment-- I had when I stepped foot abroad to do my PhD and ignited a dream-- ignited a dream about science and society. So when I joined the group, around that same time, one of our group members was defending her thesis.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And she distributed a copy to all of us. As I was reading through it, I saw a section which I couldn't understand-- it was not in English-- and asked about it. And they said, oh, it's a Popular Science summary. It's a summary of her work in the local language so everyone who can understand the language could read and get what she did. And I was wondering why a scientist, a busy PhD student, would care to write such a summary.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Whoever wants to know about her work can read the whole thesis, or part of the thesis. And if they don't have the technical ability to understand it, why would they be interested to know about it in the first place? When we had that discussion, my professor, who knew I had special attachment, with my grandmother, said, Mariamawit, if you can not and if you don't care to share your PhD work with your grandmother, then it's probably not worth doing it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Then-- yeah. That was an inspiring moment, and I came to realize that you do research, you publish, not just for the sake of enriching your CV, but serving society. So it might be preaching to the choir, but scholarly publishing is the fundamental aspect of scientific research and communication. It's a key process.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a key step in the knowledge sharing process. And at its international character, it connects scholars, institutions, and nations. And it has also a role in the current development of faculty and university rankings. In Africa, scholarly publishing is quite young. It only started during the second half of the 20th century. And Africa still represents less than 2% of the world's scholarly publications.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African scientists are still struggling to keep pace with the rest of the world. But if you look-- if you zoom into the African situation, and if you look from within, you can see that scholarly publishing actually has made great strides during the past few decades. And it has made many opportunities within the African context. For example, in 1960, there were only 35 public universities.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Within four decades, that number grew 57 fold. In the year 2000, there were 2,000 public and private universities. And many of these universities host local journals. The African journals online-- it's an indexing website, like the [INAUDIBLE].. When it's kicked off in 2000, indexed only 50 journals published in the English language. Today, it has more than 500 journals indexed, of which 260 are open access, and from both francophonic and anglophonic African countries.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African scholars, just like their peers elsewhere, are enjoying the benefits of internet, free access to scholarly material, digital publishing, and progress in information and communication technologies. To look at the actual numbers, for example, if we look at the average online publications from some select countries in the first decade of the 21st century-- if you look at Nigeria, the most populous country in the continent, it grew from about to 884 to 1,269 within six years.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: In Ethiopia, the second most populous, from 244 to 333. And South Africa, actually, took a great leap from 4,600 to about 6,300. And not only number, but the diversity of the publications is also quite good. African scholars are publishing in health sciences, biology and life sciences, humanities, social science, agriculture, environment and general sciences. All right.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So that's the situation. There is an increasing number of publications in increased number of disciplines. But when we come to impact, which was the idea-- which it was an idea embedded from the beginning of scholarly publishing. As Oldenburg wrote in one of his letters, "All indigenous men will thereby be encouraged to impact their knowledge and discoveries." What is the situation for us-- for Africans?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And The. Question is really, how do we measure impact? So of course, one way of measuring impact is bibiometrics, where there comes words like the impact factor, citation index. And names like Web of Science, ISI came up. And indexing in this corpus and the like come up. This is an important way of measuring impact. Well, it's measuring the impact of research on science itself.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But it is also important in helping scholars decide where to publish, plan their publication agenda and librarians make decision on their collection. So this is one way of measuring. And the other way of measuring impact would be the impact of research on society. And now, terms-- or the altmetrics, came like ordered society, societal relevance, quality, changing behavior, and so on.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So if we look at publications coming from Africa, and if we measure them in these two metrics, what do we see? What does that figure look like? OK. African universities are using bibliometric data to measure the progress of their faculty. And faculty are actually publishing in high impact top rated journals. And they are getting promotions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African universities are ranking better and better worldwide. And I work as associate director of stuff affairs in my college. We handle promotion cases. I've been in the office for the past one and a half year. And just during that time, we have promoted five of our colleagues to full professors and about 15 of them to associate professors using bibliometric data. So scholars-- African scholars-- are actually making good using the bibliometrics.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: If we go to the altmetrics and look at society-- the society the scholars live in-- actually, the African society is still scoring low in development indicators like world development report, world competitiveness yearbook, and technology advancement index. And questions like how could the application of knowledge end poverty and hunger in Africa, how could higher education empower women and promote gender equity, can knowledge be considered in the African context to address child mortality and improve mental health-- maternal health, are still questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And there are still conflicts. There is still poverty in Africa. In a nutshell, while African scholars-- African researchers-- are enjoying and benefiting from their scholarly publishing, their society is still lagging in many developmental indicators. So where is the disconnect? What are the possible reasons? And what could be done to close that gap?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's what I would like to discuss in the coming few slides. The first one is visibility and access. And here, I'm not talking about open access at all. I'm talking about visibility and access of even open access articles. Most publications are on journals abroad, because African scholars feel they should be competent in the scientific world.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: They should publish in top rated journals, and they don't have many local journals scoring good in bibliometric measurement. So they prefer to send their articles abroad to collaborate with scientists abroad, and the articles end up being published abroad. And usually, there is no visibility and access is very limited, even to fellow researchers, researchers in other fields, policy makers, and the general public.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It means, for example, if I publish a paper on a subject area-- if I publish it abroad, even scientists across the corridor may not be aware of it. So it's like spot the phone in this picture. I doubt if any of you can spot the phone here. So if they go in Google on that subject area, my research paper will be like the phone here-- hidden in plain sight.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Could anyone? Was anyone unable to spot it? OK. It's here. So this is for researchers-- fellow researchers-- in the same field or not. When you come to society, the general public, it will be asking them to spot the phone while they're standing in the next room.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So we are not visible, and we are not accessible-- or our work is not visible and accessible. What can be done to improve access and visibility? I want to dare to ask, or challenge, the reputable publishers, or the big players in the scholarly publishing industry, to engage in publishing local journals. Africa is a growing-- has a growing population.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It is a growing economy, still. So there is a lot to do. And I think these publishers should engage, actually, in publishing local journals. And the existing local journals should work hard, really, to avoid mediocrity of content, increase their visibility internationally, and remoteness-- decrease their remoteness-- so that African scholars feel comfortable in publishing in local journals.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the role of science academies together with, of course, publishers cannot be overstated here. The Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, for example, has started an initiative to create a body for accreditation and standardization of local journals. And once that body is formed and local journalists come up to some standard, I think it will create a platform where we feel comfortable to send our articles to.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the other is when you engage in scholarly publishing, OK, you can also publish Popular Science summaries in print or online. Again, I want to mention an experience from Africa-- The Quest, which is published by the South African Academy of Sciences, is a good example here. The Quest is a thematic publication. And in each thematic issue, they collect scientific papers and compile them in a form of Popular Science summary so that anybody can understand it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the other is, we should inform stakeholders ourselves. Why not send a copy of an abstract of my paper to a policymaker? Why not email the abstract to my friends? And why not share it on social media-- well, apart from ResearchGate and LinkedIn? So this can increase, I think, our access-- our visibility and access to our work.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Science communication-- engagement in science communication-- is also another solution. It tangentially touch publishing, actually, of course. But science communication-- communicating science with journalists-- is another arena where we can increase visibility. But on a workshop we held once at the Academy, we had journalists, and we had scientists.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And they were talking what they are looking to engage in science communications. And the scientists who are saying, I don't know how to write to a newspaper, or I don't know how to give an interesting TV interview without being too technical. So there needs to be capacity building for scientists, and science journalism should be a growing discipline in Africa.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Public lectures are also another method to increase visibility. As the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences holds, for example, regular public lectures, the whole thing from the poster, to the presentation, through the discussion is done in local language. And we have a very good positive feedback from attendees. And upon requests, scientists could write, also, policy briefs using the Academy's platform, again.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Our other problem creating a gap between our publications and their societal impact is the extrovertedness of our research questions. Most of the research funding comes from outside Africa. That's the fact. And research questions are designed to meet the interests of international funders. So African researchers should write, or should come up with, research questions that would be more relevant to meet those funder's interests than address societal questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And for everyone, not only for African research-- for anyone to-- aspiring to publish in top rated journals, cutting edge questions-- cutting edge research questions-- are very important, rather than validating solutions toward societal development. And this has also opened a gap between us and society. The solution to this would be probably setting a research agenda at various levels, starting from department level, school, university, nationally levels.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And once you have those set in place, you probably can mobilize local funds to do the research on that and funds from policymakers. Our ministers, for example-- our ministerial offices have departments for evidence based policy making. And they have some money. And we actually don't know what they do with that money. So probably, it's time to mobilize that money and make it in use of addressing contextualized research questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Probably-- well, it's getting more and more Africanized, or more and more contextualize to the African context. So language is the biggest barrier we have. Papers are published internationally in English or in French. And if you come to my country, for example, not many people speak English or French. So our publication language de facto excludes our society from discussion in science.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I want to cite an example here-- an incident here. As has been mentioned, I work with traditional healers. And I was working with this traditional healer you see in this picture. He was giving me information on the herbs, and then he took me to the field to show me which plant was which. And we can learn to discuss about registering the Ethiopian plant species and so on.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And he's interested in doing that. And I told him, oh, you know there is a project actually going on in Addis Ababa university-- an excellent project, in fact, that is doing registry of the Ethiopian flora-- The Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea Project. And as just I was telling him this, I remember that all of the volumes of that book were published, or are published, in English.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So for him, it's meaningless. It's as if it doesn't exist. So how can we tackle the barrier of language in publishing? I feel that whenever such crucial publications are there, there needs to be translation. They need to be translated and republished-- of course, all copyright issues resolved. Translation is one, but why not publish in local languages? So if we have local journals published by reputable publishers, and if you have a very contextualized research question that's relevant to your society, why don't you publish it in your local language?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That should be-- that should not be very strange. Just this morning, I was checking my Facebook account. And I haven't opened my Facebook account for a few days. And this came up-- it said you are now using Facebook in Amharic. That's my language. And the writing under it says, based on your activity, we think your Facebook experience would be best in Amharic.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So if social media can do this, if social media is collecting data on me and tell me that using my local languages would make my experience better, why not scholarly publishing? That's the question I want to raise here. So the next point, which I can never overstate, is our disconnect from indigenous knowledge as scientists. So the African society has a very deep, rich, traditional knowledge-- not only in medicine, but in various disciplines.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And as researchers, we are somewhat disconnected from this indigenous knowledge-- from the conceptualization of our research question through the process to publishing. And this is, I think, greatly unfair-- not only to the African society, but to the whole humankind. I was once attending a conference. And I think I even tweeted it. A European agricultural scientist was presenting, and he said, when an African farmer dies, a library dies, Because there is a lot of knowledge embedded in these societies.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So not digging into this indigenous knowledge and not presenting it to the scientific world, I think, is unfair to the whole of humankind. And even as the pharmacognosists assists working with traditional healers who are comparatively close to the indigenous knowledge, the pattern we engage with this indigenous knowledge is not right. I have coined myself-- two words.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: We use the fishing and the dumping models. We either fish or dump. I will take the Ethiopian traditional medicine as an example here to elaborate more. So if you will take your smartphones and Google the Ethiopian traditional medicine, you will get data from WHO and several other bodies that 70% of our society and 100% of our livestock-- and livestock is very important in Ethiopia-- depend on it for their health.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And Ethiopian traditional medicines is quite a complex system. It has, of course, spirituality, bone setting, midwifery, herbalism in all. But we have evidences, again, that it actually works for many ailments. I'm going to show you some pictures to demonstrate that. Some of them are a bit graphic. I'm sorry.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So you see that the woman had a tumor before treatment. And after treatment with a traditional herbal extract, the tumor was gone. And same here. OK. When I engage with these traditional healers, what I do is, as I said, either fish-- how do I fish? This is how I fish.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I go to the traditional healer-- a traditional healer. I collect botanical data from them, and then possibly materials, as well. And that's the end of it. We say our goodbyes, and I go to my campus, and I do literature survey-- literature survey on how extraction is done internationally, how the biopsy should look like, or how the find phytochemistry should be designed.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And then, I go to the lab. I do as I have read on the literature survey. And there will be new findings, writing up, and I publish. And there is nothing going back to the traditional healer after the first two steps. And I'm not talking about compensation and everything. I'm talking about engagement in the scientific discussion. The traditional healers are excluded after the first two steps.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: When I do my literature survey, when I do my method design, when I ask my discussion and everything, they are not in the picture. They don't even know where my lab is, probably. And how do I make this matter worse? I repeat the whole process next time and publish again. So this is the fishing model. Very unfair. And then the other one is dumping.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: As conventional health workers, we get to introduce new interventions from WHO or from elsewhere. And then, we go to the society and we tell them, stop using your traditional methods. Use these interventions. The traditional methods don't work. And I have a particular example here again from my orthopedician friends.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Born setting-- the bone setters are very important in the Ethiopian traditional medicine. And my orthopedician friends go and tell them-- tell the society, no, the bone setters are complicating, and many of the clinical complications we have is from treatment with bone setters, and so on. And you're telling this to a society that's crazy about soccer, and the national team has a bone setter.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And we have world champion athletes. And they are treated by bone setters. This is very disconnecting. And you can expect the result of this dumping process. The solution, I think is to embrace indigenous knowledge. And I want to borrow a quote here. And in reads, "To publish Africa without making visible the depth of the indigenous knowledge of Africans is to publish Africa deeper and deeper to the heart of darkness." And it's a very true statement.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Globally, we are not competitive. We are bringing out less than 2% of the scholarly publishing, I think, because we are detached from our roots. There was a lot to get from our roots and present to the world and make our presentation visible. But at the current situation, we are just going to a vacuum. We are not belonging or we are not playing a big role here. We are disconnected here. So we are going deeper and deeper to darkness.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So when we embrace indigenous knowledge, there should always be two ways of knowledge flow. It should not be either fishing from them or dumping on them, but to engage them, actually, in discussions. And my country and the science ministry is not talking about space science, space-- having a spacecraft and so on. And I don't know if they have consulted these manuscripts. The photos you see are ancient manuscripts on space science from Ethiopian tribes.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And our cross, our modern cross, even depicts the knowledge in space science by ancient Ethiopians. And if we do that, I think we will be beneficial not only to the African society, but to humankind as a whole. So all what we have talked in the previous slides is not very far to achieve if we have the correct mindset, actually. Academy of-- the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, we dialogue about this issue a lot.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And we don't have a problem. Many of our colleagues understand that society can benefit from successful research if results are translated. But the actual excuses our colleagues are telling are, oh, I don't engage in something that doesn't contribute towards my promotion. I'm too focused. Oh, I'm too busy.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Or what I do is too complicated to translate to the general public. Or traditional knowledge is not useful to the modern society, and it should go extinct. So if these mindsets are corrected, I think those interventions are actually achievable. So the situation now looks-- if we go back to the metrics, the two circles are just met tangentially in our context.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And when they come closer, the bibliometrics seem to cover up the societal impact, or the altmetric data-- or the altmetric impact. What I believe the way forward should be, the circles should overlap. I don't think they are mutually exclusive. They can overlap, actually. They could be interacted. And they will even grow bigger.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: The individual circuits will even grow bigger, because they will feed to each other. If you have a good societal impact, obviously you can pull more money. You can do better research. You can publish in a top rated journal. So this, I believe, should be the way forward. And in conclusion, of course it's high time African researchers give service to their society and make themselves visible and relevant.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: As in the new Harari book, its stated irrelevance is worse than exploitation. So you cannot-- you cannot risk to be irrelevant to society. And doing science responsibly is not a question of only research, but justice to society. There are certain benefits. There are certain funds that we get just because we are working in Africa-- just because I'm working in a developing country.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So using those funds by the name of society but not giving back to society is not justice. To conclude, again, with the story I began. That was in 2005. In 2012 I defended my thesis. And I said, hey, OK, the requirement is to write up a popular summary for me in English, because I didn't speak Swedish by that time.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But then I said, why not in Amharic as well? So I included an Amharic summary. I even wrote my name in Amharic on the cover. And there were-- oh, sorry. Oops. There it was.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Yeah. No. And I wrote six pages of summary in Amharic in my thesis. Well, it was accepted both positively, and there were some interesting comments made. My cousin said, oh, I thought you were doing something serious. Oh, all those six years just for six pages?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Well, it was disappointing by the time. And I came back to the lab, and I told my professor, my cousin said so and so. And he said, what did you expect? So anyhow, the [INAUDIBLE] was closed. And before I say my thank you, I would like to acknowledge Society for Scholarly Publishing for inviting me to this talk. And I want to single out the co-chairs for helping me throughout the process, Addis Ababa University , [INAUDIBLE] Institute, the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences for giving me a platform to pursue my passion in science and society, and Uppsala University for that life changing moment and funding my research.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And thank you very much. If you come back home to the lands of 13 months of sunshine, give me a call. Thank you.
Segment:5 Q & A.
BEN MUDRAK: Well, we can take-- we can take questions now, if people have any. Cason and I have mics, so we'll come find you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thanks for that brilliant presentation. Mine is not a question, but a comment. My name is Amayu from University of South Africa press. I think what I want to add some of the things that you said that are making it difficult for the African continent to have societal impact-- it's also low level of continental collaboration between researchers and publishers. And the second one, it's from a lived experience as a publisher, we collaborate with some of the international big publishers.
AUDIENCE: And one of them, it took us about 14 months to conclude a contract, simply because they were negotiating in bad faith. So I think my challenge here, it's for our international players, because one of the ways we can disseminate African knowledge is to collaborate with international players. So I challenge those who are here to, when they negotiate, to first accept the fact that we should be equal partners, and not subservients to the big brothers.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to make those two comments. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Really great talk. I should say, hey, I'm also from Sweden. What I want to ask you a question about is the scientific methodology-- if in its incept it kind of alienates indigenous understanding, and if, actually, where we need to look is how we do science in the first place to include that. If that is actually maybe the fundamental questions to ask to help bring indigenous-- what do you think about that, [INAUDIBLE]..
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Can you rephrase, please?
AUDIENCE: My question is if it's actually the way how we do science-- the scientific methodology from the Enlightenment period, that that's the reason why we're not able to get indigenous information out, because we have this pretense that science has to be a certain way when it should maybe be something different.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Shall I go, or-- OK. Thank you for the comment. I'm sure that's something to look into. When I spoke, I spoke from the scientist's or the researcher's point of view only. So those are-- those comments are well taken. The way we do science-- the way we look for empirical data, that probably has affected our engagement with indigenous knowledge.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But when we talk-- when I mentioned indigenous knowledge-- for example, in the traditional medicine system-- I'm not talking about those which you cannot provide empirical data for-- for example, spirituality and everything. Even when there is concrete measurement-- when there can be concrete measurement and where you can produce empirical data, when you can engage doing what you do in the way you are trained to do, you can still engage the indigenous knowledge, because there are ancient manuscripts where, actually, the same thing-- the same empirical data is recorded.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So I think it's more like the attitude. As I said, traditional knowledge, indigenous society, those terms which I wouldn't like to say out loud here, are tied to that knowledge. That's why I think we want to go far and far from it. That's my personal view.
AUDIENCE: So one of the tenants of your presentation was about language. And what-- the language of record, is it English? Is it French? When you publish in Ethiopia. And when it's translated into the various languages, does it translate in such a way that it can be replicated-- the science can be replicated.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's a very good point. When we publish in Ethiopia, we publish in English still locally. The official language of the university is-- from high school is English. That's why the general public is a bit distant for us. But when you translate-- yes, you can do that, but you have to follow strict glossary of terms-- published by several people through the past years-- of scientific terms.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And for them, when you can't find the exact term, probably you have to put them as they are. But you can. You still can achieve good repeatability if you translate.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you very much for a very interesting talk. Hello. The WHO recently recognized Chinese traditional medicine as one of the sort of systems that it recognizes and supports. And I was wondering if that's something you see as being a feasible direction for African traditional medicine anytime in the near future? And if not, what have the Chinese researchers done effectively that enabled them to achieve that kind of recognition?
AUDIENCE: Is there anything that perhaps Ethiopia, or African countries in general, could learn from?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: OK. The Ethiopian traditional medicine is also-- the traditional medicine, in general, is regarded by WHO as a means to deliver primary health care-- the primary health care. It's the conventional health professionals, like myself, who don't want to admit that-- who don't want to bring traditional medicine to the table and say, hey, it can be useful. And of course, the Chinese traditional medicine and its research-- it's extensive research-- has helped China benefits from it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: For example, acupuncture. When I say acupuncture, what comes to our minds is China. So apart from being useful to society, it has become an image-- a positive image, even, to the country. In our case, I think it's the mind-- again, the mindset. Thinking that something traditional is not probably good is the issue. And in our country, we have the growth and transformation plan.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a five year plan. And it's been rolling for two times. And the science transformation plan is now on. And it's only on the third growth and transformation plan traditional medicine was mentioned to be used in health care. So this shows that we have to do, of course, a lot more and learn, as you said, from our colleagues in China to make it more visible and useful.
AUDIENCE: Yes. First of all, when you speak of Africa, you really are not speaking of Africa. You're speaking of sub-Saharan Africa. OK. This is number one. Number two, you didn't mention anything about the upper part of Africa and what is happening there. This is two. Number three, there are quite a number of publishers who are really very active-- let's say in Egypt and in some of the other countries up north.
AUDIENCE: Three. Four-- Egypt has, also, very old civilization, very old traditional medicine, et cetera, and they are working in that direction. They tried their very best to introduce Arabic to teach science across the entire country. But they ran into some problems, which is the scientific world, nowadays, is progressing very quickly.
AUDIENCE: The speed is very high. And if you want to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of the world, unfortunately, all right, you have to use English, or maybe French, or something similar. But still, they are also using Arabic. So I think you should look a little bit up north and see what is happening. And I know that there is the African Union.
AUDIENCE: And they are very active in that direction. And maybe you can report to us what is happening. Thank you very much.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Thank you. Comment well taken. Most of the presentation I did was based on my experience. The examples I gave could only be from Ethiopia. And I have tried to look up the data-- for example, the Thomson Reuters data on a number of publications, for example, didn't include, of course, the northern African countries. I know what's being done in Egypt, because we-- Egypt is also part of the NAPRECA, the Natural Products Network.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I know they are trying their best. They have ancient civilization and traditional medicine. We share the Nile civilization, as well. But I want to challenge you, also, here. How much of that traditional medicine and that knowledge-- ancient Egyptian civilization-- is on the table now when scientific discussion is brought up? And how much of it is actually used to impact daily lives of society?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's the core point of my presentation. And I think the picture would be the same in Egypt, as well.
AUDIENCE: Question over here. Thank you so much for that really insightful talk. And I think we all understood you were using Ethiopia as a proxy, so I thought your answer was very fair the previous question. My question-- sorry, I know. Over here. My question had to do with-- you started the presentation by looking at very traditional bibliometrics to assess the relative success of African institutions and researchers.
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering if you could speak to the incentive structures within research institutions within Ethiopia, or the continent generally, that motivate how you're measuring, right? So you chose to start today by looking at a very traditional set of metrics we're all familiar with. How does that work into the incentive structure at home, and is that proving helpful or counterproductive to some of these more closer to home societal impacts that you're looking to address?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: OK. When we mean incentives, promotions, tenure, and so on? Yeah. We're still using the bibliometrics to promote faculty, to give them tenure, and so on. How is this affecting societal impact is, as I have said, as people are aspiring to get promoted by publishing in a reputable journal-- which has a good impact factor, which is not regarded predatory by the bibliometric data-- they're going far and far to journals published abroad, published in English.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So this actually has its impact on their contribution to society, as I have mentioned it on my visibility and accessibility issue.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I realize you probably can't see us with the lights in your eyes, so I apologize. My name's Heather Staines. I'm with the MIT Knowledge Futures Group. And you mentioned the percentage of participation of authors from the continent. I wondered if you came across, or if you had thoughts about, peer review participation and broadening out the pool of peer reviewers, which is a frequent topic at this meeting.
AUDIENCE: Are the same barriers there for broadening the peer review participation from Africa? And if the same barriers are there, would you have suggestions for publishers on how to expand participation?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: No. I haven't actually looked into that situation-- the peer reviewer situation. Probably, it's a good point to focus on next time. And I am-- I refrain from making any comments on that. But-- OK. Point well taken. I should look into that.
AUDIENCE: Maybe I'll follow up and ask about your experience with peer review. And maybe-- if you want to speak to that. Do you and your colleagues within your department and your university-- do you get the opportunity to review for the same sort of journals that you're publishing in? Or what can we do to make sure that you get that opportunity?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Yeah. We get invitations for peer review. And some of are professors in my faculty are actually editors of some of the international journals, as well. But that would be like here and there. I don't know. I would prefer not to make any comments here.
BEN MUDRAK: Do you have any more? OK. Well thank you again so much. It was a delight to have you.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Thank you very much.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Again, thank you for a great presentation-- starting the meeting of with a lot of great questions, everybody. So thank you for your contributions. I'm just here now just to announce, really, that there is a reception and drinks down in the exhibit hall below. Please go network, meet, talk, talk about the presentation, ask questions. I hope you'll find some ways where there are ways we can collaborate and support your research and work.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So thank you, everybody.
Segment:1 ADRIAN STANLEY: Introduction.
ADRIAN STANLEY: All right. Welcome, everybody. My name's Adrian Stanley, the current SSP president. Welcome to San Diego for the 41st annual SSP meeting. Just a few little facts about San Diego to put in context that hopefully you know. But San Diego has 267 days of sunshine, 344 days are hotter than 60 degrees. They have zero inches of snow and only 25 days a warmer than 80 degrees.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So you could say it's a sort of perfect climate ecosystem. One could draw conclusions is that is that similar to our publishing environment. Maybe, maybe not. But I actually do think it is a very similar ecosystem environment to what SSP is. So I am welcoming you. I'll hear you for that. The other interesting fact about San Diego is it's a gateway city for both Central America and Asia.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So we really use this location and the annual meeting program team to help set the theme for this meeting, which is shaping the new status quo-- global perspectives in scholarly publishing. And really, what we're aiming to do with this theme throughout the whole meeting is bring together diverse voices and points of view, not just for one single discussion, but to help bring a new paradigm of sharing, and scholarship, and scholarly publishing.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I hope you'll embrace this theme throughout the whole meeting and join. Just a little background to my very first SSP was in 2004 in San Francisco. I was given some great advice by one of the founding members of SSP, Barbara Fort Meyers. She said get involved, work on committees, get to know people. I literally moved here straight from China. I didn't know anybody.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Within a number of times-- I have so many friends and people in the audience, I know them well. So I'd courage first time attendees to get involved, see how you can work and support SSP. Experienced people who've been here for a long time know and will hopefully say hello to the new attendees. We'll just make everybody welcome. That's the environment we have.
ADRIAN STANLEY: That's what we want to create. And I really do think SSP has got a nice pay it forward culture where people support each other. We're an organization that's made up of over 250 volunteers that actively work together. And we break down a lot of barriers-- internationally, nationally, and regionally.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I'm very proud to be the president. Of course, we can't put on a meeting like this without recognizing the sponsors and people that help support this event. So just a quick heads up-- and I think there should be a rolling slide deck of all the sponsors and people. But our diamond level sponsors are Aries, Cenveo, and HighWire.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Platinum level are Cabells, Silverchair, and Cadmore Media. Gold level are Web of Science Group, Copyright Clearance Center, and 3Play Media. So is there some slides we can put up rolling the-- I don't know where they AV is. But while they're doing that-- and I'm only asking the slides to go up because hopefully you've all seen and downloaded the annual meeting app, the Wi-Fi, the SSP Twitter tag, and things like that that are-- There we go.
ADRIAN STANLEY: There we go. So if you have any questions, there are people at the membership booth and the registration desk that'll ask you, but you'll find all the information there. A big thanks to all our other sponsors, as well, and exhibitors. Please do take time to go down to the exhibit hall and see them.
ADRIAN STANLEY: We have-- this meeting, we have over 67 exhibitors and companies that help make this meeting what it is. But we actually had 10 exhibitors on the waiting list who couldn't fit in. So that's testament to our development committee. But first of all, I want to just thank-- I want you to all know the three annual meeting program chairs who really made this event with with their team and committee possible.
ADRIAN STANLEY: They've been planning probably for 10, 11 months this event, now. So I'm just going to ask them to stand there and way that you all. But Cason Lynley, Yael Fitzpatrick, and Ben Mudrak They're all here at the front. They've put in some stellar work, and we really appreciate it.
ADRIAN STANLEY: There's some really great themes and tracks for the annual meeting. Hopefully you've seen in the program. But following the overall theme of the program, the different tracks of inviting new voices, external pressures on publishing, going to market, publishing on a smaller scale, tools and technology, and some very interesting non-traditional sessions.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So I hope you'll all enjoy. I always find, when I come to this meeting, I can never go to all the meeting. I want to go, but thankfully, they are recorded and will be shown afterwards on the website after a few weeks. I also just want to thank our development co-chairs, Mike Mudrak, and Paul Yaga. If you're around and you're in the audience, if you'll wave.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Yep. Great job doing the exhibits and making this meeting possible, so thank you. You've seen the Wi-Fi, meeting apps, and housekeeping. Just obviously, show respect to speakers with turning your phones off and things like that. SSP does have a code of conduct, so I just wanted to just remind people of that.
ADRIAN STANLEY: I think you should have all ticked a box when you registered, but SSP is committed to a diverse-- diversity, equity, and providing a safe and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free for sharing of ideas, free of harassment and discrimination. So I'm sure you're all wonderful people, but do respect the speakers when you're giving your comments. And my last point to note-- again, just on the theme of the global voices, we have people from over 20 different nationalities here at this meeting.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So we have people who have traveled all the way from Australia Bahrain, Colombia, Nigeria, South Africa, Japan, China, Singapore, and many other locations. So again, please make them feel welcome. I hope you'll really enjoy the meeting when you've come and you'll bring your global perspectives to the meeting. So with that said, I'm going to now introduce Miles McNamee from HighWire, who's the kind sponsor of this keynote, to come and say a few words.
ADRIAN STANLEY:
Segment:2 MILES MCNAMEE: HighWire sponsorship introduction.
MILES MCNAMEE: Good afternoon. Oh, hi. Good afternoon, and thank you, Adrian. I'd like to add my welcome to you all. The HighWire team is very proud to once again be a sponsor of the SSP. Our relationship with SSP and this annual meeting is a longstanding one. And I don't think I'm alone in saying that this year's event feels a little bit more significant than others in recent memory.
MILES MCNAMEE: It's a time for disruptive change in our industry, and this meeting remains at the forefront, just as Adrian was explaining, of sharing best practices to facilitate discussion and collaborate to advance change. I think we agree that SSP is a must attend event. There's lots on the calendar, but this is a must attend event. The caliber of participants at SSP ensures rich knowledge exchange and debate, which we at HighWire enjoy contributing to.
MILES MCNAMEE: We know that this forum provides everyone here the opportunity to share their thinking, no matter whether you're a librarian, a publisher, an academic, or a technology services provider. I urge you all to speak up. It's only through doing so that our sector will emerge strong in the challenges and opportunities that we'll address in the next year ahead. The HighWire team is involved in a number of panels this week.
MILES MCNAMEE: And I'll just point out one. Our founding director, John Sack will moderate and speak during session 1C on publisher's preferred options to address plan S-- that's a whole mouthful right there-- which we developed with our publishing partners earlier this year in a workshop with members of the HighWire community, including several in this room. We look forward to working with our clients and our future clients-- I am the sales guy, after all-- During this SSP event.
MILES MCNAMEE: On behalf of HighWire and SSP, I'm pleased to introduce our keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Mariam Yeshak. And annual meeting program committee chair Ben Mudrak will share a bit more about Dr. Yeshak and her choice as the keynote speaker. And again Adrian, thank you for having us. See you.
Segment:3 BEN MUDRAK: Keynote Introduction.
BEN MUDRAK: Hello, everyone. Thank you to Adrian and Miles. I'm very excited to be introducing Mariam to everyone tonight. To tell you a little bit about her, she completed schooling in pharmacy in Ethiopia, received a PhD at Uppsala University. She is assistant professor of pharmacognosy at Addis Ababa university, where she leads a research group called Bioactive Secondary Metabolites for Improving Life.
BEN MUDRAK: I thought it was a really nice name. That's why I wanted to put it in here. She studies indigenous knowledge systems and the clinical application of traditional medicine. She's also very active in fostering the next generation of researchers as a fellow and chair of the Ethiopian Young Academy of Sciences, an inaugural ambassador for the next Einstein Forum, and young affiliate of the World Academy of Science.
BEN MUDRAK: As we settled on this year's theme, which Adrian mentioned, the other co-chairs, the entire committee and I-- we really focused on programming that would embody that theme. And in that vein, we were delighted when Mariam accepted our invitation. She brings perspectives that are rarely featured in a setting like this. And I know she's going to jump start the conversation about how scholarly communication can be a truly global endeavor with worldwide impact.
BEN MUDRAK: Before I turn the mic over, I do want to extend special thanks to Sean Harris and Andy [INAUDIBLE] for helping connect us with Mariam. We greatly appreciate their assistance and their efforts in the global academic community. And now, I am delighted to present Dr. Mariam Yeshak giving a presentation entitled Scholarly Publishing in Africa-- Impact Factor Versus Societal Impact.
BEN MUDRAK:
Segment:4 MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Scholarly Publishing in Africa.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mariamawit. My full first name is Mariamawit. And I'm here today to talk about scholarly publishing in Africa-- the cost between impact factor and having actual impact on society. To tell you a little bit more about myself, I come from Ethiopia, one of the nations [INAUDIBLE]..
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a country located at the Horn of Africa, a little bit north to the equator, and with a population of about 102 million people. And we like to call it the land of origins for apparent reasons, the first one being our close human ancestor, the famous Lucy, comes from Ethiopia. And also, it showcase the origin of the Blue Nile-- the longest river, which flows all the way up to Egypt, and with that, follows the Nile civilization.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: We had a very ancient kingdom-- the Aksumite kingdom, which has given the world one of the oldest known coins. And we also have our own alphabet, with a very ancient language called Ge'ez. And today, also, the official language of Ethiopia is written with these scripts. And Ethiopia is also known for its civilization and architecture, especially with single rock hewn churches and obelisks registered as UNESCO heritage sites.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And probably, very importantly, Ethiopia has given a life companion-- an important life companion-- that's coffee. Sorry. Probably have heard the story of Kaldi, the shepherd who observed the mood change in his goat after they grazed upon the berries. And he collected the berries and the story went on. But finally, the coffee was there.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And today we have a very touristic and socializing coffee ceremony, which we almost do every day. And if you visit Ethiopia, you are very welcome to attend one. And before going deep into my subject, I want to tell you the moment-- the life changing moment-- I had when I stepped foot abroad to do my PhD and ignited a dream-- ignited a dream about science and society. So when I joined the group, around that same time, one of our group members was defending her thesis.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And she distributed a copy to all of us. As I was reading through it, I saw a section which I couldn't understand-- it was not in English-- and asked about it. And they said, oh, it's a Popular Science summary. It's a summary of her work in the local language so everyone who can understand the language could read and get what she did. And I was wondering why a scientist, a busy PhD student, would care to write such a summary.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Whoever wants to know about her work can read the whole thesis, or part of the thesis. And if they don't have the technical ability to understand it, why would they be interested to know about it in the first place? When we had that discussion, my professor, who knew I had special attachment, with my grandmother, said, Mariamawit, if you can not and if you don't care to share your PhD work with your grandmother, then it's probably not worth doing it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Then-- yeah. That was an inspiring moment, and I came to realize that you do research, you publish, not just for the sake of enriching your CV, but serving society. So it might be preaching to the choir, but scholarly publishing is the fundamental aspect of scientific research and communication. It's a key process.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a key step in the knowledge sharing process. And at its international character, it connects scholars, institutions, and nations. And it has also a role in the current development of faculty and university rankings. In Africa, scholarly publishing is quite young. It only started during the second half of the 20th century. And Africa still represents less than 2% of the world's scholarly publications.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African scientists are still struggling to keep pace with the rest of the world. But if you look-- if you zoom into the African situation, and if you look from within, you can see that scholarly publishing actually has made great strides during the past few decades. And it has made many opportunities within the African context. For example, in 1960, there were only 35 public universities.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Within four decades, that number grew 57 fold. In the year 2000, there were 2,000 public and private universities. And many of these universities host local journals. The African journals online-- it's an indexing website, like the [INAUDIBLE].. When it's kicked off in 2000, indexed only 50 journals published in the English language. Today, it has more than 500 journals indexed, of which 260 are open access, and from both francophonic and anglophonic African countries.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African scholars, just like their peers elsewhere, are enjoying the benefits of internet, free access to scholarly material, digital publishing, and progress in information and communication technologies. To look at the actual numbers, for example, if we look at the average online publications from some select countries in the first decade of the 21st century-- if you look at Nigeria, the most populous country in the continent, it grew from about to 884 to 1,269 within six years.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: In Ethiopia, the second most populous, from 244 to 333. And South Africa, actually, took a great leap from 4,600 to about 6,300. And not only number, but the diversity of the publications is also quite good. African scholars are publishing in health sciences, biology and life sciences, humanities, social science, agriculture, environment and general sciences. All right.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So that's the situation. There is an increasing number of publications in increased number of disciplines. But when we come to impact, which was the idea-- which it was an idea embedded from the beginning of scholarly publishing. As Oldenburg wrote in one of his letters, "All indigenous men will thereby be encouraged to impact their knowledge and discoveries." What is the situation for us-- for Africans?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And The. Question is really, how do we measure impact? So of course, one way of measuring impact is bibiometrics, where there comes words like the impact factor, citation index. And names like Web of Science, ISI came up. And indexing in this corpus and the like come up. This is an important way of measuring impact. Well, it's measuring the impact of research on science itself.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But it is also important in helping scholars decide where to publish, plan their publication agenda and librarians make decision on their collection. So this is one way of measuring. And the other way of measuring impact would be the impact of research on society. And now, terms-- or the altmetrics, came like ordered society, societal relevance, quality, changing behavior, and so on.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So if we look at publications coming from Africa, and if we measure them in these two metrics, what do we see? What does that figure look like? OK. African universities are using bibliometric data to measure the progress of their faculty. And faculty are actually publishing in high impact top rated journals. And they are getting promotions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And African universities are ranking better and better worldwide. And I work as associate director of stuff affairs in my college. We handle promotion cases. I've been in the office for the past one and a half year. And just during that time, we have promoted five of our colleagues to full professors and about 15 of them to associate professors using bibliometric data. So scholars-- African scholars-- are actually making good using the bibliometrics.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: If we go to the altmetrics and look at society-- the society the scholars live in-- actually, the African society is still scoring low in development indicators like world development report, world competitiveness yearbook, and technology advancement index. And questions like how could the application of knowledge end poverty and hunger in Africa, how could higher education empower women and promote gender equity, can knowledge be considered in the African context to address child mortality and improve mental health-- maternal health, are still questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And there are still conflicts. There is still poverty in Africa. In a nutshell, while African scholars-- African researchers-- are enjoying and benefiting from their scholarly publishing, their society is still lagging in many developmental indicators. So where is the disconnect? What are the possible reasons? And what could be done to close that gap?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's what I would like to discuss in the coming few slides. The first one is visibility and access. And here, I'm not talking about open access at all. I'm talking about visibility and access of even open access articles. Most publications are on journals abroad, because African scholars feel they should be competent in the scientific world.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: They should publish in top rated journals, and they don't have many local journals scoring good in bibliometric measurement. So they prefer to send their articles abroad to collaborate with scientists abroad, and the articles end up being published abroad. And usually, there is no visibility and access is very limited, even to fellow researchers, researchers in other fields, policy makers, and the general public.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It means, for example, if I publish a paper on a subject area-- if I publish it abroad, even scientists across the corridor may not be aware of it. So it's like spot the phone in this picture. I doubt if any of you can spot the phone here. So if they go in Google on that subject area, my research paper will be like the phone here-- hidden in plain sight.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Could anyone? Was anyone unable to spot it? OK. It's here. So this is for researchers-- fellow researchers-- in the same field or not. When you come to society, the general public, it will be asking them to spot the phone while they're standing in the next room.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So we are not visible, and we are not accessible-- or our work is not visible and accessible. What can be done to improve access and visibility? I want to dare to ask, or challenge, the reputable publishers, or the big players in the scholarly publishing industry, to engage in publishing local journals. Africa is a growing-- has a growing population.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It is a growing economy, still. So there is a lot to do. And I think these publishers should engage, actually, in publishing local journals. And the existing local journals should work hard, really, to avoid mediocrity of content, increase their visibility internationally, and remoteness-- decrease their remoteness-- so that African scholars feel comfortable in publishing in local journals.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the role of science academies together with, of course, publishers cannot be overstated here. The Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, for example, has started an initiative to create a body for accreditation and standardization of local journals. And once that body is formed and local journalists come up to some standard, I think it will create a platform where we feel comfortable to send our articles to.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the other is when you engage in scholarly publishing, OK, you can also publish Popular Science summaries in print or online. Again, I want to mention an experience from Africa-- The Quest, which is published by the South African Academy of Sciences, is a good example here. The Quest is a thematic publication. And in each thematic issue, they collect scientific papers and compile them in a form of Popular Science summary so that anybody can understand it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And the other is, we should inform stakeholders ourselves. Why not send a copy of an abstract of my paper to a policymaker? Why not email the abstract to my friends? And why not share it on social media-- well, apart from ResearchGate and LinkedIn? So this can increase, I think, our access-- our visibility and access to our work.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Science communication-- engagement in science communication-- is also another solution. It tangentially touch publishing, actually, of course. But science communication-- communicating science with journalists-- is another arena where we can increase visibility. But on a workshop we held once at the Academy, we had journalists, and we had scientists.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And they were talking what they are looking to engage in science communications. And the scientists who are saying, I don't know how to write to a newspaper, or I don't know how to give an interesting TV interview without being too technical. So there needs to be capacity building for scientists, and science journalism should be a growing discipline in Africa.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Public lectures are also another method to increase visibility. As the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences holds, for example, regular public lectures, the whole thing from the poster, to the presentation, through the discussion is done in local language. And we have a very good positive feedback from attendees. And upon requests, scientists could write, also, policy briefs using the Academy's platform, again.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Our other problem creating a gap between our publications and their societal impact is the extrovertedness of our research questions. Most of the research funding comes from outside Africa. That's the fact. And research questions are designed to meet the interests of international funders. So African researchers should write, or should come up with, research questions that would be more relevant to meet those funder's interests than address societal questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And for everyone, not only for African research-- for anyone to-- aspiring to publish in top rated journals, cutting edge questions-- cutting edge research questions-- are very important, rather than validating solutions toward societal development. And this has also opened a gap between us and society. The solution to this would be probably setting a research agenda at various levels, starting from department level, school, university, nationally levels.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And once you have those set in place, you probably can mobilize local funds to do the research on that and funds from policymakers. Our ministers, for example-- our ministerial offices have departments for evidence based policy making. And they have some money. And we actually don't know what they do with that money. So probably, it's time to mobilize that money and make it in use of addressing contextualized research questions.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Probably-- well, it's getting more and more Africanized, or more and more contextualize to the African context. So language is the biggest barrier we have. Papers are published internationally in English or in French. And if you come to my country, for example, not many people speak English or French. So our publication language de facto excludes our society from discussion in science.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I want to cite an example here-- an incident here. As has been mentioned, I work with traditional healers. And I was working with this traditional healer you see in this picture. He was giving me information on the herbs, and then he took me to the field to show me which plant was which. And we can learn to discuss about registering the Ethiopian plant species and so on.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And he's interested in doing that. And I told him, oh, you know there is a project actually going on in Addis Ababa university-- an excellent project, in fact, that is doing registry of the Ethiopian flora-- The Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea Project. And as just I was telling him this, I remember that all of the volumes of that book were published, or are published, in English.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So for him, it's meaningless. It's as if it doesn't exist. So how can we tackle the barrier of language in publishing? I feel that whenever such crucial publications are there, there needs to be translation. They need to be translated and republished-- of course, all copyright issues resolved. Translation is one, but why not publish in local languages? So if we have local journals published by reputable publishers, and if you have a very contextualized research question that's relevant to your society, why don't you publish it in your local language?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That should be-- that should not be very strange. Just this morning, I was checking my Facebook account. And I haven't opened my Facebook account for a few days. And this came up-- it said you are now using Facebook in Amharic. That's my language. And the writing under it says, based on your activity, we think your Facebook experience would be best in Amharic.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So if social media can do this, if social media is collecting data on me and tell me that using my local languages would make my experience better, why not scholarly publishing? That's the question I want to raise here. So the next point, which I can never overstate, is our disconnect from indigenous knowledge as scientists. So the African society has a very deep, rich, traditional knowledge-- not only in medicine, but in various disciplines.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And as researchers, we are somewhat disconnected from this indigenous knowledge-- from the conceptualization of our research question through the process to publishing. And this is, I think, greatly unfair-- not only to the African society, but to the whole humankind. I was once attending a conference. And I think I even tweeted it. A European agricultural scientist was presenting, and he said, when an African farmer dies, a library dies, Because there is a lot of knowledge embedded in these societies.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So not digging into this indigenous knowledge and not presenting it to the scientific world, I think, is unfair to the whole of humankind. And even as the pharmacognosists assists working with traditional healers who are comparatively close to the indigenous knowledge, the pattern we engage with this indigenous knowledge is not right. I have coined myself-- two words.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: We use the fishing and the dumping models. We either fish or dump. I will take the Ethiopian traditional medicine as an example here to elaborate more. So if you will take your smartphones and Google the Ethiopian traditional medicine, you will get data from WHO and several other bodies that 70% of our society and 100% of our livestock-- and livestock is very important in Ethiopia-- depend on it for their health.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And Ethiopian traditional medicines is quite a complex system. It has, of course, spirituality, bone setting, midwifery, herbalism in all. But we have evidences, again, that it actually works for many ailments. I'm going to show you some pictures to demonstrate that. Some of them are a bit graphic. I'm sorry.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So you see that the woman had a tumor before treatment. And after treatment with a traditional herbal extract, the tumor was gone. And same here. OK. When I engage with these traditional healers, what I do is, as I said, either fish-- how do I fish? This is how I fish.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I go to the traditional healer-- a traditional healer. I collect botanical data from them, and then possibly materials, as well. And that's the end of it. We say our goodbyes, and I go to my campus, and I do literature survey-- literature survey on how extraction is done internationally, how the biopsy should look like, or how the find phytochemistry should be designed.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And then, I go to the lab. I do as I have read on the literature survey. And there will be new findings, writing up, and I publish. And there is nothing going back to the traditional healer after the first two steps. And I'm not talking about compensation and everything. I'm talking about engagement in the scientific discussion. The traditional healers are excluded after the first two steps.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: When I do my literature survey, when I do my method design, when I ask my discussion and everything, they are not in the picture. They don't even know where my lab is, probably. And how do I make this matter worse? I repeat the whole process next time and publish again. So this is the fishing model. Very unfair. And then the other one is dumping.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: As conventional health workers, we get to introduce new interventions from WHO or from elsewhere. And then, we go to the society and we tell them, stop using your traditional methods. Use these interventions. The traditional methods don't work. And I have a particular example here again from my orthopedician friends.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Born setting-- the bone setters are very important in the Ethiopian traditional medicine. And my orthopedician friends go and tell them-- tell the society, no, the bone setters are complicating, and many of the clinical complications we have is from treatment with bone setters, and so on. And you're telling this to a society that's crazy about soccer, and the national team has a bone setter.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And we have world champion athletes. And they are treated by bone setters. This is very disconnecting. And you can expect the result of this dumping process. The solution, I think is to embrace indigenous knowledge. And I want to borrow a quote here. And in reads, "To publish Africa without making visible the depth of the indigenous knowledge of Africans is to publish Africa deeper and deeper to the heart of darkness." And it's a very true statement.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Globally, we are not competitive. We are bringing out less than 2% of the scholarly publishing, I think, because we are detached from our roots. There was a lot to get from our roots and present to the world and make our presentation visible. But at the current situation, we are just going to a vacuum. We are not belonging or we are not playing a big role here. We are disconnected here. So we are going deeper and deeper to darkness.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So when we embrace indigenous knowledge, there should always be two ways of knowledge flow. It should not be either fishing from them or dumping on them, but to engage them, actually, in discussions. And my country and the science ministry is not talking about space science, space-- having a spacecraft and so on. And I don't know if they have consulted these manuscripts. The photos you see are ancient manuscripts on space science from Ethiopian tribes.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And our cross, our modern cross, even depicts the knowledge in space science by ancient Ethiopians. And if we do that, I think we will be beneficial not only to the African society, but to humankind as a whole. So all what we have talked in the previous slides is not very far to achieve if we have the correct mindset, actually. Academy of-- the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, we dialogue about this issue a lot.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And we don't have a problem. Many of our colleagues understand that society can benefit from successful research if results are translated. But the actual excuses our colleagues are telling are, oh, I don't engage in something that doesn't contribute towards my promotion. I'm too focused. Oh, I'm too busy.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Or what I do is too complicated to translate to the general public. Or traditional knowledge is not useful to the modern society, and it should go extinct. So if these mindsets are corrected, I think those interventions are actually achievable. So the situation now looks-- if we go back to the metrics, the two circles are just met tangentially in our context.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And when they come closer, the bibliometrics seem to cover up the societal impact, or the altmetric data-- or the altmetric impact. What I believe the way forward should be, the circles should overlap. I don't think they are mutually exclusive. They can overlap, actually. They could be interacted. And they will even grow bigger.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: The individual circuits will even grow bigger, because they will feed to each other. If you have a good societal impact, obviously you can pull more money. You can do better research. You can publish in a top rated journal. So this, I believe, should be the way forward. And in conclusion, of course it's high time African researchers give service to their society and make themselves visible and relevant.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: As in the new Harari book, its stated irrelevance is worse than exploitation. So you cannot-- you cannot risk to be irrelevant to society. And doing science responsibly is not a question of only research, but justice to society. There are certain benefits. There are certain funds that we get just because we are working in Africa-- just because I'm working in a developing country.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So using those funds by the name of society but not giving back to society is not justice. To conclude, again, with the story I began. That was in 2005. In 2012 I defended my thesis. And I said, hey, OK, the requirement is to write up a popular summary for me in English, because I didn't speak Swedish by that time.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But then I said, why not in Amharic as well? So I included an Amharic summary. I even wrote my name in Amharic on the cover. And there were-- oh, sorry. Oops. There it was.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Yeah. No. And I wrote six pages of summary in Amharic in my thesis. Well, it was accepted both positively, and there were some interesting comments made. My cousin said, oh, I thought you were doing something serious. Oh, all those six years just for six pages?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Well, it was disappointing by the time. And I came back to the lab, and I told my professor, my cousin said so and so. And he said, what did you expect? So anyhow, the [INAUDIBLE] was closed. And before I say my thank you, I would like to acknowledge Society for Scholarly Publishing for inviting me to this talk. And I want to single out the co-chairs for helping me throughout the process, Addis Ababa University , [INAUDIBLE] Institute, the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences for giving me a platform to pursue my passion in science and society, and Uppsala University for that life changing moment and funding my research.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And thank you very much. If you come back home to the lands of 13 months of sunshine, give me a call. Thank you.
Segment:5 Q & A.
BEN MUDRAK: Well, we can take-- we can take questions now, if people have any. Cason and I have mics, so we'll come find you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thanks for that brilliant presentation. Mine is not a question, but a comment. My name is Amayu from University of South Africa press. I think what I want to add some of the things that you said that are making it difficult for the African continent to have societal impact-- it's also low level of continental collaboration between researchers and publishers. And the second one, it's from a lived experience as a publisher, we collaborate with some of the international big publishers.
AUDIENCE: And one of them, it took us about 14 months to conclude a contract, simply because they were negotiating in bad faith. So I think my challenge here, it's for our international players, because one of the ways we can disseminate African knowledge is to collaborate with international players. So I challenge those who are here to, when they negotiate, to first accept the fact that we should be equal partners, and not subservients to the big brothers.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to make those two comments. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Really great talk. I should say, hey, I'm also from Sweden. What I want to ask you a question about is the scientific methodology-- if in its incept it kind of alienates indigenous understanding, and if, actually, where we need to look is how we do science in the first place to include that. If that is actually maybe the fundamental questions to ask to help bring indigenous-- what do you think about that, [INAUDIBLE]..
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Can you rephrase, please?
AUDIENCE: My question is if it's actually the way how we do science-- the scientific methodology from the Enlightenment period, that that's the reason why we're not able to get indigenous information out, because we have this pretense that science has to be a certain way when it should maybe be something different.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Shall I go, or-- OK. Thank you for the comment. I'm sure that's something to look into. When I spoke, I spoke from the scientist's or the researcher's point of view only. So those are-- those comments are well taken. The way we do science-- the way we look for empirical data, that probably has affected our engagement with indigenous knowledge.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: But when we talk-- when I mentioned indigenous knowledge-- for example, in the traditional medicine system-- I'm not talking about those which you cannot provide empirical data for-- for example, spirituality and everything. Even when there is concrete measurement-- when there can be concrete measurement and where you can produce empirical data, when you can engage doing what you do in the way you are trained to do, you can still engage the indigenous knowledge, because there are ancient manuscripts where, actually, the same thing-- the same empirical data is recorded.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So I think it's more like the attitude. As I said, traditional knowledge, indigenous society, those terms which I wouldn't like to say out loud here, are tied to that knowledge. That's why I think we want to go far and far from it. That's my personal view.
AUDIENCE: So one of the tenants of your presentation was about language. And what-- the language of record, is it English? Is it French? When you publish in Ethiopia. And when it's translated into the various languages, does it translate in such a way that it can be replicated-- the science can be replicated.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's a very good point. When we publish in Ethiopia, we publish in English still locally. The official language of the university is-- from high school is English. That's why the general public is a bit distant for us. But when you translate-- yes, you can do that, but you have to follow strict glossary of terms-- published by several people through the past years-- of scientific terms.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: And for them, when you can't find the exact term, probably you have to put them as they are. But you can. You still can achieve good repeatability if you translate.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you very much for a very interesting talk. Hello. The WHO recently recognized Chinese traditional medicine as one of the sort of systems that it recognizes and supports. And I was wondering if that's something you see as being a feasible direction for African traditional medicine anytime in the near future? And if not, what have the Chinese researchers done effectively that enabled them to achieve that kind of recognition?
AUDIENCE: Is there anything that perhaps Ethiopia, or African countries in general, could learn from?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: OK. The Ethiopian traditional medicine is also-- the traditional medicine, in general, is regarded by WHO as a means to deliver primary health care-- the primary health care. It's the conventional health professionals, like myself, who don't want to admit that-- who don't want to bring traditional medicine to the table and say, hey, it can be useful. And of course, the Chinese traditional medicine and its research-- it's extensive research-- has helped China benefits from it.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: For example, acupuncture. When I say acupuncture, what comes to our minds is China. So apart from being useful to society, it has become an image-- a positive image, even, to the country. In our case, I think it's the mind-- again, the mindset. Thinking that something traditional is not probably good is the issue. And in our country, we have the growth and transformation plan.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: It's a five year plan. And it's been rolling for two times. And the science transformation plan is now on. And it's only on the third growth and transformation plan traditional medicine was mentioned to be used in health care. So this shows that we have to do, of course, a lot more and learn, as you said, from our colleagues in China to make it more visible and useful.
AUDIENCE: Yes. First of all, when you speak of Africa, you really are not speaking of Africa. You're speaking of sub-Saharan Africa. OK. This is number one. Number two, you didn't mention anything about the upper part of Africa and what is happening there. This is two. Number three, there are quite a number of publishers who are really very active-- let's say in Egypt and in some of the other countries up north.
AUDIENCE: Three. Four-- Egypt has, also, very old civilization, very old traditional medicine, et cetera, and they are working in that direction. They tried their very best to introduce Arabic to teach science across the entire country. But they ran into some problems, which is the scientific world, nowadays, is progressing very quickly.
AUDIENCE: The speed is very high. And if you want to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of the world, unfortunately, all right, you have to use English, or maybe French, or something similar. But still, they are also using Arabic. So I think you should look a little bit up north and see what is happening. And I know that there is the African Union.
AUDIENCE: And they are very active in that direction. And maybe you can report to us what is happening. Thank you very much.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Thank you. Comment well taken. Most of the presentation I did was based on my experience. The examples I gave could only be from Ethiopia. And I have tried to look up the data-- for example, the Thomson Reuters data on a number of publications, for example, didn't include, of course, the northern African countries. I know what's being done in Egypt, because we-- Egypt is also part of the NAPRECA, the Natural Products Network.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: I know they are trying their best. They have ancient civilization and traditional medicine. We share the Nile civilization, as well. But I want to challenge you, also, here. How much of that traditional medicine and that knowledge-- ancient Egyptian civilization-- is on the table now when scientific discussion is brought up? And how much of it is actually used to impact daily lives of society?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: That's the core point of my presentation. And I think the picture would be the same in Egypt, as well.
AUDIENCE: Question over here. Thank you so much for that really insightful talk. And I think we all understood you were using Ethiopia as a proxy, so I thought your answer was very fair the previous question. My question-- sorry, I know. Over here. My question had to do with-- you started the presentation by looking at very traditional bibliometrics to assess the relative success of African institutions and researchers.
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering if you could speak to the incentive structures within research institutions within Ethiopia, or the continent generally, that motivate how you're measuring, right? So you chose to start today by looking at a very traditional set of metrics we're all familiar with. How does that work into the incentive structure at home, and is that proving helpful or counterproductive to some of these more closer to home societal impacts that you're looking to address?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: OK. When we mean incentives, promotions, tenure, and so on? Yeah. We're still using the bibliometrics to promote faculty, to give them tenure, and so on. How is this affecting societal impact is, as I have said, as people are aspiring to get promoted by publishing in a reputable journal-- which has a good impact factor, which is not regarded predatory by the bibliometric data-- they're going far and far to journals published abroad, published in English.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: So this actually has its impact on their contribution to society, as I have mentioned it on my visibility and accessibility issue.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I realize you probably can't see us with the lights in your eyes, so I apologize. My name's Heather Staines. I'm with the MIT Knowledge Futures Group. And you mentioned the percentage of participation of authors from the continent. I wondered if you came across, or if you had thoughts about, peer review participation and broadening out the pool of peer reviewers, which is a frequent topic at this meeting.
AUDIENCE: Are the same barriers there for broadening the peer review participation from Africa? And if the same barriers are there, would you have suggestions for publishers on how to expand participation?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: No. I haven't actually looked into that situation-- the peer reviewer situation. Probably, it's a good point to focus on next time. And I am-- I refrain from making any comments on that. But-- OK. Point well taken. I should look into that.
AUDIENCE: Maybe I'll follow up and ask about your experience with peer review. And maybe-- if you want to speak to that. Do you and your colleagues within your department and your university-- do you get the opportunity to review for the same sort of journals that you're publishing in? Or what can we do to make sure that you get that opportunity?
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Yeah. We get invitations for peer review. And some of are professors in my faculty are actually editors of some of the international journals, as well. But that would be like here and there. I don't know. I would prefer not to make any comments here.
BEN MUDRAK: Do you have any more? OK. Well thank you again so much. It was a delight to have you.
MARIAMAWIT YESHAK: Thank you very much.
ADRIAN STANLEY: Again, thank you for a great presentation-- starting the meeting of with a lot of great questions, everybody. So thank you for your contributions. I'm just here now just to announce, really, that there is a reception and drinks down in the exhibit hall below. Please go network, meet, talk, talk about the presentation, ask questions. I hope you'll find some ways where there are ways we can collaborate and support your research and work.
ADRIAN STANLEY: So thank you, everybody.
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