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DISCUSSION FORUM ON INFORMATION SERVICESIN THE ASIA-PACIFICBecky Skidmore ASEAN Forest Tree Seed Centre Project, Ottawa, Canada |
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[Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] [Appendix 1] [Appendix 2] [Appendix 3] [Appendix 4] [Appendix 5] [Appendix 6] |
APPENDIX 3 THE FUTURE FOR SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING ANDINFORMATION IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGIONFrancis S.P. Ng Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia SummaryThe growing acceptance of English as the language for scientific communication throughout the region is enabling national scientific communities to emerge from ghetto-science. At the same time, research universities are beginning to emerge from the obsolete paradigm of vocational universities. Simultaneously, the electronic revolution is overturning traditional concepts of publishing, archiving and database management. Desk-top publishing technology has drastically reduced the expense and labour of publishing on paper, while Internet publishing offers a powerful alternative. Both these developments enable scientific communities to take back publishing power from the commercial publishing houses. Cost and copyright barriers will hopefully come down. The nature of scholarship is changing as computer-readable archives replace paper archives. Libraries, and database services like AGRIS, need to re-focus their activities in order to remain useful to the scientific community. SCIENTIFIC SCHOLARSHIP AND THE LANGUAGES OF SCIENCE The most important characteristic of science is that it is universal and unified. There is no such thing as American molecular biology separate from Russian molecular biology, nor Chinese physics separate from Japanese physics. All scientists share and contribute to the same universal pool of scientific knowledge, at least in principle. In practice, this pool is divided by language into various sub-pools, with the practical consequence that access to the scientific literature is determined by language. Before World War II, every colonial power promoted its own language as a language of science. German and French were strong contenders against English, but after the war, German lost its position due to the emigration of many German scientists to the US. This gave English a clear lead, and this lead has grown steadily, because of the obvious advantages of having a single language for scientific communication. It is estimated that about 80% of the world's scientific literature is now published in English. As a result scientists who do not use English are locked out of the bulk of the world's scientific literature. In the Asia-Pacific region after the war, nationalistic sentiments have played an important role in the development of science and technology. All governments have recognised the value of science and technology in the building up of national economic assets (knowledge, products, processes, skills) but, at the same time, nationalist sentiments in countries like Japan, China, Indonesia and Malaysia have made it politically difficult for scientists to address the problem of scientific communication in an objective way. The desire of such countries to make their languages "scientific languages" in the old European pre-war style, has held back the development of science by hindering the development of scientific scholarship. Scientists who have been locked into small language ghettos have been unable to acquire the confidence that comes from familiarity with the larger pool of knowledge outside, and have been unable to place their own contributions into the larger pool, to benefit from international review, and to earn international recognition. In China, the political decision to promote Russian as the second language of scientists, rather than English, proved to be a blunder which slowed down the development of Chinese science for 30 years. It has taken the Asian countries some 50 years to learn that ghetto science is detrimental to national development, and that scientists serve their own communities better if they act as bridges to the world of science at large. The decision by ASEAN to use English as its regional working language, has been a decisive factor in the growing acceptance of English as the language for communication in commerce and science throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The economic and technological advantages of using a common language have become so evident that this trend is unlikely to be reversed. The way has thus been cleared for the Asian scientific communities to put the emotive language issue behind them and to concentrate on the development of scientific capacity. The alternative, if each country pursues a nationalist language policy in science, would be the division of the world's scientific literature into one major pool: English, and several minor pools: Russian, Japanese, Chinese, German and French, according to the numbers of scientists belonging to each linguistic group (Table 1). The resolution of the language issue has already enabled Asian countries to play an increasing role in international scientific communication. The trend has become evident in the rise in scientific papers tracked by the Science Citation Index. Between 1989 and 1994, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have more than doubled their annual output, while China has increased its annual output by about 50% (Nature, 1996). Other countries that have begun to make their mark are South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia. These countries have been increasing their publication rate faster than the average for all countries in the world. SCIENTIFIC SCHOLARSHIP AND THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES Scientific scholarship is heavily dependent on the way in which scientists are trained at universities. With few exceptions, the developing countries of the Asia-Pacific region only began to build universities after independence. Most universities in the region are less than 50 years old, and nearly all were founded on the idea that universities should concentrate on vocational training. Research has played a very minor role. Laboratory and library facilities have been poorly developed, and staff have had little or no incentive to do research. Efforts to track down published sources for reference have been futile because of the poor state of libraries. Consequently, the habit of scientific scholarship, which involves the ability to survey, evaluate and summarise the scientific literature could not be promoted. Students interested in research have found it preferable to take their research degrees overseas. Scientific scholarship is a habit that has to be instilled. CIFOR found this when it distributed pre-paid vouchers to 17 forestry institutes and universities in developing countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, Chile, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Peru, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Venezuela), to enable them to order copies of papers from CAB International. The receiving organisations had previously been supplied with the TREE-CD database which contains Forestry Abstracts, Forest Products Abstracts and Agroforestry Abstracts (Soeripto, 1996). No organisation was able to use up its 50 vouchers in one year. We found that the demand does not exist even when the means are made available, because the habit has not yet been instilled. UNESCO statistics (1993) show that the numbers of students from developing countries studying in the developed countries rose from 518,195 in 1980 to 666,445 in 1990. The favourite destinations were the USA, France, Germany, UK, the former USSR, Canada, Belgium, Australia and Japan. The financial consequences of this movement of students have been immense. Foreign students in the USA alone spend $7 billion a year on tuition and living expenses, and provide vital support for many graduate programmes in science and engineering (Koretz, 1995). In contrast, the universities in developing countries that have concentrated on their vocational roles, have become stunted in their scientific development. When I was Chief of the Forest Research, Training and Education Branch in the FAO in 1991 - 1994, I was puzzled by requests from forestry faculties and colleges in developing countries for FAO assistance to upgrade their teaching curricula. Why were they not able to upgrade their curricula themselves? It turned out that these faculties and colleges had been set up under developmental aid programmes implemented by the FAO in the 1960s to 1980s. Their teaching staffs had been trained to teach forestry as a fixed package of knowledge. By the 1990s, this package had become obsolete. Retraining was not the solution, for the staff would only have become obsolete again. The only way they could have kept themselves up to date was to do research, and to train post-graduate students through research. Developing countries are beginning to discover the hard way that an undergraduate programme cannot be sustained without a postgraduate programme. The post-colonial vocational university model only resulted in pseudo-universities, not real ones. Kelly (1990), commenting on his experience in a university in Nigeria, says that the students knew their mentors only as teachers of science and not as creators of science. Science was something that was created elsewhere. In a survey of scientists in developing countries, Gaillard (1991) has noted, "All too many university professors in developing countries have lost contact with ongoing science and merely chant scientific facts of the past instead of teaching students that science is an active method used to state and solve problems". During a visit to Iran, I found that the first postgraduate programmes were only implemented in the early 1990s. This large country of 50 million people needed to train hundreds of PhDs, but post-graduate students had always been sent abroad for training. It was only the desperate state of the national economy in the 1990s that forced the government to think about local training for PhD candidates, but it was an idea that the academic staff were themselves unhappy with. They felt they were not ready for it. Through the delay in establishing their postgraduate programmes, the ability of developing-country universities to keep their undergraduate courses up-to-date was undermined, but something else was undermined too: the early emergence of a culture of science in their countries. Thirty years after the establishment of universities, the local academic communities should have already produced respected professors, whose students should be having an influential effect on society. Instead, most universities have been anaemic and scientists, including those trained expensively abroad, have been tempted to emigrate. Interestingly, at the end of its colonial period, Hong Kong has set up the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), with post-graduate training and research on top of its agenda. As one of Asia's most ambitious educational projects, HKUST aims to be a first-rank science academy, with a faculty recruited from prestigious research organisations around the world (Lindorff and Engardio, 1992). Reform has also been spreading through other university systems, in Singapore and Malaysia, while India has passed a bill in parliament to allow for the establishment of private universities, in recognition of the fact that the government-established universities was producing graduates "poorly equipped for high-tech occupations" (Bagla 1995). In 1996, thirteen universities in Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong) formed the Association of East Asian Research Universities to promote academic co-operation between them (Normile 1996). This is a clear sign that universities in Asia are beginning to see themselves as part of a larger scientific and academic community, with the leading ones taking action to lift themselves above the pack by emphasising research. THE EFFECT OF THE ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION ON SCHOLARSHIP For centuries, paper has served as the universal medium for publishing and archiving. About 30 years ago, the beginning of the so-called information explosion forced a distinction to be made between publishing and archiving. As the numbers of books, journals and magazines kept increasing, libraries were forced to specialise and to cull their collections continuously, because of lack of physical space. Libraries also began to convert their paper collections to microfiches for archiving. For a while, it looked as if microfiche films would replace paper as the universal medium for archiving. However, microfiches were clumsy to handle. Also, as the amount of published information increased, information searches became more and more difficult, and it was more difficult to search through microfiches than to search through paper. Hence microfiches never became popular. Now, computer-readable storage in compact disks (CDs) provides a powerful medium for the archiving of published information, not only because of the immense volume of information that a CD can hold, but also because of the rapid way in which its contents can be searched and analysed. The nearly 30 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, now available in a single CD, provides an excellent example how much information a CD can hold, while the Index Kewensis CD demonstrates clearly the power of computer search. The paper version of the Index, containing all the published names of plants, was a pain to use, because the information was scattered over so many volumes. With the CD version, information search and retrieval is so much more efficient that the printed versions became obsolete as soon as the CD became available. Recently, we in CIFOR put my two-volume 3.8 kg Manual of Forest Fruits, Seeds and Seedlings into one CD containing over 1000 illustrations. In the beginning we had some doubts over whether all the pictures, including hundreds in full colour, would fit into the CD. In the end, we had room to spare on the CD. Future CD-ROMs will have many times the storage capacity of current ones, and capacity will continue to grow. As more publications are digitised and archived in computer-readable format, the nature of scholarship, which used to mean the ability to search manually through books and papers for information, will change. Much of the tedium of scholarship will be reduced by computer-assisted search mechanisms, freeing researchers for more creative activities. As an example of what is already happening, there was a PhD student who, in 1987, finished four years of labour searching the Greek classics for the classical sources of 2000 anonymous fragments of mediaeval text. Then, just as she began to write her doctoral dissertation, all that effort was eclipsed. In a few dozen hours working with the new Thesaurus Linguae Grecae on CD, she found every one of her 600 hard-won sources again, and 300 more that she had missed! (The Economist, 1994). Whole libraries can now be scanned into the digital domain, which will allow their contents to be analysed exhaustively. It has been estimated that the entire Library of Congress can be stored in a roomful of CDs. The massive job of conversion from paper copy to computer-readable copy would have to be done first, but the cost of doing this is coming down as scanning technology improves and document-formatting software becomes easier to use. One can set up a CD production unit (scanners, character-recognition software, document-formatting software, and CD writer) for a few thousand dollars. Replicating a disc is cheap. If mass-replicated, the cost comes down to about $4 a disc. At the same time, home computers with CD readers have become standard items already, thanks to children's computer games which now come in CD format. To computer-literate children, getting information and entertainment by slipping a CD into a computer is the easiest thing to do. This opens the possibility for private individuals to have an entire Library of Congress installed in their own homes if they wish, or to have tailor-made but very comprehensive selections. Music-lovers have been able, for years already, to put together their own selections, by copying from tape to tape. In principle, this can be done with CDs. Service providers can scan documents into diskettes and customers can then have the information reformatted any way they like, and eventually transferred to a CD for permanent storage. How are libraries and CD producers adapting to the electronic revolution? Inadequately, I think. CD producers are still marketing their products as if they are high-tech expensive products for the exclusive few. Consequently libraries are treating CDs in the same way. The way of the future is to treat CDs like paperback books. This is because
Libraries should stock multiple copies of each CD edition, so that users can borrow CDs to use wherever they wish at home, in the office, or on a laptop during travels. The most-used CDs should find a permanent place in home libraries. Technically, a library with a collection of digitised works, could produce tailor-made combinations of such works according to the needs of individual readers. For forestry, I think making the 40 most-used books and 20 most-used journals available in computer-readable form, will meet the reference needs of most foresters. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AS A BARRIER TO SCIENTIFIC SCHOLARSHIP A big and relatively new barrier to the development of a world-wide community of scientists sharing information resources is intellectual property rights. The main interest of scientists in journal publication is to have their papers distributed as freely as possible. The practice of giving out free reprints of one's published papers, at one's own expense, was a well-established scientific courtesy until photocopiers became easily available. The invention of photocopy machines was a boon to the spread of scientific information. Then in the 1970s and 1980s more and more scientific journals in the west turned commercial, and their publishers began to lobby for laws making it a crime to make unauthorised photocopies. Copyright statements like this:
began to be replaced by statements like this:
What the publishers are doing goes against the traditions of science, whereas a scientist who makes copies of journal articles for personal or class room use or to share with other scientists, is keeping well within the traditions of science. The surrender of copyright to the commercial publishing houses in the developed countries was due to the withdrawal of scientific organisations from publishing, as a cost-cutting measure. This forced scientists to submit to the demands of the publishing houses in order to get published. We now have the situation in the publication of scientific research, that intellectual property has passed out the hands of the scientists who do the intellectual work, and out of the hands of their employers, into the hands of their publishers. One can understand the need of the publishing houses to make a profit, but the way it is done should be fair to all. Otherwise, scientists are forced to look for other alternatives in publishing. During the past five years, the labour involved in type-setting and formatting has been drastically reduced by the development of desktop publishing software. It is now possible for the scientific community to regain control of the publication of scientific journals, at relatively low cost. At the same time, Internet publishing provides a powerful alternative. It is interesting to see how scientists who have lost control of paper publishing, have taken to Internet publishing, using their creative energies to present information in attractive and competitive formats on well-designed Internet pages. Designing paper pages using advanced desktop publishing software is not more difficult than designing Internet pages. The advantage of publishing on the Internet is that it saves the cost of using and mailing paper. However, an Internet page is more ephemeral than a printed page, although for the purpose of archiving information, information designed for Internet pages, just like information on printed pages, can be easily transferred to CDs. ABSTRACTING SERVICES: AGRISThe service provided by AGRIS to the international scientific community, in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, was an excellent idea, at a time when the information explosion was just starting. However, with the explosive growth of published information, the system may be on the verge of breaking down. Having begun with resources provided by international donors, AGRIS has not faced up squarely to the problem of how to sustain itself without donor funding. It has also not recognised the need to capture the imagination and support of the scientific community, nor that of editors and publishers. In the field of forestry, most forestry research institutions and their editors do not feel any affinity to AGRIS. I also doubt if publishing houses have any affinity for AGRIS. This is a major weakness of the system. We need to think about incentives for participation. Editors, publishers and authors need to be convinced that being in AGRIS would elevate their status. To get onto the Science Citation Index, a journal has to pay $10,000, and over 3000 journals pay to get on (Gibbs 1995) because they see obvious benefits in getting cited in the SCI. Why is there little interest in being cited in AGRIS? The AGRIS database on CD ROM represents the climax of a big international co-operative effort. It could be a great promotional product. Every researcher in agriculture, forestry and fisheries should be made aware of it and be encouraged to own a personal set. However, at over $1000 for the initial set of 6 disks, the AGRIS CDs are unmarketable to individuals. AGRIS needs to reconsider the market for its products. The idea of libraries as the market for archival CDs may prove to be a fatal mistake, because instead of going to a library, more and more scientists expect the library to come to them through their personal computers. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Mikael Hirsch, Jerry Vanclay and Neil Byron for reviewing the manuscript. REFERENCES Bagla, P. 1995. India proposes private universities. Science 270 (3 November): 730. Gaillard, J. 1991. Scientists in the Third World. University Press of Kentucky. Gibbs, W.W. 1995. Lost science in the Third World. Scientific American, August issue: 76 - 83. Kelly, M. 1990. Creating the right atmosphere. New Scientist (7 April): 17-18 Koretz, G. 1995. Colleges are looking abroad. Business Week (27 November): 14. Lindorff, D. and P. Engardio. 1992. Is 'The MIT of Asia' growing in Hong Kong? Business Week (30 November): 77. Nature. 1996. Chinese scientists drawn back to Asia. 5 September (383): 11. Normile, D. 1996. 13 universities seek common ground. Science 273 (20 September): 1661-1662. The Economist. 1994. The lays of ancient ROM. August 27. 65 - 66. UNESCO. 1992. Statistics on science and technology. UNESCO, 1993. Foreign students in higher education. STE-11. Rubinstein, E. 1995. Editorial: Winds of Change. Science 270 (17 November): 1099 Soeripto, Y. 1996. TREE-CD database and literature requests. CIFOR News No. 12: 2.
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