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Science in Africa

Brenda Raud (BR): Nokuthula, thank you so much for joining the podcast and talking to us.

What do you do at the African Open Science Platform, and what has been your journey to this position so far?

Nokuthula Mchunu (NM): I started out in molecular biology and protein engineering, and then later moved into genomics, where I ended up at the Agricultural Research Council working on crop genomics. My last job was working on cannabis genomics, which was quite interesting. But going back a bit to my 15 years at university, I really started my academic career at the peak of the HIV and AIDS pandemic in South Africa in a microbiology biotech, teaching some immunology. I wanted to actually take my students back into the community to show how they would communicate, not HIV/AIDS awareness exactly, but the science-based type of thinking [behind the HIV and AIDS pandemic] and show them how they would work with their communities.

I worked a lot in agriculture with rural communities that bank seeds that are grown in their communities. This is what I continued to do at the Agricultural Research Council, working on Indigenous legume genomics with cannabis, but really focused on using genomics for seeds that are rural-based, not commercial seeds that are purchased. When I was doing this for 15 or 20 years or so, it wasn't called citizen science in my mind. It was just called community engagement or engagement with the community. But as you know, now it's been formalized within the international community as citizen science.

Nicole Quinn (NQ): As a fellow genomicist, I relate to that. I always love to meet other genomics scientists. At some point, you moved into working on open science.

Can you outline that path and what you're working on now and what you've built?

NM: It's been interesting. After the Agricultural Research Council, I moved to the NRF of South Africa, which is the largest public funder of research in the continent. In South Africa, we fund all university and public institution research—everything except clinical trials and professional degrees. It's a relatively big budget in South Africa, even compared to the Global North. Within the NRF, I sit in what we call the partnership section, where we take on international projects. Fortunately, when open science was formalized within UNESCO, in South Africa our Director General (the equivalent of the Deputy Minister or Assistant Deputy Minister to Science and Technology in Canada) was the Chair of the UNESCO Open Science Working Group. He had a vision in 2015: that Africa would need to consolidate by themselves, and he had a plan for how to approach this. So this is where it was proposed to start an African Open Science Platform within Africa. It was actually the open science initiative that was formed, open to all countries in the continent. Then South Africa won the bid by the Ministry to host it.

As a functioning agent of the Ministry, we then hosted the African Open Science Platform. Because it is quite a new formalized space, we took on most of the roles of working on open science within South Africa and within the continent. We coordinate the smaller activities that are happening within open science in the continent and also try to embed open science within the partnerships that are happening with South Africa, the continent, and globally, thereby promoting a growing project at scale by opening data and sharing. But of course, in the Global South, the biggest thing about open science is that it is a way to address equity and reach equity in access and contribution to knowledge. There are many legs to it, like reproducibility of research, there is quality, and many others. However, for the Global South, before we get to reproducibility, and before we ask about the quality of research, we still just need to be able to access and freely contribute to the body of knowledge in science. And of course, we mean both core sciences and humanities.

BR: I think this is a great segue to the question I wanted to ask you. Africa is, of course, a very large continent. It has 1.3 billion people. That's 17% of the world's population. It's so diverse and large. It has so many people doing so many different things and having so many different backgrounds. From a scientist's perspective, it is the most genetically diverse continent on Earth. In your position, trying to support African science, what are the main challenges? What are the main structural issues that you see and that, to some extent, you're trying to address? For people that don't think too much about what the challenges are for African scientists, if you were to educate them, what would you say? What information would you share with such people?

What are the main challenges in trying to support science in Africa?

NM: I think when people think of Africa, they think of the pictures they see of poverty or the lack of infrastructure. If that lack of infrastructure is true, we then need to first acknowledge the position of Africa as being a once-colonized continent, which means that people of Africa didn't have the right of self-determination of building their own infrastructure and resources. Even now, those inequities in resources and how resources are distributed within the continent and from the world still prevail, which impacts how science is conducted within the continent. However, fortunately enough, during COVID, the people of Africa showed they can produce and are producing world-class science and science research. So for me, our strength is in our diversity, which also brings its own challenges. We generally divide the continent into Southern, Eastern, Central, West, and North Africa. We know that North Africa has more in common with the Middle East and the Arab-speaking countries. Then through many years of colonization, which I won't go back to, you have what we call Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which excludes all the Northern African countries.

Then the other challenge is language. We have countries in West Africa and Central Africa, which are predominantly French-speaking. And of course the Indigenous languages that thousands speak that prevail underneath that colonized language. And then, of course, you have the Southern and Eastern parts of Africa, which are anglophone. And then you have just two countries where people speak Portuguese, which are Angola and Mozambique; they feel more left out because it's just the two of them while there are 10 francophone countries. So this diversity in language and lack of infrastructure and previous history of colonization has set back the continent quite a bit. This is why when you look at development on the continent, you find that anglophone countries are more developed or partake more [in science]. If you look at the body of knowledge or contribution, they have more because English is a dominant language in science, which is another thing that we need to address. For us then, for open science and the African Open Science Platform, the challenge is to try to figure out, with these underlying infrastructure and resource challenges and, of course, language and diversity barriers: how do we come together as a continent and also speak about this with global partners?

Overcoming Challenges; the African Open Science Platform

NM: As an initiative, we tried to address these many challenges faced by having regional nodes that each country would figure out by themselves, and then we support them. Our biggest projects or subprojects that we do are based on science, contribution, engagement with science, and access to it. We also have the challenge of leveraging infrastructure that exists within the continent that is not fully utilized, and making it open for everybody in the continent to be able to use.

NQ: There's so much in there that I'd love to dig into. Are there any lessons or examples of progress that you've made, structural or systems, that have actually helped or that you think have hope in helping overcome the language challenge? Particularly that could expand to other areas in the world who face similar challenges?

What has helped overcome the language challenges?

NM: Fortunately, being at the NRF, we have what we call the SKA: the Square Kilometer Array Project, which is a global project of infrastructure that looks into space science. Generally, none of the African countries were engaging in space science until about 2014 before this was established. So through this shared infrastructure, the initial plan was that 12 countries within the continent would contribute to this project; if you understand space science and data sharing and generating data, you will have access to the telescope or to the satellite dishes based on how much you could afford. But South Africa did not accept that plan. Instead, each partner can have a share of time spent in the telescope so that it is equitable. Also there were programs where countries in the continent can apply to freely access the SKA or the telescopes and the dishes without partaking in any resource or form within the SKA. So this is one reason we have seen a lot of growth in science and space science and even in skills.

Then we have what we call Open Access (OA) for common language and, I think this also exists in Europe and in Canada, a national research and education network (NREN). All universities belong to these networks. Then you have regional networks that are bigger. These regional networks in the continent, previously, were configured to provide connectivity like a network within the institution, which could bring down the cost of connectivity, making it easier for institutions to do business. Over the years, they have built infrastructures that provide connectivity. The government and the NRF discussed with some of them about providing high computational power for universities to use as repositories, that connects them to access and acts as a place to deposit work that then would be archived and shared with other universities within the continent. This is a project that we started testing out in the last year, which was the project that was built during COVID.

During COVID in 2020, South Africa along with other global partners like the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), got together and put forward a fund that, in the continent of Africa, could fund research, science, communication, and citizen science. However, although it was a lot of money and there were a lot of great projects done by 17 countries, none of this was shared in any form except the normal way of publishing in journals. In science communication, citizen science doesn't take the form of a journal publication. So what we've done since last year is that we have provided a community space where we have bought digital object identifiers [DOIs] for all the work that they've been doing. It could be videos, it could be pamphlets, it could be anything. It could be pictures that they produce, that could be put up in one of the NREN cloud servers that could then be freely available. It could be associated as an output to whoever deposited that work because it has a DOI attached to it, which we as an initiative and with the partners, freely provide. Through that type of pilot, the NRF has now committed that all the projects that we do within the continent will start building this community space and databases that are connected but have also identified us for funders, for countries, and researchers that they can deposit work at any point in time, even if it has been published in a journal or has not been peer reviewed, but it can be freely available and archivable within the high-performance computing facilities of the NREN. The nice thing about the NRENs is that the universities are already members of them. It's an easier relationship to build than starting a different repository and another initiative on the side.

BR: Basically, you have established equal partnerships with global collaborators, really standing your ground and negotiating favorable conditions. For example, like you did with the radio telescope. Then you have provided the infrastructure to share the resources across the country, and between countries, to generate more data, and made sure that at least science that is done in-house is available for everyone in the continent. I think those are very important concepts that you bring up. From my perspective, coming from Argentina, where we have similar issues, access to international literature is really difficult, and is really expensive. It is beyond the means of many of the academic institutions in the country. Also, I think the access to equal partnerships is difficult because the money moves depending on influence. It's very difficult to say no to certain unfavorable offers because the alternative is nothing sometimes. I think it is really important to start bringing more equality in that sense because everybody has something to offer. Money is only one part of the equation. The expertise, the resources are also very important. And I think continents like the Global South have a lot to offer in that sense, as long as we really know what we're worth and work for it.

Equitable Partnerships Versus Equal Partnerships

How can researchers in the Global South advocate for themselves?

NM: As younger researchers, we thought about equal partnership, which is a different concept to what is prevailing now, which is equitable partnership. We understand that the Global South, like scientists in South America, cannot put dollar to dollar. That is just not going to work. However, we can think about economics and equitable resources to make partnerships work. This has also been South Africa's ethos. We're now saying to members of our African countries that if you have a project, you don't have to have a lot of money to make it work, but you need to put something at the table so that you have a sense of ownership, and an openness to demand a certain way of doing things or partnership. Because if you have put nothing into it, it also makes it difficult to have this relationship. In many of our projects or programs, we really work on these equitable partnership models. We are slowly starting to work with other African countries to come to the party. In South Africa, the government has taken a little bit of a shift to not only growing South Africa, as it looks like we can't grow the South African system without growing the African continent system.

In many of our programs, we have these negotiations where we want other African countries to be involved. For example, you probably know that we are in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) program of countries. Some people are not happy about that, but it's not about who has money. But we have South Africa advocating for the joining of Egypt and Ethiopia, to make sure that these global partnerships are grown. We also have an initiative, again, funded through global partners like IDRC, Sida, the NRF, UKRI, and a few other global funders called the Science Granting Council Initiative (SGCI). NRF is a science-granting council. In most African countries, these do not exist. Money often comes through the ministries directly to the researchers, and this makes funding very vulnerable to changes in government and politics. We are an agency. We also answer to a politician. But it buffers the system from the change in government. So SGCI encourages countries in the continent to form formal science-granting councils.

For any country in the continent, it is free to join [the SGCI]. However, there are certain conditions that the country has to undertake; by Act of Parliament [the Science Technology and Innovation (ST&I) Act] the country has to form a science-granting agency in later years. This is why, for example, we now have to say National Research Foundation or NRF South Africa [rather than just “NRF”], because two years ago NRF Kenya was formed, which is the National Research Fund of Kenya. There are several science granting councils. You have Fonds National de la Recherche et de l'Innovation pour le Développement (FONRID, or the National Fund for Research and Innovation for Development], which is an institution based in and vital to Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa. You've got Fonds pour la Science, la Technologie et l'Innovation, which is the Fund for Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Ivory Coast [established in 2018, this organization supports research and development by funding scientific projects and programs aimed at socio-economic and cultural development within the country]. We are starting to see, after working together, that it's actually helping to strengthen the science system in the continent. Once you do that, you strengthen the scientists, then they can contribute a little bit more. Then the issue becomes access and which wall they are facing. Is it the paying wall, or their payroll on the other side?

NQ: That sounds like really positive progress. I want to go back to the discussion about equitable contributions and the satellite or telescope example, because I was thinking, and this might be a very naive statement to make, but if countries can't necessarily contribute the funds, there are other things; I'm sure access to clear skies and lots of open space in African countries is what people studying space really want. Am I right that there are other ways and resources that can be offered that can help countries contribute to science?

Other than money or funding, what resources or ways can countries contribute to science, to help the greater scientific community?

NQ: The Square Kilometre Array, which will be the biggest telescope in the world once it's finished, is used by a consortium of countries, including Canada and the US; everybody, even South America. But the SKA is somewhere in the Northern Cape where nobody lives. It is totally dark. It doesn't have light interference. It is the right space to have the telescope. However, although I am not an astronomer, they tell me sometimes to build the bigger picture, you need other satellites. They might be smaller in other countries, but you can build the more complete pictures by having different pictures taken in different parts of space. So it is then important to have other countries joining the space science initiative because they can build other telescopes. The South African MeerKAT, as it's called now, has 64 dishes [MeerKAT is a world-class radio telescope used to study the universe by detecting faint radio waves from distant cosmic sources; it is a core component of the larger international SKA project]. There is also a large one in Australia. But I know there are plans to build another one or two dishes along the continent to make sure that they capture more.

This can only be done through this partnership. Also, what we've seen is that we need more astronomers. In South Africa, we cannot all be astronomers. So the more you provide space for people to use the telescope, the more you train astronomers across the continent and across the globe. In South Africa, before the SKA, we virtually had almost no astronomers. But once we had the SKA, we increased that capacity. Those astronomers who are using our telescope or may have come to South Africa as a student, actually train and then go back [to their own country]. I've been speaking to the managing director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is in charge of SKA; they say that most of the space programs in African countries are started by people who were part of the SKA at some point in time. This would not have happened if South Africa had not openly made it known that it would accept other African countries to be part of this program.

Strong Infrastructure Builds Strong Scientific Initiatives

NQ: As soon as you get that interest, you start to build infrastructure. Following infrastructure, you get the expertise, you get the training, and hopefully a trickle effect to get some momentum behind these things. I'm hoping there are examples beyond. I'm also not an astronomer, but in every field of science and immunology and other elements of biology where you may be tapping into genetic diversity or ecological diversity, where you can use these variable resources or unique resources that can only be in specific countries to start to build that momentum. But you did mention something that made me think about the issue of brain drain, because you said that people will come and then they'll go elsewhere. I'm sure that's something that every country faces. Canada faces a brain drain, really. I can only imagine what happens elsewhere. Are there any comments you'd like to make on that and anything that you've seen that helps avoid people leaving once they've had the training?

How can scientific institutions help stem the “brain drain”?

NM: In South Africa, in general, it's relatively easy to stay here and not really want to leave. But I've known many people in different countries and different situations that leave their country to work somewhere else. However, I think Africa is progressing in science, it's a growing continent, and I think you are getting more and more people staying within the science space. In the genomics space for example, If you look back at COVID, the amount of work that was done in South Africa in genomics, genomics platforms, and sequencing platforms was tremendous. Through that, South Africa has attracted great minds outside of the continent, never mind in the continent. I think once you strengthen the system within the country and within the continent, you stem the brain drain. You cannot ask people to stay without strengthening that system because they must see a functioning system. I'm not saying South Africa doesn't have this fault, but if you look at this infrastructure and the strengthening of the system that was built through the HIV and AIDS pandemic, our genomics platforms and sequencing work had already attracted a lot of people that want to work in science.

The pandemics kept these scientific skills in the country for quite some time. When COVID came, it was easy for us to just redirect all that viral genomic work into COVID. Again, we were able to do this because we maintain the skills, the infrastructure, and the support system. It's important for African countries to strengthen their systems also, to stem the brain drain out of their countries. I think it's also now difficult with the heavily connected globe as a counter effect that everybody moves everywhere and everyone wants to go everywhere. It is also somewhat of a positive thing for the African continent in that there's also a lot of pushback on immigration by Global North countries, where it's now becoming more difficult to move. For example, although I don't want to pick on Canada, the recent policy limiting international student movement to Canada is going to benefit the African continent. In contrast, which is worrying for our partners at universities in Latin America, due to policies like those in Argentina they've lost almost 50% of their funding, which means most of them will likely leave the system and the system will get crippled. So there are a lot of things outside of the control of the researchers.

Unstable Political Environments Affect Access to Science

How can scientists ensure research continuation amid government volatility?

BR: That is a major issue. The volatility of different governments in places like Argentina. Because there's not a lot to start with, it really makes a huge impact on what resources scientists end up getting. Right now, there's a large movement of people outside of Argentina because the current government doesn't support science. When you have a system that is not strong, where you don't give enough strength to the institutions to really protect their own, then you are at the mercy of each different government that comes along. It's important to build some resilience to the system so people can adapt, at least in the short term. Of course, in the long term, you need the support of the government, but [you need that resilience] to try to soften the blows when you have an unfavorable political environment impairment.

That's very problematic. But I think that it is very common, at least in Latin America, that you never know. It depends on the current government. I mean, that's everywhere. Sometimes when resources are already so low, you're very close to rock bottom. So then you reach rock bottom a lot faster. That's a problem because as a scientist, you need to think of your lab, and your projects can take years. As a PhD student, you need to be able to guarantee at least three or four years of salary. If you want to build something that lasts, something that matters, you need several years. You need a decade to build a research line that really makes a difference in the world. If you don't know whether that money you have is going to continue, you honestly, truly don't know what's going to happen in five years. Then it's really hard to build and to invest into your life, your time, your effort, and your career on something from the start.

NM: Yeah. This is why I keep going back to how the NRF and South Africa's approach is trying to strengthen the region as much as it can as a whole and have some partial independence of science from the government. When you have these science agencies that are outside of government. Because in South Africa, as we’ve all seen, the government has changed so many times. But the NRF helps stabilize universities because it helps the universities really not feel that much of a change of government. In many of the talks I give, I talk about how the global science community should work together to make sure that the science we do is science for society. That the science that we do is freely available, as freely as it can be, and everybody has access and can contribute to it. It makes it really frustrating [when it is not freely available]. We've all been groomed into this way of communicating our science [through journals]. But we need to now start to ask the question; is the journal the way to communicate science?

Financial Barriers Prevent Science from Being Communicated

How can the scientific community ensure that scientists globally have access to all published science?

NM: If you look at the work or the analysis that was done in the University of Ottawa by Dr. Stefanie Haustein, it showed that the top five publishers made huge profits from Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Open Access; around US$10 billion over five years. They've completely switched the model from pay to subscribe to pay to publish, which means in general, it costs a scientist US$2,500 to publish. Can somebody from South America afford this? Can somebody from the African continent afford US$2,500?

NQ: It's even a problem for North American scientists. I can't stress this enough that the publishing model as it has been built is just not the scientific communications model that needs to go forward. We've had a lot of excellent conversations within the Lab Coats & Life™ Podcast about this open access topic, or open science topic. We spoke with Richard Sever, a co-founder of bioRxiv, and we recently spoke with a co-founder of PubPeer, which is another way of accessing science. It's focused on published science, but accessing and creating open dialogue globally around science. We've also talked about open data quite a bit. I think more of these conversations are necessary because I fully agree that global accessibility to scientific information is fundamental, not only for the sake of the individuals contributing and the ability for people around the world to contribute, but also for the sake of science, because the publishing model is slow, selective, and limited. It slows progress down, and we need to move faster. I fully agree with you.

Making Science More Accessible to All

NQ: You spoke to this at the beginning that your core job is actually a researcher, but you've dedicated so much of your time and your life and your expertise to facilitating open science and to try to increase access to science, specifically in Africa, but globally as well. I thank you for that. I think that's amazing. I'm wondering what advice you would give to other scientists who want to do similar things, regardless of where they are working from?

How can scientists contribute to making science more accessible for scientists globally?

NM: I will answer from two different angles. First, in December, we had what we called the Diamond Summit; the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, where we talked about how we can contribute to science freely. This would be great. So without journals charging institutions or institutes paying. However, the second angle is what we call research assessment. Because I would love researchers to do what I do, which is to contribute a lot of their time to doing community engagement, working with communities in whatever space and time. But slowly, in the past 10 years, even universities and research institutions have been doing business in a different way. As a researcher, you are required to do A, B, and C. You won't get paid unless you do A, B, and C. Slowly, increasingly, all these other things related to community engagement and making sure that science is accessible and shared with society becomes very hard. I think researchers or scientists, if you ask them, are overburdened; they feel that they cannot do anything anymore. They are asked to publish five to ten papers a year, which is simply impossible. So I think we need to incentivize researchers to communicate their science in different ways to the community.

NM: If governments and institutions do not change this, then you will only have a few scientists or researchers who just like to do it, on top of whatever they need to do. Most of them will not do anything [in terms of science communication beyond journal publications]. What will be the result of this?

Engaging with Community over Publishing in Journals

Why don’t scientists engage with the public as much as they could?

NM: The issue is incentivizing researchers and researchers remembering why they got into science. When we all got into research, when you were a first-year PhD student, you wanted to solve this biggest world problem, and you were driven to do that. If anybody asked you on that first day what you’d have achieved in ten years time, you probably would have said, “I'll be a professor and I would have published 100 papers.” You were just wanting to solve that social problem. I think we need to move back to that, as scientists; do we do science for fame so that we can say we publish in Nature, or are we really solving world problems? I always try to go back to thinking about why we are doing what we are doing, not the fame that comes with publishing in a journal with an impact of 50, which is a made up number to begin with.

NQ: I agree across the board with what you said. I don't think that's limited. I think that's a global problem. No matter where you are, researchers are overburdened with the pressures that they have just to keep up with research and keep funding in their labs. Those things like science, communication, mentorship, contributing to their communities and contributing to the global scientific community; those are not necessarily incentivized and rewarded. What it comes down to is, yes, we do have to get back to those fundamental desires. People don't go into science to necessarily get rich, although there is more money as things are moving more and more to be commercialized. But generally, scientists go into science for all the right reasons. Ultimately, humans need to look after themselves and their families. You end up having to make decisions that might not align with the reasons you started in science. We need to remove that so that we can contribute in better ways.

How can scientists communicate the value of science to society?

BR: I think you hit the nail on the head several times. It is absolutely important to have the opportunity, have the resources to do the right thing by science and not to feel overwhelmed. So overwhelmed with the bare minimum that then you forget which are the things that really bring value to society. I think that's very important. I feel that. I do that every day. It's really tough. You really want to do something for the community. But then oftentimes, that's not something that you can put in your grant application to keep getting a salary. You're going to run out of salary next year and you need to fix it. But I think there are some winds of change. I think more and more there are some initiatives to keep other extracurricular activities in view. But in the end, this is how it goes at the moment. This places a burden on scientists where publishing is really hard because it's really costly or making the data is really costly. It’s not because they are not capable or don't have good ideas. It's just because the research is limited and therefore everything takes you longer or there's some experience you just cannot do because you don't have the resources. Once you're perpetually in this disadvantaged position, it's really hard to get out.

NQ: Yeah. Or you have to publish in English, and English isn't your first language. And then you have to engage with translators or editors just to get your publication into that broken system that existed in the first place.

Is open science the way forward?

NM: I think what Brenda was just saying is that we need to move to a situation where we don't look at open science [as something unusual]. Open science is the right way to do science. It shouldn't be an extracurricular activity like a side job. It should be the main way we do things, and we should incentivize it. And bringing the conversation back to what you said, Nicole; the publishing model or pathway that we have currently is long, it is arduous, it is full of many inequities. However, before we end this podcast I want to say that as scientists, the publishing system is built on us. From the beginning to the end, we contribute, we do the final review for the publishers to take everything. We really need to rethink that whole thing structurally. Because if all scientists and researchers pull away from the current publishing model, it will force publishers to rethink.

NM: They could offer services to researchers, not the other way around. We also then need to ask ourselves, with the digital platforms and technology we have now, “Is the journal the only way to publish or to pass on our thoughts and ideas?” My opinion is that maybe only 4 - 5% of research that scientists do needs to be communicated to our peers in that language [through journals]. Nobody understands it. Even with a background in genomics, sometimes I still have to try to figure out what the person is saying. But 95% of it [research] is regurgitating one or two things, but finding application in a different setting. That needs to be a two-, three-, or one-pager to the stakeholders that you're doing that, not to the community. I think we need to figure [science communication] out. Once you take away all that pressure, we will really have a different way of how science is communicated or should be communicated in the world.