Presentation at the Summit on the Sustainability of Open Access Publishing in Africa, May 17, 2012. Organized by BioMedCentral and hosted by the Wellcome Trust. This talk discusses why treating scholarly publications as a public goods require a different kind of thinking about "sustainability". There is a need to move away from traditional and rigid criteria of according "prestige" to research publication, and a key strategy is to move "prestige" to open access journal based in Africa. This further requires rethinking about what constitutes "prestige", "values", "capitals", and "impact" of research for the African and for the development contexts.
