Centre for Internet and Society

Use of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers

Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2013-07-04T04:50:49Z

Indian researchers have published more than 43,400 papers in over 4,600 journals in 2009 as seen from Science Citation Index (SCI) – Expanded. Of these, over 6,900 (or one in six) papers are published in 445 open access (OA) journals. The proportion of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals is considerably higher than the world average, which is estimated to be 8.5–10.0%. Although India publishes well over a thousand journals, including about 360 OA journals, SCI Expanded indexed in 2009 only 101 Indian S&T journals including 46 OA journals. It is likely that the percentage of Indian papers in OA journals as seen from SCI will be higher if more Indian journals are indexed in SCI Expanded.

Subbiah Gunasekharan and Subbiah Arunachalam (2011) Use of open access journals by Indian researchers. Current Science, 101 (10). pp. 1287-1295. Download the full research paper

In a recent paper, Madhan and Arunachalam looked at the use made by Indian researchers of selected high impact open access (OA) journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E. In this article, we report the use made by Indian scientists of OA journals that are indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) Expanded. Web of Science (WoS) – SCI Expanded, indexes 8,368 journals, of which 836 are OA. We obtained the list of 836 OA journals from Thomson Reuters (Scientific).

Since 1989–1990 when the first four OA journals – Bryn Mawr Classical Review (http://bmcr.brynmawr. edu/), Postmodern Culture, Psycholoquy (http://www.ils.unc.edu/~arnsj/inls180-01/harnard.htm), and Public-Access Computer Systems Review – started publication, thousands of OA journals have been published. The number of OA journals as well as those indexed in WoS, are increasing steadily. Heather Morrison has been following the growth of OA journals over the past decade (Figure 1). Informatics India Ltd, publisher of Open J-Gate, has also started following the growth of OA journals (Figure 2). Currently (as on 30 September 2011), there are 7,070 OA journals according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and over 9,300 OA journals (including more than 6,200 peer-reviewed) from over 5,000 publishers, according to Open J-Gate. Indeed, the growth rate has accelerated in the past few years, and currently it stands at four new titles per day. OA not only plays a crucial role in disseminating scientific knowledge at a low cost, making it more accessible and more visible locally and globally, but also plays an important role in preserving indigenous knowledge to enrich the new generations, says Iryna Kuchma.

New publishing models are emerging too. While PLoS publishes only seven OA journals and BMC publishes 221 peer-reviewed OA journals (as on 1 October 2011), SciELO publishes 875 OA journals from ten countries (as on 2 October 2011), and J-STAGE provides a portal for over 757 Japanese journals (as on 1 October 2011), most of them OA.

Earlier studies have shown that the greater accessibility and visibility of research papers published in OA journals have improved their impact and citations.

Evans and Reimer have shown that the openly available articles, especially from developing countries, are cited much more often by peers than articles behind a toll barrier. It is important to know how aware Indian researchers are of OA.

In this article, we have studied the contribution of Indian researchers to OA journals indexed in SCI Expanded in the calendar year 2009. There is another multidisciplinary abstract and citation database of research literature, viz. Scopus published by the Reed Elsevier group. Even though it indexes a larger number of journals and has citation data and other features available in WoS, it has some limitations when one wants to download and analyse large amounts of data. For instances, at any given time Scopus allows downloading only a limited number, viz. 2000 records. WoS does not impose any restrictions on the number of records downloaded. One can download metadata for the downloaded data, 500 records at a time and go on adding in steps of 500 using the ‘marked list’ facility. WoS has a history of about half a century and as its founder Eugene Garfield was interested in scientometric research of all kinds, his team shaped the database to lend itself not only to perform its primary function, viz. searching the literature, but also to provide a source for a variety of other tasks such as building science indicators and carrying out scientometric studies with ease. Surely

Scopus will offer such features as more and more researchers and science analysts start using it for such applications. Another database, viz. Open J.-Gate also indexes a large number of OA journals, but it does not provide citation information and hence could not be used in this study.

Methodology

We collected bibliographic data of research papers published by Indian researchers in the calendar year 2009 from the SCI Expanded section of WoS. Papers were included if at least one author had given an address in India. The data were downloaded in comma-separatedvalues (CSV) format and imported into MS Access. We wrote a few SQL scripts for analysing the data. We separated the list of the 836 OA journals indexed in SCI for our analysis. Apart from the list of 836 OA journals provided by the Thomson Reuters, there are nine other journals registered as OA in the Scopus source list (e.g. Chem. Pharm. Bull., Japan, ISSN 0009-2363, IF 1.507) which have been considered as OA journals in our study. The countries of publication of journals were collected from the source data indexed in Scopus. We preferred Scopus over the SCI database, because occasionally the country assigned to a journal in the source data of SCI differs from the individual entry for the paper in the set of records downloaded for our analysis. For example, Chinese Chemical Letters, published by the Chinese Chemical Society, Beijing, China, is also attributed to Elsevier Science Inc., New York, USA; the Chinese Journal of Chemistry, published by the Chinese Chemical Society, Shanghai, China, is attributed to Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany in the data downloaded and also attributed to Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, USA in the list of journals indexed in SCI Expanded and Eur. Phys. J. – Appl. Phys., published by the Cambridge University Press, New York, is also attributed to EDP Sciences, France. Impact factor (IF) values of journals were assigned from Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2010. Some journals are shown as having an IF value of zero; it means that either they were not indexed in JCR, or indexed recently but not yet assigned an IF. When assigning IF values from JCR 2010 by matching the ISSN using SQL script in MS Access, we found that 150 journals in our dataset did not match with the ISSN given in JCR 2010 (same title, but different ISSN – maybe of on-line and print version). For these 150 journals, we checked the journal titles manually and assigned IF values. Only 19 journals had IF and the rest (131) did not, and we assigned a value of zero. Some titles also had different abbreviations; for example, An. Stiint. U. Al. I-Mat. (in JCR) is rendered as Analele Stiint Univ. in SCI, and Probl. Atom. Sci. Tech. (in JCR) is rendered as Probl. At. Sci. Tech. in SCI. Thomson Reuters will do well if they take care of such discrepancies in journal title abbreviations and assignment of publishing countries.

Results

Indian researchers have used 4,603 journals to publish 43,481 research papers in 2009. They used 445 OA journals to publish 6,904 papers, which accounted for 15.88%, and 4,158 non-OA journals to publish 36,577 papers (Table 1). Of the 445 OA journals, 15 are published by MedKnow, Mumbai, India, and these carried 1,282 papers (http://www.medknow.com/). Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories. A subsequent study commissioned by the European Commission called the SOAP project survey, the largest to touch issues in OA publishing so far reports that approximately 10% of papers published currently appeared in OA journals. Thus, contrary to the prevailing perceptions, Indian researchers are publishing a substantially larger percentage of their papers in OA journals than the rest of the world.

Table 2 shows the distribution of the papers by document type. About 83% of papers in all journals and 78.7% of papers in OA journals are articles, and 2.38% of papers in all journals and 0.54% of papers in OA journals are papers from proceedings. A little over 2% of papers in all journals and about 4.5% of papers in OA journals are editorial material.

Journal country
The 4,603 journals used by Indian researchers are published from 64 countries, but a substantial number of papers, more than 88%, have appeared in journals from five countries. These include 1,351 US journals publishing 10,284 (or 23.65% of all) Indian papers, 775 journals from The Netherlands publishing 9,202 (or 21%) of all Indian papers and 1,119 UK-based journals publishing 8,710 papers (accounting for 20%). Indian researchers used 101 Indian journals to publish 8,258 papers (18.99%) and 361 German journals to publish 2,195 papers. Table 3 gives a list of country of origin of journals, number of journals, number of OA journals and the total number of papers published in journals from each country. Out of the 1,351 US journals, 59 are OA; of the 1,119 UK journals, 71 are OA; of the 101 Indian journals 46 are OA and of the 361 German journals, 11 are OA; but only one of the 775 journals from the Netherlands is OA. This is largely because The Netherlands is the home of the world’s leading journal publishing companies and unlike in the USA, UK and India, there is hardly any journal in The Netherlands published by non-commercial publishers of scholarly journals. Indeed one of the companies has made a contribution to the election fund of an American Senator who brought up amendments to stall the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Many of these commercial publishers had even hired a public relations consultant ‘to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available’.

One may wonder at the small number of Indian journals. In fact, Indian scientists publish in many more Indian journals, but they are not indexed in SCI Expanded or JCR. The distribution of OA journals indexed in SCI Expanded by country is revealing (Table 4). While countries like England and USA have 115 and 102 OA titles, The Netherlands has just 3 OA journals.

OA journals used
OA journals used by Indian researchers in 2009 are listed in Table 5. Only the 24 journals with at least 70 papers from India are shown. Of these 24 journals, only five have an IF of greater than 1.000, and only 18 have at least 100 papers from India and these 18 journals together accounted for 50.69% of India’s total OA journal output. Of these 18 OA journals, 16 are from India and one each from United Kingdom and Kenya. Of the 445 OA journals, Current Science (IF = 0.897) published by the Current Science Association in association with the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, tops the list with 597 papers, followed by Acta Crystallogr. Sect. E-Struct. Rep. (IF = 0.413) published from the United Kingdom, with 440 papers. The journal Indian J. Pharm. Sci. (IF = 0.455) has 326 papers. The overall average citation per paper (CPP) in OA journals is 1.27, a rather small number, and smaller than CPP for Indian papers published in all journals (including non-OA journals; 2.62). This is contrary to expectations and needs to be probed further;several studies have shown the citation advantage of OA.

Is there a difference in citability of papers published in OA journals by authors from developing and developed countries? Our results are for papers published in 2009 and the CPP is likely to improve with the passage of time.

But there are certain OA journals which have recorded high CPP for Indian papers. Notably, the UK-based journal Mol. Syst. Biol. (IF = 9.667) has one paper which received 23 citations. Similarly, Nucl. Acids Res. (IF = 7.836) has 17 papers from India which together received 321 citations for a CPP of 18.88. Five papers published in Molecules (IF = 1.988) received 69 citations. Three papers that appeared in PLoS Genet. (IF = 9.543) received 39 citations. Two review articles that were published in Biogeosciences (IF = 3.587) received 25 citations. Similarly, nine papers that appeared in PLoS Med. (IF = 15.617) received 101 citations for a CPP of 11.22. The Int. J. Electrochem. Sci. (IF = 2.808), being published by the Electrochemical Science Group, Serbia, since 2006, and indexed in JCR only from 2009, has 33 Indian papers that have received 227 citations, with an average citation per paper of 6.88.

The 4,603 journals in which Indian researchers have published have been classified by IF of journals as seen from JCR 2010 (Table 6). We notice that the ratio of OA journals to the total number of journals decreases with an increase in IF. This is to be expected, as many of the toll access journals with high IF have been around for a long time and most OA journals are less than 10 years old. About 2.5% of papers from India have appeared in 131 journals (including 26 OA journals), which are either not indexed in JCR 2010 or recently indexed but not assigned IF values. We have assigned their IF as zero. A little over 34% of all papers published by Indian researchers appeared in 1,471 journals, which include 235 OA journals with IF less than 1. About 56.5% of papers have appeared in 2,645 journals with IF in the range 1–4.499. Only 357 papers appeared in 66 journals, including three OA journals, with IF > 10. Of the 6,904 papers in OA journals, less than 4% of papers appeared in journals with IF = 0 and over 73% of papers published in 235 journals with IF less than 1. An item classified as ‘editorial material’ appeared in the OA journal CA-A Cancer J. Clin. (IF = 94.262) which has received three citations. Among the 445 OA journals, the high IF journals, e.g. PLoS Med. (IF = 15.617) has nine papers, viz. five articles, three editorial materials and one review which together received 101 citations; and PLoS Biol. (IF = 12.469), Mol. Syst. Biol. (IF = 9.667) and PLoS Pathog. (IF = 9.079) have one paper each and they have received 9, 23 and 6 citations respectively.

We notice that the average CPP correlates well with the IF of journals. For journals with IF up to 1.5, CPP is less than 2.0 and for journals with IF in the range 7–20, CPP is higher than 9.0. Indian papers published in 37 OA journals have CPP of 5 or greater. In contrast, Indian papers published in 149 non-OA journals have CPP of 10 or above.

Non-OA journals
Table 7 presents the use of non-OA journals by Indian researchers in 2009. They used 4,158 non-OA journals to publish 36,577 papers in 2009. Of the 101 Indian journals used, 55 are non-OA and they had carried 4,000 papers. Two Indian journals have been used to publish more than 300 papers, viz. Asian J. Chem. (IF = 0.247, 481 papers) and Indian J. Anim. Sci. (IF = 0.147, 312 papers). Other frequently used non-OA journals are from the US, The Netherlands and UK. Some non-OA journals have decent CPP values [e.g. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. (IF = 15.199) and Nat. Rev. Neurosci. (IF = 29.510) have each one paper from India with CPP of 505 and 112 respectively; other notable non-OA journals are Rep. Prog. Phys. (2 Indian papers, CPP 91.00), Chem. Rev. (4 papers, CPP 60.00), Nano Today (1 paper, CPP 59.00), N. Engl. J. Med. (20 papers, CPP 55.90), Phys. Rev. Lett. (82 papers, CPP 11.68), J. Org. Chem. (73 papers, CPP 10.22), Tetrahedron Lett. (264 papers, CPP 6.44), J. Hazard Matter (225 papers, CPP 8.02), Eur. J. Med. Chem. (156 papers, CPP 6.74) and Phys. Rev. D (165 papers, CPP 7.58)]. The 170 papers Indian researchers have published in the Swiss journal Ann. Nutr. Metab. (IF = 2.173) have not received any citation during the period. Of these 170 papers, 169 are meeting abstracts. Similarly, 102 meeting abstracts published in Abstr. Pap. Am. Chem. Soc. have not received any citations.

Distribution of Indian papers by subject
SCI provides a broad classification of journals by subjects and sub-fields. The classification is at the level of journals and not individual articles. In Table 8, we provide information on the distribution of Indian papers published in toll-access and OA journals by journal subfields. Chemistry (4,593 papers in 162 journals) and physics (2,694 papers in 104 journals) lead the list if we consider all journals. [Apart from chemistry we have ‘materials science: chemistry’ journals, polymer science, etc. and apart from physics, we have crystallography, ‘materials science: physics’, astrophysics, etc. That is to say the classification is not into water-tight compartments.] But if we consider only OA journals, then general science periodicals top the list (711 papers in eight journals, of which Current Science alone accounts for 597 papers, Def. Sci. J. accounts for 65 papers, Arab. J. Sci. Eng. accounts for 16 papers, Int. J. Phys. Sci. accounts for 12 papers, Sci. Res. Essays and Scienceasia have six papers each, and Maejo. Int. J. Sci. Technol. and S. Afr. J. Sci. have eight and one paper respectively). Chemistry journals come next (697 papers in 21 OA journals, of which the two sections of Indian J. Chem. account for 226 papers, E-J. Chem. accounts for 188 papers, J. Chem. Sci. accounts for 78 papers and Arkivoc accounts for 52 papers), followed by pharmacology and pharmacy (592 papers in 21 journals, of which Indian J. Pharm. Sci. accounts for 326 papers, Indian J. Pharmacol. accounts for 61 papers and Pharmacogn. Mag. accounts for 54 papers) and crystallography (440 papers from one journal – Acta
Crystallogr. Sect. E – Struct. Rep. Online).

Distribution of Indian OA papers by institution and cost of publication
We did not attempt to find out the distribution of all Indian papers (or just the papers published in OA journals) by institution, as the only way it could be done was to download each record and check the author affiliation manually. Considering the large number of records we are dealing with we thought the results would not be commensurate with the effort. Nor have we attempted to evaluate the costs to India of publishing in OA journals. In 2009, Indian researchers had published 2,646 papers in 399 OA journals published from outside India. Many of these journals may charge a fee from the author; some of them charge about US$ 3,000. However, many of these journals are ready to waive the charges for authors from the developing countries. But still some authors may have paid the fees. Gathering such data (how much Indian authors have spent in 2009 for publishing their papers in OA journals) is not an easy task. One has to contact each author.

Incidentally, no Indian OA journal charges an author side fee. Most Indian OA journals still sell subscription to their print versions; many of them carry advertisements; some of them are supported by grants from the government (Department of Science and Technology and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi).

Conclusion

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’.

In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 papers/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

Note: Subbiah Gunasekaran is in the Knowledge Resource Centre, CSIR – Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi 630 006, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India. *For correspondence. (e-mail: guna1970@gmail.com).

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Acknowledgement: We thank Thomson Reuters for providing the list of OA journals indexed in the Web of Science (SCI Expanded), and Ms S. Jothy, Informatics India Ltd, Bangalore, for providing Figure 2.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/current-science-vol-101-10-1287-s-gunasekharan-s-arunachalam-use-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers

Use made of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers to Publish their Findings

Madhan Muthu and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2013-07-04T04:45:39Z

Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) ournals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.

Muthu, Madhan and Subbiah, Arunachalam (2011) Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings. Current Science, 100 (9). pp. 1297-1306. Download the full research paper

How aware are Indian researchers of open access (OA) and its advantages 10 years after Stevan Harnad visited India and spoke about the need for adopting OA archiving? To answer this question, we looked at India’s participation in both OA institutional archiving and Indian researchers using OA journals to publish their findings. In this article, our emphasis is on the use made of selected high impact OA journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E, the three leading publishers of open access papers in terms of number of papers published annually.

The Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR) lists 2,047 repositories (data gathered on 17 December) of which 59 are from India. Included in the 59 repositories are the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) journals repository, the Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology Journal repository and repetitive entries of five institutional repositories, viz. EPrints@CMFRI, EPrints@IIMK, EPrints@MKU, repository of INFLIBNET and the repository at the Cochin University of Science and Technology. Many Indian repositories listed in ROAR are inactive. There are at least five other Indian repositories not listed in ROAR, viz. Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, and Vidyanidhi, Mysore, both repositories of theses; International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Ministry of Earth Sciences and SARAI. In all, there are 33 OA repositories in India which include 24 institutional repositories, 4 subject repositories and 5 dedicated theses and dissertation repositories. The quality of tese repositories varies widely as well as their maintenance. Considering that there are more than 450 universities and several hundred research laboratories in the government, corporate and the non-government sectors, one would expect a very large number of institutional repositories in India. Furthermore, many of these repositories are not filling fast enough.

Out of the 5,897 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or DOAJ (data accessed on 17 December 2010) 276 are from India. Another database, Open J-Gate 5 , developed by the Bangalore-based Informatics India, lists 7,967 OA periodicals worldwide which include 4,773 peer-reviewed journals including 339 peer-reviewed Indian journals (Figure 1). There are a few other Indian OA journals which are yet to be listed in DOAJ and indexed in Open J-Gate. For example, two journals published by the Indian National Science Academy (Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy) and two journals published by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences) are neither indexed in Open J-Gate nor listed in DOAJ. DOAJ does not index Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources (formerly known as Natural Product Radiance), published by NISCAIR. In all, there are more than 360 Indian OA journals. Needless to say a vast majority of papers, published in the Indian OA journals, are mostly written by Indian researchers. Incidentally, two Indian journal publishers, viz. Indian Academy of Sciences and MedKnow Publications figure in the top 14 OA journal publishers in the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) survey. Our focus here is papers published by Indian researchers in high-impact OA journals published outside India. We chose all seven journals published by PLoS, 10 BMC journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. We gathered data from the Science Citation Index – Expanded section of Web of Science between 11 and 29 December 2010. Countries were assigned to papers based on addresses in the by-line. If three authors then the paper was assigned to all three countries. Therefore, the sum of papers from different countries will be far more than the actual number of papers indexed in Web of Science.

Results

BioMed Central Journals
BioMed Central, established in May 2000, is the world’s leading OA publisher in the fields of medical research and biology and publishes 208 OA journals as noted on 28 December 2010. Not all of them commenced publication at the same time, not even the same year. Different journals started publication in different years. So far these journals together have published 99,717 articles, including 83,893 original research papers and 15,824 other types of articles (Table 1). Indian researchers have published 1,872 original research papers and 92 other types of articles (such as review articles) in these 208 journals. To see India’s record in perspective, we have provided data for 11 other countries. These include the other three BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China), South Korea and Israel, both of which have scientific enterprises comparable in size to that of India, and six advanced countries. USA stands out with close to 29,300 papers, followed by Great Britain (9,464 papers) and Germany (9,340 papers). China is way ahead of other BASIC countries, and India is ahead of Israel, Korea and South Africa in the number of papers published. Brazil is ahead of India in total number of papers but falls behind in the number of original research papers. It will be interesting to see why researchers from Brazil publish such a large number of review articles.

Of these 208 journals, only 77 have been listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2009 and assigned an impact factor. (For a journal to get indexed in JCR it should have been in existence for longer than two years). We list in Table 2 those journals with impact factor greater than 4.000. Among BMC journals, Genome Biology has the highest impact factor (6.626). Other high impact factor journals are Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases (5.825), BMC Biology (5.636) and Breast Cancer Research (5.326). The following nine journals have published more than 2,000 papers so far (since they became OA journals): BMC Bioinformatics (4,078), BMC Genomics (3,204), Critical Care (2,787), BMC Public Health (2,580), Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica (2,575), BMC Cancer (2,344), Arthritis Research and Therapy (2,286), Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research (2,255) and Genome Biology (2,069). Ten journals have published more than 1000 papers but less than 2000. Four journals have published less than 100 papers. Five journals have citations per paper (CPP) higher than 10. These are Genome Biology (18.35), Veterinary Research (12.27), Genetics Selection Evolution (11.71), Respiratory Research (11.03) and Breast Cancer Research (10.33).

The number of papers published by authors in India in 10 BMC journals during 2003–2010 (data gathered on 13December 2010), the number of citations to these papers and cites/papers are provided in Table 3. To see the Indian papers in perspective, we have also given the total number of papers published in these 10 journals during the same period, number of citations received by them and the average number of citations per paper (CPP) as well as similar data for 11 other selected countries including five scientifically middle-level countries and six advanced countries. A quick look at the table reveals that there is a perceptible difference between the middle-level countries and the advanced countries.

Indian researchers have published 4.53% of the papers that have appeared in Malaria Journal, 2.49% of papers appearing in BMC Genomics, 1.77% of papers appearing BMC Public Health, 1.7% of papers appearing in BMC Bioinformatics, and 1.61% of papers appearing in BMC Evolutionary Biology. India’s participation in the other five journals is rather meagre. Looking at CPP, Indian contributions in nine of the ten journals have a lower CPP than the world papers. Year after year, Thomson Reuters’s ScienceWatch has shown that Indian research papers on an average have been cited less often than world papers in every field

But Indian papers in BMC Public Health have been cited on average 7.45 times compared to the world average of 5.59 CPP. This is rare and the researchers responsible for this deserve to be congratulated. It will be worth examining if India’s performance in public health research is of a higher class overall than research in other areas of medicine. The number of papers from China in BMC journals accounts for a much larger per cent than papers from India. For example, papers from China account for 10.0% in BMC Cancer, 7.75% in BMC Genomics, 5.74% in BMC Bioinformatics and 5.41% in BMC Evolutionary Biology. This is to be expected, as China is second only to USA in the number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and publishes more than three times the number of papers as India. Except in Breast Cancer Research, in which journal China publishes about 1% of papers, in all other journals, China’s CPP value is less than the journal average.

Although Brazil publishes fewer papers than India, it has an enviable CPP record in at least five journals considered here: Arthritis Research and Therapy (15.88; journal average 8.64), Genome Biology (23.43; journal average 22.50), Critical Care (11.96; journal average 8.23), Breast Cancer Research (10.71; journal average 8.52) and BMC Public Health (6.54; journal average 5.59). Israel, a small country with only a few research institutions and universities, has published fewer papers, but has a CPP higher than the journal average in seven of the ten journals. South Korea has a higher CPP for its papers in Arthritis Research and Therapy than the journal average.

Except for BMC Public Health, in all the other journals USA accounts for not less than 25% of papers and in some well over 40%. Also, in each of the 10 journals, USA has recorded higher CPP than the journal average. Great Britain is a distant second, but its share of papers in BMC Public Health and Malaria Journal is even higher than that of USA. Britain’s interest in public health and malaria research could be explained by over two centuries of her colonial connections. Also, in both these journals, Britain’s CPP is greater than the journal average. In fact, in both BMC Genomics and Malaria Journal, the CPP is highest for Britain.

Germany has published a larger number of papers in BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Cancer than Britain and France and these have been cited more often as well. Germany has published close to 10% of the papers in Genome Biology and these papers have recorded the highest CPP (33.08 compared to 25.78 for USA).

Acta Crystallographica
The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) publishes Acta Crystallographica in six sections. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online is the IUCr’s first electronic-only journal It is a rapid communication journal for the publication of concise reports on inorganic, metal-organic and organic structures. Unlike other fee-based OA journals published in the western world, this journal charges a modest USD 150 per article and it also offers a fee waiver for authors from developing countries.

During the seven years 2003–2009, this journal published 22,887 papers which were cited 35,078 times (Table 4). China accounted for more than 47% of these papers, followed by India (9.1%). However, papers from India averaged a higher CPP (2.13) than Germany, Britain and USA. Crystallography is a known area of strength in India. The earliest Indian paper in this field by Banerjee of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science appeared in 1930. Today, chemical crystallography is arguably stronger than all other aspects of crystallography in India, although in the early years physicists dominated the field. Work in biological crystallography started when G. N. Ramachandran, a physicist, started his work at the University of Madras in the 1950s. It will be interesting to look at the historical evolution of crystallography in India.

PLoS journals
We will now turn our attention to the PLoS journal There are seven journals in all. PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is somewhat different from the other six PLoS journals. It is an international, peer-reviewed, OA, online publication that accepts reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. In-house PLoS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards ensure fast, fair, and professional peer review. In Table 5, we provide data on the number of papers published each year by authors from the 12 countries during 2006–2010. The USA has published the largest number of papers, viz. 6,501, which is more than four times that of Britain, its nearest rival. India has published 262 papers and has the least CPP, viz. 2.34, whereas all the other countries have a CPP of above 3.0. Britain has the highest, viz. 4.76, closely followed by Germany (4.73). The values for other countries are: USA (4.36), France (4.23), Canada (4.29), Israel (3.98), Japan (3.86), South Korea (3.82), South Africa (3.46), China (3.24) and Brazil (3.01). The journal has published during this period 14,071 papers at a CPP of 3.99. The number of papers published by the other six journals, number of times they are cited and impact factors of these journals are given in Table 6. In these journals, India has published 120 papers and these have been cited 1,022 times for an average of 8.52 CPP. The corresponding figures for other middle-level countries are: China (212 papers and 11.39 CPP), South Korea (62 papers and 17.47 CPP), Brazil (131 papers and 10.21 CPP), South Africa (137 papers and 18.42 CPP) and Israel (184 papers and 15.46 CPP).

Looking at individual journals (Table 7), one sees that in general the middle-level countries have published very few papers compared to the advanced countries. There are exceptions though. Israel has published 73 papers in PLoS Computational Biology, comparable to France’s 92 and higher than Canada’s 55 and Japan’s 46. In this journal Israel’s CPP (8.5) is comparable to the world average (9.1) and the CPP of Britain and higher than the CPP of Japan. In PLoS Medicine, India’s 38 papers have a CPP of 6.92, far below the journal average of 14.12, and less than that of the other 11 countries considered. In PloS Biology, India has a CPP of 15.77, far below the journal average of 31.69, whereas South Korea (54.78) and China (32.12) have a CPP higher than the journal average. In PLoS Genetics, Brazil, South Africa and Israel have a higher CPP than the journal average. Authors from USA publish the largest number of papers in each of the six PLoS speciality journals, followed by Britain. But USA leads in CPP in only two of them, viz. PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Computational Biology. Britain has the highest CPP for PLoS Genetics followed by USA. Japan has the highest CPP for PLoS Medicine followed by France. Canada has the highest CPP for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS Biology, the first of the PLoS journals.

Discussion

There has been a perceptible increase in the number of OA papers published in journals. Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories. A recent forecast by Springer based on Web of Science data has shown that at the current rate of growth journal articles which are OA will likely grow from 8.7% in 2010 to 27% by 2020 assuming a constant annual growth rate of 20% as against 3% growth rate of papers indexed in Web of Science. It will be interesting to see if the number of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals also increase year after year. Sathyanarayana of Informatics India tells us that the per cent of OA papers published by Indian researchers as revealed by Open J-Gate is higher than the world average (private communication), but we need a proper scientometric study to confirm this. Evans and Reimar have shown that for authors from developing countries free-access articles are cited much higher when they make them freely accessible over the Internet and that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists’ investigation.An analysis of many MedKnow journals has shown that OA journals do not lose subscribers to print editions; on the contrary, the number of subscribers is increasing in most cases. Again, OA has helped MedKnow journals attract a larger number of paper submissions, hits and downloads, win more citations and improve impact factors.The Indian Academy of Sciences has also seen similar trends for their journals (G. Chandramohan, pers.commun). Data in Table 5 show that the number of papers published by each one of the 12 countries in PLoS ONE has increased over the years dramatically. We found similar trends for all PLoS journals (except PLoS Medicine) and several BMC journals including BMC Public Health, BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Genomics

Both BMC and PLoS charge article processing fees as do many other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $ 1450 and $ 1640, PLoS ONE charges $ 1350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $ 2900 and other PLoS journals $ 2250. This could be a deterrent to most Indian and other developing country researchers. However, these journals waive the processing fees if authors request before submitting their papers. But not all Indian scientists would like to request such waivers. Here is what Balarama leading Indian molecular biophysicist, says: ‘As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds to be subsidising Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals or any other non-Indian open access journal. Some journals waive these charges for authors from developing countries. But I do not think we should go begging for waivers.’

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting.

Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad and Balram One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.

Muthu Madhan is in the ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No.194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India.
*For correspondence. (e-mail: subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com)

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[]. Jayaraman, K. S., Open archives – the alternative to open access, interview with Prof. P. Balaram, SciDev.Net, 9 July 2008; http://www.scidev.net/en/features/q-a-open-archives-the-alternative-to-open-access.html

[]. Harnad, S., How India can provide immediate open access now? Curr. Sci., 2008, 94, 1232.

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[]. Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute; http://eprints.cmfri.org.in

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings

US pressure threatens to weaken data - localisation mandate in India's landmark data-protection bill

Sandhya Sharma — 2019-08-22T01:41:21Z

Sources say the bill may have to concede vital ground to technology companies.

The article by Sandhya Sharma was published by ET Prime on August 19, 2019. Arindrajit Basu was quoted.

Indian law-enforcement agencies have repeatedly expressed their unhappiness with America’s reticence on the sharing of critical data — whether it was around the 26/11 Mumbai attacks or procuring electronic evidence under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) from technology companies.

Top cybersecurity sources in the government tell ET prime that India’s own Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill 2019 is in response to this. Cabinet nod to the bill is expected anytime, and it is likely to be tabled in the next session of Parliament. However, thanks to diplomatic pulls and pressures, a vital provision of the bill could end up markedly diluted. Sources in the Indian government say the US has conveyed it does not want the bill at all.

“We expect it will be a better mechanism than MLAT” for procuring data from technology companies, says a person aware of the development, while adding that the thorny question of data localisation is now a very small part of the bill. Across key bilateral engagements — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s June visit to India, G20 meetings between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump, and a US trade representative delegation visiting India for talks — American unease with the growing “protectionism” in Indian policy has remained a key talking point.

"Forum members oppose data localisation policies, and we look forward to sharing our concerns when the data protection bill gets introduced in Parliament,” says Susan Ritchie, vice-president of technology, media, and telecommunications at lobby group U.S. India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF).

“An environment where regulatory coherence is a governmental priority provides industry with greater predictability and stability resulting in increased investment." A toothless treaty? According to policy experts, MLATs have been the most widely used method for cross-border data sharing. India has signed MLATs with 39 countries, including the US. These treaties give India access to data stored on the cloud and call for data stored by multinational service providers within the jurisdiction of the partner country. However, MLATs are time consuming and have failed in their basic function in the past, sources say, and hence the government was keen to hold the data of Indians back in India, including data pertaining to e-commerce transactions, banking, healthcare, etc.

According to the Justice Srikrishna Committee report, eight of the 10 most accessed websites by Indians are owned by US entities. If data is exclusively processed in India, it will potentially cut off foreign surveillance, the report also notes, while highlighting a three-pronged approach to Indian data to reduce dependence on MLATs.

Talking exclusively to ET Prime, Justice BN Srikrishna says, “MLAT is a long-drawn process and hence the process goes through several diplomatic and judicial channels. It takes anywhere between 18 months to two years to get the information from the foreign technology companies for any investigation [and] much more time for extracting information on taxation and other financial matters…. Once the data of Indian citizens is in India, it will be much easier for law enforcement agencies to take the data for investigation purposes. In the past, the technology companies have dilly-dallied on the information requests of Indian law enforcement agencies.” To be sure, the report does not claim "perfect compliance" through data localisation and it clarifies that for data owned by companies like Google a "conflict of law" might arise if the country of registration — in this case the US — also asserts jurisdiction.

According to the report, between January and June 2017, Google received 3,843 user data-disclosure requests by Indian governmental agencies. Google refused to provide data in 46% of the cases. Now with the PDP Bill, Indian officials can easily get their hands on the data of Indian citizens not residing in India, says Justice Srikrishna. US resistance US tech-industry insiders tell ET Prime on condition of anonymity that no law-enforcement agency should be allowed 100% unfettered access to information. They claim MLATs have been successful in most cases of intelligence sharing around terrorism and national security.

“National security” is a very wide concept in India, unlike in the US where it generally refers to international activities, they say. Jacob Gullish, senior director for digital economy at the lobby group US India Business Council (USIBC), says the term MLAT is often used incorrectly as a catch-all. MLATs are designed for a very narrow and a specific purpose: where the transmitted information is admissible in the foreign country’s judicial system, he says. “In these cases, information has to be handled carefully to ensure the request complies with domestic laws and the transmission is certified for authenticity and a chain of custody, as well as packaged to allow its use as evidence in a foreign court. This process takes time, and the business community supports MLAT reform.

“Just like in the physical world, due process rights for the citizens of the world’s largest and the world’s oldest democracies must be respected in the digital domain. Companies also need legal certainty when operating between different jurisdictions. The bottom line is that law enforcement agencies (LEAs) on both sides need to develop clear processes and procedures, as well as trusted relationships, which will facilitate information exchange during an investigation.” A Google spokesperson echoes Gullish. “On urging from us and other Internet companies, MLAT processes have improved and in most cases responses are provided in a week or two,” the spokesperson says.

“In addition, we are also advocating for MLAT reform, including supporting calls to invest over [USD20 million] to address insufficient staffing, and helping investigators around the world better understand the MLAT process, to help expedite requests.” Other industry insiders claim that US companies field a high volume of requests and respond quickly for the most part, and that ultimately all of this goes back to trust. In December 2011, a Delhi court had issued summons to 21 companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube, to face trial for allegedly hosting objectionable content promoting hatred or communal disharmony.

The then IT Minister Kapil Sibal had asked Google and Facebook to ensure prompt removal of offensive material, complaining that the companies had not cooperated in the past. Concerns with data-localisation norms in the present state 1. Diplomatic and political: Data-localisation mandates could impact India’s trade relationships with partners like the US. 2. Security risks (“Regulatory stretching of the attack surface”): Storing data in multiple physical centres increases the exposure to exploitation by malicious actors. 3. Economic impact: Restrictions on cross-border data flow may harm economic growth by increasing compliance costs and entry barriers for foreign service providers, thereby reducing investment or forcing businesses to pass on these costs to the consumers. The major cost pertains to setting up data centres in India.

Further, for startups looking to attain global stature, reciprocal restrictions slapped by other countries can be a serious hurdle. “Data localisation would be most effective if it is — (a) done after India updates its privacy and security standards by passing the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019; (b) done sectorally, after considering how critical it is to store the data in India; (c) done conditionally in (i) the country where data is transferred having equivalent privacy and security safeguards, both de jure and de facto and (ii) the presence of an executive data sharing agreement,” says Arindrajit Basu, senior policy officer at New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Internet and Society. This is essentially what the international community describes as “free flow of data with trust” — the G20 mandate which India recently rejected. Can the US CLOUD Act solve for the lack of information access? A section of policy experts argues that the localisation mandate proposed in India’s new bill does not solve an important problem: What happens when law-enforcement agencies need access to data relating to a foreigner stored in a server located in another jurisdiction by a company incorporated in the US? Will the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act) passed in the US last year help?

The US has recently amended the CLOUD Act after a dispute between Microsoft and the US government. The law now ensures two things: American law-enforcement agencies will get access to data held by US cloud service providers (CSPs) regardless of jurisdiction, and allow “qualified foreign governments” to access data stored by US CSPs. This has given rise to a view that the CLOUD Act could be the silver bullet countries like India need to push US tech companies to share data in a timely fashion. Basu of the Centre for Internet and Society says, “India should use the threat of data localisation to negotiate an executive arrangement under the CLOUD Act. India would fare better if it were to use the language of international law to articulate its position in the MLAT reform process, or to propel itself to a better position under the CLOUD Act (which requires countries to demonstrate a commitment to a free and open Internet) or potentially pursue negotiations for a multilateral data sharing treaty.” Siddharth Jain, assistant commissioner in Delhi Police and an expert in investigating cyber-crime issues, says Indian technology firms do provide adequate and timely information about suspicious transactions; however, US firms are lax in sharing information.

Telangana IPS officer Rema Rajeshwari concurs that it’s a problem for law-enforcement agencies to cull out information from some US technology companies. Data-protection bill already diluted? ET Prime has learned that the net result of the pulls and pressures exerted by US commercial and diplomatic interests is that data localisation now remains just a small part of India’s data-protection bill. The Ministry of External Affairs maintains that the US-India relationship is “extremely important”. After President Trump’s controversial comments on offering mediation on the Kashmir issue, ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said, “We are very strong strategic partners and we have brought in deep convergences across a range of issues.

We have excellent trade and investment linkages and are moving toward high defence and technology tie-up.” It’s not just political posturing by India to maintain the tricky relationship at a time when the Trump administration is coming up with reports one after the other criticising the country’s proposed data-protection policies. The PDP Bill was listed to be tabled in Parliament in the first session of the Modi 2.0 government but is yet to see the light of the day. If India tables the draft bill without making concessions that ease the demands on US technology companies, it will severely harm the India-US technology relationship, according to some US policy lobbyists. However, government sources tell ET Prime that the bill now has “data localisation as a very small part”, meaning that it is already likely diluted due to US pressure tactics. Sources say the non-critical data of an individual like height, weight, bank-account number, etc., will not need to be mandatorily stored in India. However, biometric data will have to be stored locally.

Top policymakers who were consulted for the Justice Srikrishna Committee report say should the bill be diluted under duress, it will be a sorry statement for India’s data-protection regime. Meanwhile, with nationalistic sentiments in full flourish during the new Modi government’s first Parliament session, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a note that “the bill being prepared will address India’s sovereign data concerns and provide a framework to boost innovation in India while complying with the directives contained in the judgment of [the Honourable Supreme Court]”.

India and EU: a potential template In contrast to the Indo-US friction, India’s understanding with the European Union (EU) on the issue of data protection offers a potential template. India is looking at dialing EU to seek ‘adequacy’ status with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) once it passes the PDP Bill. Tomasz Kozlowski, EU Ambassador to India, said at the recent ET 5G Congress, “Data protection is an important element of EU-India cooperation.

With such a law in place, India will be joining the global trend of global convergence toward a modern data-protection law, and take a leadership role in the region and globally, at a time when the need to address challenges to data privacy and security requires a common approach.” Kozlowski added that the “adoption of strong data protection law will also pave way for EU-India discussions and further facilitate data flows.” Top cybersecurity sources in the Indian government point out that the US has agreed to GDPR, which is far more stringent than the Indian Bill. If so, why make noise about India’s data-localisation demands?

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/et-prime-sandhya-sharma-august-19-2019-us-pressure-threatens-to-weaken-data-localisation-mandate-in-indias-landmark-data-protection-bill

US Copyright law faces constitutional challenge

sinha — 2016-08-11T13:28:13Z

In a major international development, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to strike down the provisions on Digital Rights Management(DRM) in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this post, I discuss DRMs, the EFF lawsuit, and then draw upon the differences between the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.

Originally published by Spicy IP on August 5, 2016. You may read EFF’s lawsuit here.

Decoding DRM

If you own a Netflix account and travel a lot, you may have been denied access to some TV shows depending on the country you logged in from. While that restriction can perhaps be gotten around by using VPNs, there exist other technological measures that prevent you from fixing your own automobile to sharing/making copies of an e-book that you supposedly bought. Such technological protection measures are commonly known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). These go back twenty years, and it was in 1996 when the first DRM appeared in the form of geo-access restrictions on DVD play.

Soon thereafter, it became de rigeur for businesses dealing in IP to apply all kinds of DRMs to their products. It was largely an embarrassing and a pointless saga of implementing software embedded restrictions to stem piracy (remember the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco?), given how blatantly they were discovered and circumvented. And now since technology is beginning to dwell even in our shoes, DRMs have been slapped onto these as well. So if you discover a bug causing a miscalculation in your step count, you are not only prohibited under law from probing the code and fixing it yourself, but you also may get jailed for doing so. Imagine such how such prohibition impacts and limits our daily lives and the work of professional researchers.

Clearly, DRM is not just a mere trifle to be brushed aside via smarter code– its ramifications go much farther. DRMs come with the problem of masking vulnerabilities, compromised security of the device and us er-privacy, and trampled consumer rights, fair use and free speech. Further, the poor design of DRMs makes them unable to distinguish between illegal use and fair-use. Progressive cutting down of users’ rights to store, reproduce, distribute media has become especially problematic for developing countries because of our greater dependence on free-er terms for sale, lending and donation. On the other hand, DRMs continue to become more ubiquitous(could be incorporated in the HTML 5 standard soon).

However, in an exciting development, the first major legal battle to kill DRM has begun!

Because finally in an unprecedented move, a constitutional challenge has been lodged in the US against DRM provisions, on the grounds that they restrict free speech and fair-use of copyright materials (the fair-use doctrine allows copyright law to co-exist with the first amendment). The complaint has been filed by EFF on behalf of Matthew Green (a security researcher) and Andrew “bunnie” Huang (a technologist)

The rejection that prompted a legal challenge..

Sections 1201-1205 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) lay down provisions relating to circumvention of DRM. Uniquely, the DMCA vests power in the Librarian of Congress to periodically enact rules granting exemption from the anti-circumvention provisions to legitimate non-infringing use of works (known as DMCA Rulemaking). It was under this particular instance of rulemaking in 2015, wherein the Librarian failed to grant an exemption for “…speech using clips of motion pictures, for the shifting of lawfully-acquired media to different formats and devices, and for certain forms of security research.” The rejection triggered the challenge against ‘Rulemaking’, ‘anti-circumvention’ and ‘anti-trafficking’ provisions of the DMCA, namely sections 1201(a), 1203, and 1204 . (This exemption was applied for by EFF, which has been seeking (and been granted) exemptions since 2003.)

In fact, universally, DRM provisions pose questions of free speech, consumer rights, privacy and copyright law. In the following section I will examine and compare the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.

WCT and DMCA were used to push DRM protection into Indian Copyright Act

The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 provisions on DRM are based in sections 2(xa), 65A and 65B, which were introduced through the Copyright Amendment Act, 2012. The sections define ‘Rights Management Information’, provide for ‘Protection of technological measures’ and ‘Protection of Rights Management Information’, respectively. It must be noted that the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) was the first instrument to conceive rules on DRM protection (Articles 11, 12). US was the first country to import WCT provisions into its copyright law via DMCA, which even went above the WCT standards. Soon, Hollywood-backed USTR wanted India to follow suit, and the provisions were queued up for an amendment to India’s copyright law. Please note that India is NOT a party to the WCT, and was under no obligation to enact laws on DRMs. Nevertheless, the Indian provisions with some changes and added limitations were loosely lifted from the equivalent WCT articles.

It is worth noting that the Indian DRM provisions have better safeguards than the DMCA provisions:

1) The Indian provisions (s. 65A+ 65B) do not make building and distribution of circumvention tools illegal. Only the act of circumvention attracts criminal liability. However, there is a duty on the person facilitating circumvention for another person to maintain a record of the same, including the purpose for which the facilitation occurred. The purpose should not be expressly prohibited under the Copyright Act, 1957.

Regardless, being criminally liable for circumventing DRM is a major threat to small businesses and developers. In one instance, when some Indian developers had built an open source software “PlayFair” to bypass Apple’s FairPlay DRM, they were threatened with legal action under the US’ DMCA. Despite the DMCA having no jurisdiction in India, the developers shut shop.

2) Clauses 65A(1) and 65A(2)(a) confine violation of technological protection measures to rights enumerated in the act, only. This means that the section does not restrict circumventions which attempt to get access to the underlying work.

While India has not seen major challenges to this provision, in 2013 the Delhi High Court injuncted persons from jailbreaking into Sony Playstations. Amlan analysed the order and questioned it in terms of the Court finding the act of ‘modifying the playstation without Sony’s consent’ illegal. Because, if you read section 65A (emphasis supplied is mine):

65A. Protection of Technological Measures

(1) Any person who circumvents an effective technological measure applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act, with the intention of infringing such rights, shall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to two years and shall also be liable to fine.

(2) Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from:

(a) doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act:

Provided that any person facilitating circumvention by another person of a technological measure for such a purpose shall maintain a complete record of such other person including his name, address and all relevant particulars necessary to identify him and the purpose for which he has been facilitated; or

(b) doing anything necessary to conduct encryption research using a lawfully obtained encrypted copy; or

(c) conducting any lawful investigation; or

(d) doing anything necessary for the purpose of testing the security of a computer system or a computer network with the authorisation of its owner; or

(e) operator; or [sic]

(f) doing anything necessary to circumvent technological measures intended for identification or surveillance of a user; or

(g) taking measures necessary in the interest of national security.

Clause (1) clearly states that the law is only applicable to such technological protection measures applied to protect any of the rights conferred by the copyright act. Which raises the questions of which rights are affected when OS of the playstation is modified, and how does the modification amount to copyright infringement? One may perhaps draw that the Court in this order placed the ‘consent’ of Sony above the law.

3) S. 65A(2) safeguards certain acts which also exist as exceptions granted in the Copyright Act. These enumerated acts may be performed without attracting liability: for instance, circumventions for purposes of encryption research, security testing, lawful investigation, evading surveillance by DRM are kosher. Note that s. 65A(2)(g) permits circumvention in the interest of national security.

(For a detailed exegesis of these provisions, please read this piece.)

A look at the draconian DMCA provisions

As I mentioned earlier, the DMCA provisions on DRMs are much stricter compared to the Indian copyright act. Both circumvention(s. 1201(a)(1)), and building and distribution of circumvention tools(s. 1201(a)(2)) are illegal and punishable. The DMCA also meticulously defines circumvention, in terms of “circumventing a technological measure” and “circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure.”

More alarmingly, these provisions envisage access controls as well as use controls. So a person decrypting a DVD to gain access to the work would be held liable for infringement (unlike in India where only the act of copying or modifying the work would trigger infringement). It is also worth noting that there is no clause stating that circumvention (and tools) of only those DRMs is illegal when the DRMs protect rights conferred under the DMCA.

While s. 1201(c) states that the section shall not affect “…rights, remedies, limitations or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair-use…” Further, there do exist exemptions to clauses(a)(1) and (2):

Exemption for nonprofit libraries, archives and educational institutions; and
Exemption for the purposes of law enforcement, intelligence and other government activities, reverse engineering (solely for the purposes of achieving interoperability), restricting internet access to minors, protecting personally identifiable information, security testing, encryption research, etc.

While the list seems to permit circumvention for a wide range of purposes and fair-use, the vague and narrow language has failed the implementation of these exemptions. EFF lists a bunch of these instances where the DRM provisions have been not necessarily used against pirates, but also scientists, consumers and legit competitors.

Further, the DMCA left it entirely to the US copyright agencies to carve exemptions for non-infringing uses of works on a triennial basis. This rulemaking procedure has received heavy criticism, and as a result of the 2015 rejection the Library of the Congress finds itself in a legal soup.

Finally, the EFF lawsuit also illustrates the violations of the plaintiffs rights to free speech and fair-use, as a direct result of the provisions and the Rulemaking process. Armed with a strong case, and as Cory Doctorow puts it, we may witness the eradication of DRM in our lifetime. And I will be following the developments closely and keep our readers updated.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/us-copyright-law-faces-constitutional-challenge

Updated Aadhaar Report

praskrishna — 2017-05-16T16:37:30Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/updated-aadhaar-report.pdf

Unpacking Openness: From Seemingly Transparent to Definitely Opaque

Maarten Zeinstra and Marlieke Kieboom — 2012-08-01T09:16:38Z

Nishant Shah was in Netherlands recently and as part of his trip had given a public lecture to an audience at Kennisland. One of the respondents wrote a small write-up of the talk.

This was originally published on the Kennisland website on July 25, 2012

Last month we were honoured to have Nishant Shah visit our office to have a vibrant discussion about the multiple understandings and purposes of the term ‘openness’. Shah is research director of the Indian Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). CIS undertakes interdisciplinary research about knowledge access, openness, transparency and governance in the digital age. Shah spent an hour of his valuable time discussing how openness may be interpreted. Kennisland is also actively promoting openness. Therefore it was interesting to discover how the term is used differently across the world, at least within our discussion in the Netherlands and in Asia.

Shah describes openness as an opaque metaphor. Openness is used as a metaphor or rhetoric tool to achieve or argue for transparency, accountability, efficiency, community building and other changes in governance and structuring civil society.

Openness or technocratic uncovering?

There is not one specific conceptual tool to explain what openness is. Still we use the term openness in different contexts to argue for being moral, good, efficient and transparent. When we decompose the term, we discover that ‘open’ is not necessarily always the equivalent of ‘good’. Shah unpacks this opaque metaphor in terms of transparency and shows us that when a government uses the metaphor of openness for transparency it does not mean that all the data exposed is useful for everyone, produced by everyone, or beneficial for everyone. It can actually mean other perspectives and information are kept hidden or turn invisible at the same time. An almost technocratic uncovering occurs. The perspectives and documents that can be made available through the tools of transparency, like access to statistics and policy, gain importance and become the dominant perspective of ‘progress’.

This makes other perspectives and problems less visible. In China for example many people are being displaced because new cities are being constructed. Documents on these new cities are readily available, but no documents are available on the people who used to live in those areas. This type of selective ‘transparency’ actually makes these displaced people less visible for researchers and policy makers. Likewise, in India transparency is used as a tool for financing and subsidies. But it disrupts the social structures that are already in place to make types of social subsidies possible. In this case a bureaucratic solution has pushed away a social structure that had been around for decades. Consequently openness excluded the most marginalized people who depended on these social structures.

Shah argues for more multi-faceted research on the multiple uses and interpretations of the term openness to uncover situations where openness has its drawbacks. He does not argue that openness is bad or good, but that we need more insights into to the process of openness in seemingly transparent societies.

Openness and what it means to Kennisland

At Kennisland we use the term openness frequently. What does Shah’s proposed argument mean for our activities? In our work openness is not directly geared towards pushing for more governmental transparency but meant to empower citizens to achieve social and sectorial innovations. Kennisland does not directly lobby or petition governments to open up datasets but we believe that more open datasets help empowering citizens to participate more equally in our society. We agree that just opening up data is only a part of this process.

Moreover Kennisland uses openness in a legal rights perspective: openness is content or data that is shared with everyone with permission to re-use and mix, even for commercial purposes. We educate the general public, NGO’s and governments about the opportunities that arise by creating access to copyrighted material. For example, our project opencultuurdata.nl helps archives and museums to open up their collections by creating open data and open content. It is very important for us to stress the point that open data ought to be used as an extra communication channel that needs to be used in addition to already existing communication channels. Simply replacing existing communication channels by open data or open content will lead to the same social problems that Shah revealed.

Below I describe two examples or scenarios in which a group of people holding certain information, or a group of people who do not have access to data, can become marginalized and therefore unheard.

Old vs. young

The Dutch cultural sector, a very innovative sector, needs to keep older generations in mind. It needs to realize that the generation that demands openness in terms of transparency, efficiency, and reuse is a different type of audience: young, fast and tech-savvy. Besides, in the Netherlands the products of openness, in our legal perspective, can also have significant social consequences. In the Netherlands openness is usually connected to the internet and digital access. That means that older, less technologically educated generations can actually lose access to important resources, data and forms. Therefore it is important to serve different generations independently from each other.

Large vs. small

In a second scenario, there is also a risk of a growing cultural bias in favor of the larger cultural institutions. Only these large institutions have now managed to open up their institutions with open data and open content. Only these collections can now be used on Wikipedia, third-party websites and in innovative applications. Smaller cultural institutions experience more difficulties opening up because of several reasons: lack of money, lack of power and therefore access, and lack of knowledge. This could lead to a dominant cultural canon, in which less influential cultural collections are invisible. Luckily we see a lot of national aggregators that fill this gap, like digitalecollectie.nl and Collectie Gelderland.

In our current and future ventures we will keep these important points in mind and we encourage others to do the same by asking the following questions: who is opening data, and for what purpose? And consequently, who isn’t, and why?

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/unpacking-openness

Unlock = Open, not Choked!

Shyam Ponappa — 2020-06-15T03:04:18Z

Don't let a virus stall initiatives and weaken the economy.

This article first appeared in the Business Standard and on June 4, 2020.

A recent column in this newspaper juxtaposed the way smart, experienced people have high expectations, only to be disappointed by our weak state’s predictable failures (Strong expectations from a weak state, May 25). Is there justification for any optimism, or at least hope? Here is an exploration of reasons for persisting in the face of continued odds, and pushing for economic recovery. Why should one persist with constructive efforts? Because a rising tide lifts all boats, and one’s contribution can affect outcomes. And because attempts at partial opening will not suffice.

There could be new economic opportunities by way of capacity, logistics or markets, or a wider array of sustainable consumer choices, whether for manufactured goods, services, or activities. Think back, and surely you have witnessed government action extend beyond the grind of just keeping everything going.

One instance of major change that affected the economy was in 1990, when the secretary of the Department of Electronics N Vittal worked in close consultation with industry. This resulted in path-breaking reforms, such as the setting up of “high-speed” links (of a mere 64 kilobits per second at the time) between Information Technology (IT) companies in Indian software technology parks and their international clients, and various tax incentives that followed much later. The offshore services industry gathered strength, and later expanded to cover IT-enabled services with call centres and business processing, extending to knowledge processing.

Likewise, telecommunications reforms began in 1990, when prime minister Chandra Shekhar led a shaky government for a brief period. The telecommunications ministry was looking for a private sector consultant. Through an invisible network, an investment banker who had been a management consultant in San Francisco was asked to look into telecommunications reforms. This led to the setting up of the Athreya Committee and its recommendations: On separating policy-making from operations, corporatising the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam as an operating company for Delhi and Mumbai, and Bharat Sanchar Nigam for the rest, while recommending access to private sector operators. All this was not smooth and painless, and took years, but did happen eventually, although the separation remains untidy.

By 1998, telecommunications operators were in a situation similar to the predicament some months ago, of weak revenues and a debt overhang, with some differences. There were many operators with heavy debt because of government charges and limited revenue generation capacity, because of smaller networks and less clients. This is the “winners’ curse” of auctions, when exorbitant amounts are paid to government for auctions, with nothing left for building and running networks and enterprises to generate the revenues to justify those payments. There are exceptions, as in the social democrat Nordic states, or state-controlled allocations as in China, or in Japan for a number of years.

Key people in government grasped this. The Prime Minister’s Office consulted with industry and external consultants, and took action. This resulted in the New Telecom Policy 1999 (NTP-99), whereby the major change was converting up-front licence fees to revenue sharing, although the policy was uneven because of cherry-picked recommendations. Initially, the government set the percentage share too high. It took years to reduce and trigger rapid growth. This came about through reduced government charges, calling party pays (which cut call costs), and a price war, brought on by the stealth entry of a new technology (CDMA) network, which the authorities allowed despite incumbent protests. Mobile services then grew exponentially from 2004, until the 2G spectrum scam surfaced in 2011.

A stream of articles advocated extending revenue-sharing to spectrum fees as for licence fees, and for shared infrastructure including spectrum. In 2011, a senior official in the DoT was sufficiently impressed to explore the possibility of evaluating alternatives using simulation models. But the 2G scam broke after the first few meetings of DoT officials, and this process was aborted. Instead of major changes based on simulations, a mere statement of intent about spectrum pooling and sharing made it into NTP-2012.

There were other incredible developments, although with no apparent results (yet). For instance, in 2013, a non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, arranged for the former chief technology officer of the US Federal Communications Commission, Jon Peha, who had pioneered changes in America, to meet with top officials of the DoT, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and some IIT professors. The latter conducted successful trials using TV White Space spectrum for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The details are many, but the point is that constructive advocacy can have an impact.

Reviving the Economy Now

We are in a difficult situation, with our economy and society battered by the lockdown and much else. We will need to do everything possible to recover, and it will take years. Attempts at partial opening will not suffice. Systemic revival calls for unrestricted flows of money, people, activity, and goods and services.

While reactivating the economy, we will need to be cautious through the pandemic (through “social distancing”, using masks to reduce infection, avoiding close contact with outsiders, and so on). But survivors have to live with this virus, as with other strains of viruses and bacteria, and other threats.

Consider traffic accidents, which average over 145,000 deaths annually (data 2013-2017: https://ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/chapter-1A-traffic-accidents-2017_0.pdf). Extrapolating, this means a million fatalities in seven years, yet we don’t shut down all traffic. By comparison, Covid-19 had about 6,000 fatalities since January.

A proportion of the medical fraternity opines that (a) there is community spread of Covid-19, and (b) with many cases milder than the expected severity, that most patients need home care rather than hospitalisation. If these continue, our health systems will not be overwhelmed with severe cases. Also, so far, India has had a relatively low fatality rate of 2.8 per cent (see chart).

Source: Data - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

As long as these factors hold, our priority has to be unfettered economic activity. Countries with higher fatality rates, including Sweden, China, Japan and Germany in the chart, have open economic activity (with tremendous productivity). We will weaken and our problems will escalate if we are held back.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/unlock-open-not-choked

Unlicensed Spectrum Policy for Government of India

praskrishna — 2012-07-26T08:29:16Z

This file is authored by Satya N Gupta, Sunil Abraham and Yelena Gyulkhandanyan.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/unlicensed-spectrum-brief.pdf

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

pavanaja — 2014-07-24T07:03:45Z

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license.

Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia. The print volumes of the first version of the encyclopaedia are out of stock now. Recently UoM has started revising and reprinting the encyclopaedia. So far 4 volumes have been revised, enhanced and published.

UoM believes in Open Access to Knowledge. It has put up the research outputs from its departments online for free access to the public. UoM has done these as a subscriber to the idea of Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Open Access Institutional Repository, of UoM, covers scholarly publications covering journal articles, conference papers, books, book reviews, presentations, reports and patents ever since UoM was established in 1916. Extending the philosophy of open knowledge to the Kannada encyclopaedia published by UoM becomes a natural extension. UoM is in the verge of celebrating its centenary soon and has taken many initiatives in that direction.

CIS-A2K has been in negotiations with UoM towards releasing of its high quality Kannada Vishwakosha (Kannada Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons license. CIS and UoM signed a MoU on February 22, 2014. Here is the relevant extract from the MoU: "They will work together to digitize all encyclopaedic publications for which the copyright is owned by UoM, and re-release them under the Creative Common license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The digitized content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia and Wikisource. The digitization will be done employing the global standard Unicode so that the content has longevity, is universally portable and is easily searchable. Both parties have joined hands to undertake the above in order to enhance digital literacy in the Kannada language and facilitate collaborative production and free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to the students, academics, researchers and the wider public. The parties also believe that by reintroducing the knowledge in digital and openly accessible formats could significantly enhance the production of knowledge in Kannada and give a new lease of life to Kannada language in the digital era. The parties will co-design and jointly implement relevant programmes to achieve this objective." As part of this MoU, UoM agreed to release the first six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC.

Volume numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha of UoM have been revised and published recently. A project page has been created in Kannada Wikipedia for this project. Kannada Wikipedians joined hands in the project. The project involved extracting the text from the soft copies of the files, converting them into Unicode, extracting articles from these files and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource.

A team of interns from Christ University had a major role to play in this development. These were students from the Wikipedia in Education Program that was conducted in Christ University during the academic period of 2013-14. These students took active part in the current project and uploaded about 1200 articles so far (till July 21, 2014).

Media Coverage

The event attracted very good media coverage. Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Other Links:

UoM Kannada Vishwakosha conversion project page in Kannada Wikipedia - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivwp
Articles from UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv
Category UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivws
For pictures from the Open Knowledge Day event in Mysore - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysore_University_Open_Knowledge_Day

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/university-of-mysore-releases-kannada-vishwakosha-under-cc-license

UNHRC Resolution on The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet (A/HRC/32/L.20)

Japreet Grewal — 2016-07-05T11:51:38Z

Here, CIS has incorporated amendments (A/HRC/32/L.85, A/HRC/32/L.86, A/HRC/32/L.87 and A/HRC/32/L.88) to the original resolution A/HRC/32/L.20.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/unhrc-resolution-on-the-promotion-protection-and-enjoyment-of-human-rights-on-the-internet-a-hrc-32-l-20

UNHRC Resolution A/HRC/32/L20 (with amendments (in track))

Japreet Grewal — 2016-07-06T08:07:48Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/unhrc-resolution-a-hrc-32-l20-with-amendments-in-track

UNESCO's Open Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:58:47Z

As UNESCO organized Freedom of Expression related workshops, this Open Forum will be dedicated to other key IGF topics, notably multilingualism in cyberspace, open access to scientific information, open educational resources, and accessibility for marginalized groups. In addition, UNESCO will take this opportunity to announce new initiatives and share experiences with participants. The interactive panel format will start with brief presentations from experts, followed by a moderated discussion with participants.

Organizer: UNESCO

Moderator:
Mr Jānis Kārkliņš, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO

Opening by Mr Jānis Kārkliņš

Introductory remarks

Mr Nitin Desai, Chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will speak about: The future of the IGF and UNESCO’s opportunities
Mr Rod Beckstrom, CEO ICANN, on cooperation with UNESCO, next steps

1. Multilingualism in cyberspace

Proposed speakers:

Mr Baher Esmat, Manager, Regional Relations – Middle East, ICANN
Mr Daniel Pimienta, President of FUNREDES (Fundacion Redes y Desarrollo) Saint Domingue, Dominican Republic

Open discussion

2. Open access to scientific information and open educational resources

Proposed speakers:

Mr Indrajit Banerjee, Director, Information Society Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
Mr Abel Packer, Director of the SciELO.org Open Access (OA) initiative

Open discussion

3. An initiative on developing inclusive information policies using ICTs in education for persons with disabilities

Proposed speakers:

Mr Axel Leblois, Executive Director, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communications Technologies 9G3ict), An Advocacy Initiative of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development
Ms Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society (India)

Open discussion

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/unesco-open-forum

UNESCO Internet Universality Indicators consulted at the 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum

praskrishna — 2017-08-23T02:05:44Z

“Internet Universality indicators should measure broad social implications of the Internet and serve as a powerful tool to foster sustainable development,” was a strong message delivered by Asia-Pacific stakeholders at UNESCO consultation to develop Internet Universality indicators during the 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) in Bangkok (Thailand), 29 July 2017.

This was published by UNESCO on August 9, 2017.

The Bangkok consultation event, co-moderated by Ms. Xianhong Hu (UNESCO) and Ms. Chat Garcia Ramilo (Association for Progressive Communications, APC), brought multi-stakeholders and experts from the Asia Pacific region to contribute to prioritizing issues within the five categories indicators along the Internet Universality R.O.A.M principles, namely on human Rights, Openness, Accessibility, Multi-stakeholder participation, as well as concerning Crosscutting issues.

“Rights entail a number of digital rights including freedom of religious and political expression and right to assembly and association online. Privacy concerns on the Internet are extremely important as well”, stated Ms Gayatri Khandahi from APC on human Rights indicators. In addition, she noted the importance of social and economic rights exercised on the Internet, such as the right to work and the right to political participation, and the jurisdiction challenges of these rights in the pretext of Internet. She emphasized the need to consult also with vulnerable groups, such as women, trans-gender groups and migrants.

Dr. Anja Kovacs from Internet Democracy Project pointed out that rights have impact on other themes or indicators, for instance online abuse of women impacts access in India. She also noted that in the course of developing these indicators, it is crucial to take into account future trends because digital rights are evolving and these indicators might not be useful in 10 years.

“Open Internet is a top concern since it is being limited by many localized requirements. Thus openness requires open and transparent policy and decision making process which is at the core of multi-stakeholder approach”, commented by Prof. Xue Hong from Beijing Normal University on Openness indicators. She suggested “open access” needs to consider people’s various barriers to access Internet, including legal barriers. She suggested that “open source”, “open innovation” and “open market” are also important aspects to measure the level of openness.

On Accessibility indicators, Mr Winston Roberts from the International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions (IFLA) suggested that the definition of universal access needs to be updated and access in various forms can be used as an indicator, such access to broadband. He stressed the importance to include quality access and access in rural areas.

“Access and accessibility should be defined clearly. Access should include indicators to assess quality of service and openness should include assessment of the market”, stated Ms. Bishakha Datta. Mr. Naveed Haq from Internet Society suggested those accessibility indicators could check how many government websites are available to people with disabilities.

“Internet is a classic example where various communities are represented and thus multistakeholderism becomes important”, said Mr. Naveed Haq from Internet Society on Multistakeholder indicators. Mr. Sunil Abraham from Center for Internet Society raised challenges that the government needs to deregulate policies and laws and redo them with a multi-stakeholder process, but on the other hand, private sectors fail to mitigate harm through the self-regulatory model. Mr. Joyce Chen, ICANN representative, highlighted the importance to engage with governments, who need to facilitate more dialogue.

“The rights and interest of those vulnerable groups, such as transgender and women should be considered by the indicators, particularly to assess how rights, such as the right to privacy intersect with their agenda”, suggested by Ms. Bishakha Datta from Point of View on Crosscutting dimension indicators. Dr Anja Kovacs pointed out that it is crucial not miss out groups of people whose interests might not be directly aligned with their governments, for instance refugees or migrants.”

In addition to the ongoing on-site Multistakeholder consultation sessions, UNESCO is now also offering the possibility for interested actors, including Member States, to participate in the consultation online at https://en.unesco.org/internetuniversality.

As an ongoing project developed by UNESCO, Internet Universality Indicators aims to serve as a recognized and authoritative global research tool for national assessing Internet development along the lines of UNESCO’s Internet Universality concept as endorsed by UNESCO 38^th General Conference in 2015. The final indicators will be presented in 2018 and will be submitted to the UNESCO Member States in the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) for endorsement.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/unesco-internet-universality-indicators-consulted-at-the-8th-asia-pacific-regional-internet-governance-forum

UNESCO Global Report: Opening New Avenues for Empowerment

nirmita — 2013-09-04T07:21:56Z

We prepared a report on higher education for persons with disabilities in the Asia-Pacific region for UNESCO some time back. The report has been compiled into a global report. Nirmita Narasimhan was the project coordinator from the Centre for Internet and Society.

Preface

(by Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO)

Over one billion people – approximately 15 percent of the world’s population – live with some form of disability. Facing a wide range of barriers, including access to information, education, health care and a lack of job opportunities, persons living with disabilities struggle every day to be integrated into society.

This is unacceptable, and UNESCO is taking a stand. To tackle these challenges, UNESCO has led a number of initiatives, including the 2013 Global Report, to empower persons with disabilities thanks to information and communication technologies. Our position is clear – information and communication technologies, along with associative technologies, can widen access to information and knowledge, so they must accessible to all.

Building on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Global Report addresses strong recommendations to all stakeholders – from decision-makers to educators, civil society and industry – on how concretely to advance the rights of people living with disabilities. These recommendations draw on extensive research and consultations. Studies launched in five regions have allowed UNESCO to understand more clearly the conditions and challenges faced by persons with disabilities around the world.

To empower persons with disabilities is to empower societies as a whole – but this calls for the right policies and legislation to make information and knowledge more accessible through information and communication technologies. It calls also for applying accessibility standards to the development of content, product and services. The successful application of such technologies can make classrooms more inclusive, physical environments more accessible, teaching and learning content and techniques more in tune with learners’ needs. We need the commitment of all Government and stakeholders to make this a reality for all persons living with disabilities. To build the inclusive knowledge societies we need for the century ahead, we cannot leave anyone aside. We must do everything to replace exclusion and discrimination with inclusion and empowerment – for this, we must harness the full power of information and communication technologies. This is our shared commitment, and this Global Report will help us move forward.

Forward

(by HE Mr. Miguel Angel Estrella, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador)

Communication and information are essential for the development of people and societies. It is thanks to the networks of connections which are established freely between individuals that a society is able to advance, as well as the personal development of individuals which makes it possible to increase the collective benefit of all those who form a society. In light of this, special attention should be paid and necessary products and services should be created for persons with disabilities. The more totalitarian and repressive societies are, the more restricted access to information and knowledge is, as well as the application of rights to self-expression and opinion. In addition, special services and attention for the common good of society are limited. However, when a society is free and respectful of human rights, individuals have more solidarity, are open to work together and share information. As a consequence of this free exchange of information and knowledge, it should be possible to build a more inclusive society which can fully participate in the social, cultural and economic life, intellectually and culturally rich, and where people with different
abilities, can take full advantage of Information and Communication Technologies.

Access to information and knowledge allows humans to contribute to social development where he or she can make better choices, and to share the richness with those around them. The conditions, special capacities and abilities of each individual to learn should never be an obstacle or an impediment to their individual development. On the contrary, it is the duty of all authorities to establish an enabling environment and provide special services to those who require them, keeping people with disabilities in mind. Such an inclusive society ensures that each person is valued as an equal human being.

I, therefore, warmly welcome UNESCO’s publication titled “Opening New Avenues for Empowerment: ICTs to Access Information and Knowledge for Persons with Disabilities” which not only makes a major contribution to our understanding of disability, but also highlights technological advancement and shares good practices that have already changed the lives of people with disabilities. The publication also makes concrete recommendations for action at the local, national and international levels, targeting policy and decision makers, educators, IT&T industry, civil society and certainly persons with disabilities, which, I hope, will receive your deserved attention!

Acknowledgements

This Global Report, Opening New Avenues for Empowerment: ICTs to Access Information and Knowledge for Persons with Disabilities, has been commissioned by the UNESCO Communication and Information Sector. It is a result of collaborative action among many researchers, public and private organizations, governmental bodies and civil society, and appreciation is extended to each of them.

The Report is based on the findings of five UNESCO regional studies carried out with the help of the following institutions and coordinating authors:

Africa: Mr Raymond Lang, Dr., the Leonard Cheshire Disability and Inclusive Development Centre, University College, London (UK);

Arab Region and North Africa: Mr Mohamed Jemni, Professor of ICT and Educational Technologies, Head of Research Laboratory UTIC, University of Tunis (Tunisia);

Asia Pacific: Ms Nirmita Narasimhan, Project Coordinator, Centre for Internet and Society (India);

Eastern Europe and Central Asia: International Consulting Agency- Mezhvuzkonsalt (Russian Federation);

South America, Central America and Mexico and the Caribbean: Ms Pilar Samaniego (South America);
Ms Sanna-Mari Laitamo and Ms Estela Valerio (Central America and Mexico); and Ms Cristina Francisco (The Caribbean).

The principal author of this global report is Mr Michael Blakemore, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Durham (UK), who is a UK’s Bologna Expert (Higher Education Reform and Innovation) with the European Commission.

The overall preparation of the world report, regional studies and coordination of the project were ensured by Ms Irmgarda Kasinskaite-Buddeberg and Mr Davide Storti from UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector.

UNESCO thanks the GAATES Foundation for its contributions and advice to the preparation of this report, particularly Ms Cynthia Waddell and Ms Betty Dion. Thanks also to Mr Jonathan Avila from SSB Bart Group

UNESCO wishes to acknowledge the many individual contributors, experts, and advocates, who assisted in the gathering of survey data and in the preparation of the regional studies.

All those contributing their expertise and time to the peer review also deserve recognition. They include: Axel Leblois (G3ict), Luis Gallegos (Ambassador of Ecuador to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland), David Andrés Rojas M. and Vanessa Ramirez (The Trust of America, TRUST ), Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C/WAI), Bernhard Heinser (DAISY Consortium), Jan A. Monsbakken and Uma Tuli (Rehabilitation International, RI), Karsten Gerloff (Free Software Foundation Europe), Brian Nitz (Oracle), Kiran Kaja (Adobe), Katim S. Touray (Free Software Foundation for Africa), Sophie Gautier and Charles-H. Schulz (LibreOffice), Luiz M. Alves dos Santos (European Commission, EC), Arnoud van Wijk (Real-Time Task Force), Reinhard Weissinger (International Organization for Standardization, ISO), Kenneth Eklindh (UNESCO), Simon Ball (JISC TechDis).

The global summary report was edited by Ms Alison McKelvey.

Click to read the full report here.

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UNESCO Global Report

praskrishna — 2013-09-04T06:53:18Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/unesco-global-report