The Centre for Internet and Society
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Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India — A Status Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx
<b>This report was prepared by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madan Muthu on 9 April 2011.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:47:07ZFileOpen Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Status Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf
<b>The draft report was prepared in April 2011 by Prof. Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:46:11ZFileOpen Equitable Access (PDF)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access
<b>file</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:42:17ZFileOpen Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report: Call for Comments
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society welcomes comments on the first draft of "Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report". This report, on open access to scholarly literature, with a special focus on scientific literature, has been written by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu. The report surveys the field of scholarly and scientific publication in India and provides a detailed history of the open access movement in India.</b>
<p>It notes that Indian science has "low but increasing research productivity helped by increasing investments on R&D, and low but moderately improving visibility", and that the best way to boost visibility and impact of Indian science are by pursuing a nation-wide open access policy.</p>
<p>Thus, it recommends that all publicly funded research in India should be made open access and provides suggestions on how this could best be achieved. It points out the need to go beyond open access mandates, to practical aspects like training of repository maintainers and of researchers for self-archiving. In addition, it points out the need for more effective advocacy and for a judicious mixture of both top-down and bottom-up approaches for bringing about the realization of the benefits of open access.</p>
<p>Please do write in to Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (<a class="external-link" href="mailto: subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com">subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com</a>), Madhan Muthu (<a class="external-link" href="mailto:mu.madhan@gmail.com">mu.madhan@gmail.com</a>) and Pranesh Prakash (<a class="external-link" href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>) with your suggestions, criticisms, or general comments that you may have by Friday, August 12, 2011.</p>
<div>Please click below to access the document.</div>
<div><br />
<ul>
<li><a class="internal-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf" title="Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Status Report">Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India </a>[PDF, 1872 kb]</li>
<li><a class="internal-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx" title="Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India — A Status Report">Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India</a> [Word, 1964 kb]</li>
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<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>This draft report was prepared in April 2011 and the authors will update it soon.</i></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature</a>
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No publisherProf. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan MuthuOpennessOpen Access2012-12-14T10:26:24ZBlog EntryQ&A on open access with Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam
<b>Amrit Dhir, a 1L at Harvard Law School, has been working with the Harvard Law School Library on open access activities. He recently had an opportunity to interview Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The interview was published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University on May 5, 2011.</b>
<p><i>Thanks to the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/">HLS Library</a> for permitting us to share this Q&A!</i></p>
<p><b>Amrit Dhir</b>: What is your association with the Bangalore-based <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a> (CIS)?</p>
<p><b>Subbiah Arunachalam</b>: I am one of the founding members of the Board of the Centre for Internet and Society. Mr Sunil Abraham invited me to join and I agreed as I found the group to be a talented bunch of people much younger to me and interested in questions, the answers to which would be of interest to me.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What has been your involvement with the Open Access (OA) movement for the past ten years?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: For the past ten years, I have been literally breathing OA! I always believed that knowledge should be free and open, but my formal engagement with OA began in 2000. That was the year when Eugene Garfield, the well-known information scientist, turned 75. He has been a great influence in my life and so I wanted to celebrate his 75th birthday with a conference. Gene had written hundreds of essays and he had put all of them together in fifteen volumes (Essays of an Information Scientist). What is more, long before the formal movement for OA began, Gene had put all his essays - in fact, all his writings - up on the University of Pennsylvania website.</p>
<p>For the conference, I invited another friend of mine, Alan Gilchrist, Editor of Journal of Information Science, and a world leader in advancing knowledge about thesauri. For the second speaker I invited Stevan Harnad, as I had read his article on scholarly skywriting (which was included in Garfield's Essays). I was working as a volunteer at the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation whose main thrust was development, but my chairman Prof. M. S. Swaminathan helped me raise some funds. From then on I started dividing my time between development and promoting OA in India and the developing world. My prior experience as editor and publisher of science journals (at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Indian Academy of Sciences) was a great help. For one thing, I knew a large number of scientists and academics. For another, as I had no big official position I was free to make statements freely. And I took advantage of both.</p>
<p>In 2001, I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to convene a meeting of editors of Indian S&T journals and convince them of the advantage of their journals going electronic. About 50 editors were trained in two three-day workshops. One of them, Dr. D. K. Sahu is today the world's leading OA publisher who neither charges the authors nor the readers [<a class="external-link" href="http://www.medknow.com/">http://www.medknow.com</a>].</p>
<p>In 2005, the Open Society Institute (OSI) invited me to Toronto to plan a conference. I had proposed to bring scientists from India, Brazil and China and to promote OA in these three countries. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that if OA takes roots in these three countries then it would be easy to promote it in the rest of the developing world. The conference itself was held at the Indian Institute of Science in November 2006, with support from OSI and the Indian Academy of Sciences. It was at this conference, with the help of Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan, that we produced the Bangalore Declaration, which could be used by governments and funding agencies in developing countries to mandate OA.</p>
<p>In January 2006, I organized a full session on OA as part of the Annual Science Congress held at Hyderabad. In 2008, I spoke to Prof. Samir Brahmachari, Director General of <a class="external-link" href="http://rdpp.csir.res.in/csir_acsir/Home.aspx?MenuId=1">CSIR</a> and convinced him of the need to adopt OA. He accepted the idea immediately and opened up all the sixteen journals published by CSIR's publishing arm, NISCAIR. I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to set up a repository for all papers by all Fellows and currently the repository is getting ready and I expect it to be available online in July or August. The Academy took nearly four years, but I am glad it is finally happening.</p>
<p>I have groomed a number of young people to take up OA advocacy and implementation. In particular, Muthu Madhan (now at ICRISAT) has done well. He has helped six institutions set up their repositories. I took him along with me (CIS funded his trip) to the International Conference on Repositories in Amsterdam jointly organized by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/">JISC</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.surf.nl/en/Pages/home.aspx">SURF</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>I have written about OA both on my own and in coauthorship with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan. I have given interviews to key outlets and spoken at many national and international conferences including two A2K conferences organized by Yale University, several Berlin conferences, and the ICSU-UNESCO conference where I was one of two keynote speakers.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What is the potential of OA, and what makes it unique to India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: OA has tremendous potential not only to India, but to the world as a whole. But its value to developing countries is much greater than to advanced countries, because the serials crisis and the access to knowledge problems are felt far more acutely in developing countries. Currently higher education and R&D (Research and Development) are in an unprecedented expansion phase and therefore we would need huge investments to meet information needs if only traditional methods of access were available to us. As large publishing corporations are raising subscription costs year after year at an unacceptably high rate, Indian researchers and students would benefit if more and more scientists in the West were to make their work OA.</p>
<p>There is nothing unique about OA in India. Whatever applies to India applies to the larger developing countries (China and Brazil, South Africa). That is why I believe these four countries should work together in promoting OA.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What do you see as the future of the OA movement in India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: As far as India is concerned, currently, a higher proportion of Indian work (12.5%) appears in OA journals than the world average (estimated to be between 8.5 and 10%). The two major Academies and CSIR in favor of OA. I and others are trying to persuade other funding agencies and research councils to adopt OA. It is a question of time before OA becomes accepted by at least some of the leading institutions. There are about 40 active repositories, but the number has started increasing.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What are the impediments to realizing that future? Are there any legal concerns or legal obstacles that you anticipate approaching?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: There are no impediments. At least I do not see any. You may then ask why the progress is slow. It is largely because of author inertia and general ignorance. Yes, ignorance. Not many scientists really know about what is possible and what is not possible with regard to depositing their papers in a repository. They are needlessly afraid of copyright infringements. Thus all the 'impediments' are imaginary!</p>
<p>When it comes to journals, it is easy. We publish the journals and we decide if we want to be closed or open. MedKnow publishes 150 journals, of which 148 are open. All 11 journals of the Indian Academy are open. Even when they entered into an agreement with Springer [Publishing], they retained the right to keep all of them open on their site!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you compare the institutional openness of India and the US to the potential and needs of OA?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: I have already explained why I believe OA is far more important to developing countries. But even in the West, the serials crisis is forcing librarians to adopt OA. In the West, prestigious institutions such as Harvard, MIT, NIH, Wellcome Trust, RCUK (Research Councils UK), have adopted OA and that has made a big difference. Now the US Congress is considering the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act). Eventually, all institutions will have to adopt OA.</p>
<p>There is one advantage of institutions in the developing countries adopting OA that may be missed by many. Often research done in the South in problems like SARS, tsunami, HIV/AIDS, climate change will be of global relevance. These issues do not know any national boundaries.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: You have spoken of a social mission and a human-rights-based justification for supporting greater OA, particularly with regard to the hard sciences and scientific research. What is the relationship between justice and OA, both on an international scale and as it relates to India more specifically?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: A very good question. When Kofi Annan was heading the United Nations, it came up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On top of the list was poverty alleviation. What use is all the science that we do if fellow human beings are unable to even buy food and keep dying of hunger and malnutrition? This is the basis for the argument on opening up of scientific knowledge as an issue of justice. In India, the government has invested millions on R&D in atomic energy, space science, new biology and biotechnology and so on, and yet more than 60 years after we had became a Republic, poverty is rampant, the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and both the number of billionaires and the number of people below the poverty line are increasing every year. All our science and technology have not ensured basic necessities for the poor. We do not use what we know, and what we know is not known widely.</p>
<p>In an excellent article “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector” in 22 Quarterly Journal of Economics 879 (2007), Robert Jensen of Harvard's Kennedy School used the example of how the introduction of mobile phones in coastal areas of Kerala opened up information and brought many benefits to the community as a whole and not just to fishing families.</p>
<p>There is another angle to the urgent need to reduce poverty, viz. the security angle. Two years ago, I was invited to write a short essay on information and livelihood and I began my essay with these words: "We live in a divided world where far too many people live in abject poverty. To help these people get out of poverty is good for the world as a whole, for great disparities in wealth will lead to violence and terrorism and no one can live in peace and harmony."</p>
<p>There is yet another issue. This is related to drugs and pharmaceuticals. Many pharma companies do not want to bring to market products from their latest research because the previous products are still doing well. Profit is the motive, and it trumps public good. Also, Western pharma companies send out scouts to the old world and learn from local wisdom the medicinal value of plants and herbs and take advantage but without sharing the profits with the local people. A clear case of the North exploiting the knowledge of the South. And yet their own drugs are all under patent protection!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: Some see Indian civil society and even Indian government insisting on greater transparency and access to information, with such movements as the one behind the Right to Information (RTI) Act as an example. Are you optimistic about such efforts at governmental and legal reform? And, how does it relate to your work and the broader objectives you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: About two years ago, the Department of Biotechnology entered into a partnership with the Wellcome Trust. The was born with a view to providing generous fellowships to scientists at three stages of their careers. One of the features was that all papers published by these Fellows have to be OA. The Minister for science and technology (Mr Kapil Sibal at that time) announced this proudly. I wrote him that he should also make OA all papers by scientists receiving grants from DBT, but he did not bother to reply. There is a lot of political doublespeak. I also wrote to Members of Parliament belonging to all the major parties suggesting that they consider legislation similar to the one which brought OA to all NIH-funded research in the US. No one replied. The RTI Act and the recent happenings on the corruption front (the government yielding to the request of Gandhian Anna Hazare) are indeed very good. And I believe one day the need for OA will be recognized as important and worthy of legal status. But one may also achieve a lot through bottom-up approaches by talking to individual institutions, universities and scientists.</p>
<p>I am not losing hope. I will keep making my requests until OA is accepted as the norm.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you call upon American universities and institutes to act or reform in light of the OA measures you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: The larger the number of American universities, research institutions and funding agencies adopting OA, the better it would be for us, as we would have more papers in the open domain. More than that, we could cite their example and convince Indian institutions to adopt OA.</p>
<div class="pullquote">Read the original interview published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society <a class="external-link" href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6825">here</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam</a>
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No publishersubbiahInterviewOpen Access2023-11-01T12:41:47ZBlog EntryTowards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge
<b>There is growing recognition that the capacity to conduct research and to share the resulting knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from improving health care delivery to increasing food security, and from enhancing education to stronger evidence-based policy making. This article by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was published in PLoS (Public Library of Science) on March 29, 2011.</b>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:04:54ZBlog EntrySeminar on Open Access for Scientific Information
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access
<b>Open-access provides free online access to quality scholarly material that can be defined as “open domain,” meaning publicly supported research information, and “open access,” so that it is copyrighted to be freely available scholarly material. Open-access publishing enables researchers in developing countries to establish priority for their research, which they could use later to defend their intellectual property. It removes excess barriers in terms of both price and permission, enhances national research capacity, and improves visibility for developing-country research. Open access thus enables a global platform for this research and collaboration and reciprocates the information flow from South to North among all countries.</b>
<p>In India, there is a large opportunity for open-access publishing. There are many non-commercial research and development institutions, both academic and research laboratories. For example, there are approximately 300 universities that offer both graduate and research programs. There are also many R&D laboratories operating within government science agencies, which cover domains like industrial research, defense research, agricultural research, medicine, ecology, environment, information technology, space, energy, and ocean development.</p>
<p>Many of these institutions, and also several professional societies, publish science journals. Tools like the Open Journal Systems could help many of these journals to come online in an open-access environment. Open Access is relevant to India because most research is funded from public money, institutional framework and information infrastructure, trained manpower and financial resources are adequately available. It widens distribution of information and knowledge and lowers the cost of reaching a fairly wide audience while maximising return on public money. The OA movement is being supported by research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public. </p>
<p>Open access publishing can foster the exchange of research results amongst scientists from different disciplines, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research, whilst providing access to research results to researchers world-wide, including from developing countries, as well as to an interested general public. </p>
<p>Access to and sharing of information, including scientific information, goes through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new communication and information technologies (ICTs) and the societal transformations that they generate. But what are the long-term strategies to efficiently harness the open access potential for developing new approaches to knowledge acquisition and sharing? What needs to be done to effectively integrate these strategies into forward looking and sustainable policy making? How can we harness the potential of open access to develop knowledge societies that are people-centred, inclusive and development oriented? What are the global environmental trends that will influence open access in the next few years? What are the main needs of the open access stakeholders in India and South Asia ? Which are the publishing models for open-access journals and what does it imply to finance and sustain open access journals in developing countries; how to overcome language and other barriers ? </p>
<p>These issues are of strategic relevance to UNESCO as they address key challenges linked to building knowledge societies, one of the overarching objectives of the Medium Term Strategy 2008-2013.</p>
<p>UNESCO, jointly with the Centre for Internet Society is well placed to mobilize interested stakeholders to develop efficient implementation strategies in the area of acquision and sharing of scientific information and to integrate them into forward looking and sustainable policies. </p>
<p>UNESCO believes that open access is an enriching part of the scholarly communication process that can and should co-exist with other forms of communication and publication, such as society-based publishing and conferencing activities. Open access publications are also more easily included and searchable in search engines and indexing databases.</p>
<p>In order to initiate a sub-regional dialogue on democratizing access to scientific and health-related information, on the economics of scientific publishing and the implications of the various open-access models and the copyright and intellectual property issues, UNESCO convenes a one day seminar on 16 March 2011 in New Delhi. The concept of « open access » and the inter-relationships between academic institutions, researchers, scientists and publishers will be examined, as well as the challenges and barriers which OA is currently facing in this part of the world. </p>
<h3>Overall objectives </h3>
<ul><li>Strengthen awareness of UNESCO’s stakeholders on the potential of open access in scientific knowledge sharing that are dramatically accelerated by ICTs; </li><li>Provide analysis for anticipating foreseeable trends end emerging challenges in order to enable Indian and South Asian stakeholders to develop strategies and policies to take them up;</li><li>Develop a partnership and collaboration among interested stakeholdesr in order to improve access to and sharing of scientific information and research through open access </li></ul>
<h3>Expected results </h3>
<div> </div>
<div>The discussion of the Open Access Seminar is expected to achieve the following results: </div>
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<ul><li>UNESCO’s stakeholders enabled to understand trends and emerging challenges related to the impact of open access on scientific information acquisition and sharing; </li><li>Possible developments prospected in the area of scientific information sharing in the coming 5 years; </li><li>Specific technology generated trends, and their consequences for development in scientific information and research sharing </li><li>Highlight the collaborative and collective efforts and actions behind the Open Access movement</li><li>Discussions of best practices of Open Access Initiatives</li></ul>
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<h3>Who should attend: </h3>
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<ul><li>Science editors</li><li>Policy makers</li><li>Information professionals</li><li>Researchers </li><li>Open Access movement activists</li><li>Academics and all those interested in electronic publishing.</li></ul>
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<h3>Terms of Reference:</h3>
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<div>1) Initiatives within the open access movement (with focus on what all of this means for developing countries):</div>
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<ul><li>discussion on the pros and cons of open access </li><li>different models used and paths to achieving open access to the health literature </li><li>research reports and open access </li><li>democratizing access to scientific and health-related information</li><li>economics of scientific publishing and implications of the various open-access models </li><li>copyright and intellectual property </li></ul>
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<div>2) Open Access and the journals from developing countries</div>
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<ul><li>what does it means to bring journals online </li><li>publishing models for open-access journals </li><li>financing and sustaining open access journals in developing countries </li><li>costs associated with open access in developing countries </li><li>language barriers and translation </li><li>training information specialists and users on searching and accessing health literature</li></ul>
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<div><em>This event is co-organised by UNESCO and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore</em></div>
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<div>Download the agenda <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/open-access-agenda" class="internal-link" title="Agenda">here</a></div>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-06-09T12:41:22ZEventDesign!publiC
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/design-public
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with Centre for Knowledge Societies, Venkataramanan Associates, Centre for Law and Policy Research and LiveMint is organising Design!publiC on March 18, 2011. Design Public is a conversation about whether and how to bring design thinking to bear upon the challenges of government so as to promote governance innovation. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: left;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_Design.jpg/image_preview" alt="Design Public" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Design Public" /><br /></h3>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">Background</span></h3>
<p>The problem of governance is perhaps as old as society, as old as the rule of law. But it is only more recently -- perhaps the last five hundred years of modernity -- that human societies have been able to conceive of different models of government, different modalities of public administration, all having different effects on the configuration of society. The problem of governments, of governmentality, and of governance is always also the problem of how to change the very processes and procedures of government, so as to enhance the ends of the state and to promote the collective good. </p>
<p>Since the establishment of India’s republic, many kinds of changes have been made to the policies and practices of its state. We may think of, for instance, successive stages of land reforms, the privatization of large-scale and extractive industries, the subsequent abolition of the License Raj and so and so forth. We may also consider the computerization of state documents beginning in the 1980s, and more recently, the Right To Information Act (RTI). More recently there have been activist campaigns to reduce the discretionary powers of government and to thereby reduce the scope of corruption in public life. </p>
<p>While all these cases represent the continuous process of modification, reform, and change to government policy and even to its modes of functioning, this is not what we have in mind when we speak of ‘governance innovation.’ Rather, intend a specific process of ethnographic inquiry into the real needs of citizens, followed by an inclusive approach to reorganizing and representing that information in such a way that it may promote collaborative problem-solving and solutioneering through the application of design thinking. </p>
<p>The concept of design thinking has emerged only recently, and it has been used to describe approaches to problem solving that include: (i) redefining the fundamental challenges at hand, (ii) evaluating multiple possible options and solutions in parallel, and (iii) prioritizing and selecting those which are likely to achieve the greatest benefits for further consideration. This approach may also be iterative, allowing decisions to be made in general and specific ways as an organization gets closer and closer to the solution. Design thinking turns out to be not an individual but collective and social process, requiring small and large groups to be able to work together in relation to the available information about the task or challenge at hand. Design thinking can lead to innovative ideas, to new insights, and to new actionable directions for organizations. </p>
<p>This general approach to innovation -- and the central role of design thinking -- has emerged from the private sector over the last quarter century, and has enjoyed particular success in regards to the development of new technology products, services and experience. The question we would like to address in this conference is whether and how this approach can be employed for the transformation public and governmental systems.</p>
<h3>What is the Evidence that Design Thinking Positively Impacts Governments?</h3>
<p>Many European countries have government-supported design conglomerations for the purposes of enhancing business and the government’s interface with the public. Design Council in the UK not only works to create public identities but also helps formulate national design strategies that help the United Kingdom to differentiate its national brand and achieve broad national benefits. Elsewhere in the UK, a private organization, Think Public, and various governmental agencies, are working through a consultative approach with citizens to better target governmental services so as to maximize citizen benefits.</p>
<p>In the context of public health, the first major public health information system has been built in Canada, and in many ways it may serve as a reference and benchmark for other countries around the world. The first deployment of a public health information system in developing country contexts is in Ghana, where a specialized Resource Center is even now being conceived to enable the support and further development of this new system.</p>
<p>In India, early innovation research and concept development activities by the Center for Knowledge Societies for the Gates Foundation has shown promising results in terms of new opportunities to enhance the quality of health care delivery through the Bihar pilot itself, using the tools and techniques of ethnography, design, and user experience enhancement. In its studios in New Delhi and Bangalore, it has hosted innovation workshops with international health experts, public officials and other stakeholders to envision new kinds of technologies and solutions for improving public health delivery. In future, it may be possible to organize these kinds of efforts in the form of an Innovation Lab or Innovation Center. </p>
<p>Whereas, in the past, diverse attempts have been made to reform government, to make it more efficient, to reduce corruption and the arbitrariness of decisioning authority. Beneficial as these approaches may have been, they have not always been successful in fundamentally transforming the ways in which bureaucracies think about their mission, objectives and goals. They have not resulted in greater consumer orientation of these cadres, or greater public participation in the decision-making of these bureaucracies. These are the kinds of benefits that design thinking can bring to governmental and quasi-governmental bureaucracies. </p>
<p>In this conclave, our interest is to explore how design thinking and user-centered innovation might help such organizations better accomplish their mission and better serve their beneficiaries. We also seek to explore and establish particular modalities through which governance innovation can be achieved, as well as to identify key stakeholders and personalities gripped of the challenge of governance innovation. Our larger goal is to craft a path forward for integrating design thinking and innovation methodologies in the further re-envisioning, refashioning and improvement of public services in India and elsewhere in the world.</p>
<p>Specific Expected Outcomes</p>
<ul><li>A shared understanding and common vocabulary around design thinking and innovation</li><li>A review of insights and outcomes from the event by members of government with a view to routinizing and institutionalizing innovation in government</li><li>A documentation of case-studies, concepts and perspectives from different participants emerging from the conclave</li><li>An emerging community of thinkers and practitioners interested in working together to share information and insights to accelerate governance innovation</li><li>A consensus on the modalities and occasion for the conduct of a follow-up conclave, possibly in Bangalore as soon as September 2011</li></ul>
<h3>An Invitation to Dialogue </h3>
<p>Design Public is a conversation among a select group of high level thinkers and actors who care about public services design. No more than 50 persons will be in attendance. Presentations will be brief. Panel discussants will intersperse with the other participants for greater involvement and equal opportunity for dialogue and response. All attendees will be asked to participate in the emerging dialogue through the day. </p>
<h3>Draft Schedule</h3>
<p>
</p>
<p>10.00 am<br /><em>What do Designers do? </em><em>How can Physical, Informational and Interaction Design Impact the Everyday Life of Citizens?</em></p>
<ul><li>Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society (Moderator)</li><li>Aditya Dev Sood, CEO, Center for Knowledge Socities</li><li>Abhimanyu Kulkarni, Design Director, Philips Design</li><li>Younghee Jung, Senior Designer, Nokia Corporation</li><li>Daniela Sangiorgi, Lecturer, Lancaster University </li><li>Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Founder, Centre for Law and Policy Research</li><li>Naresh Narasimhan, Principal Architect, VA Group<br /></li></ul>
<p>11.00 am</p>
<p><em>How Can the Government Best Use Designers and Design Thinking?</em></p>
<ul><li>Aditya Dev Sood, CEO, Center for Knowledge Societies (Moderator)</li><li>Niels Hansen, Project Manager, MindLab</li><li>Aparna Piramal Raje, Design Thinker, Mint</li><li>Anant Shah, Program Officer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation</li><li>Harsh Shrivastava, Consultant (Planning), Planning Commission of India</li><li>Kiran Dhingra, Secretary, Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation</li><li>Shubhagato Dasgupta, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Policy Research</li><li>Steven Solnik, Member-Government Performance and Accountability, Ford Foundation </li></ul>
<p>
12.00 pm</p>
<p><em>How can Social / Media Promote Design and Governance Innovation? </em></p>
<ul><li>
Suresh Venkat, Executive Producer, CNBC TV18 (Moderator)</li><li>Vibodh Parthasarthy, Associate Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia</li><li>Yatish Rajawat, Editor-in-Chief, Business Bhaskar</li><li>R. Sukumar, Editor, Mint</li><li>Sashwati Banerjee, Executive Director, Sesame Workshop India</li><li>Aditya Mishra, Founder, Headstart Foundation</li></ul>
<p>1.00 pm </p>
<p>Working and Networking Lunch</p>
<p>2.00 pm</p>
<p>Innovation Workshopping Breakout Sessions</p>
<p>Track One: </p>
<ol><li><em>Conducting Ethnography to Inform the Innovation Process<br /></em>
<p>The group is responsible for coming up with an innovative approach
to curbing power theft in peri-urban locations in India. Many factors
are responsible for this phenomenon. What questions will you ask and how
will you collect information on the ground to inform any future
innovations you might come up with? (Case Study subject to change)</p>
</li><li><em>Brainstorming and Concepting in Response to Ethnographic Data<br /></em>
<p>The
group is responsible for conceptualizing a new ways to promote maternal
and child health using mobile devices. Data on this question has
already been collected and will be shown to you in the form of a brief
presentation. You must come up with as many different ideas or concepts
as possible using post-its. Then you must prioritize these concepts and
vote on the ones you would like to see implemented. (Case Study subject
to change)</p>
</li><li><em>Approaches to Institutionalizing Innovation in Government<br /></em>
<p>This
group will consider ways and means for accelerating and
institutionalizing innovation in governance, through for example, the
provision of knowledge, best practices, support, training, and
organizational change. Ideas may include, but not be restricted to new
kinds of handbooks, online sources, academic and applied training and
other ideas. Approaches should be evaluated and prioritized prior to
presentation back to the group.</p>
</li></ol>
<p>4.30 pm <br />Team Presentations (over tea served at tables) </p>
<p>5.00 pm<br /><em>What institutional and organizational models can best foster Governance Innovation?</em></p>
<ul><li>Amit Garg, Director, MXV Consulting (Moderator)<br /></li><li>Arun Maira, Member, Planning Commission & Member, National Innovation Council</li><li>R. Gopalakrishnan, Member Secretary, National Innovation Council</li><li>Mohammad Haleem Khan, Director, CAPART</li><li>D S Ravindran, CEO, Center of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka<br /></li><li>Aditya Dev Sood, CEO, Center for Knowledge Societies</li></ul>
<p>Other Notable Discussants and Interactants</p>
<ul><li>Anil Khachi, Deputy Director General, UIDAI</li><li>Narahari Mahato, Member of Parliament, AIFB</li><li>N. Cheluvaraya Swamy, Member of Parliament, JD(S)</li><li>Syed Azeez Pasha, Member of Parliament, CPI</li><li>Moinul Hassan, Member of Parliament, CPM</li><li>Amit Garg, Director, MXV Consulting</li><li>William Bissell, Managing Director, FabIndia</li><li>Kalpana Awasthi, Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to Sam Pitroda</li><li>Abhimanyu Kulkarni, Design Director, Philips Design</li><li>D. Raja, Member of Parliament, CPI</li><li>Josh Glazeroff, Visa Chief, US Embassy</li><li>Pooja Sood, Curator and Director, Khoj Foundation</li><li>Ravina Agarwal, Program Officer, Ford Foundation</li><li>Nita Soans, Advisor, Center for Knowledge Societies</li><li>Ekta Ohri, Head of Project Operations, Center for Knowledge Societies</li></ul>
<h3>Individual Participation</h3>
<p>In order to make each voice count, entry to the conclave will be by arrangement only. Others who are truly interested, should please drop us a few lines on how they would like to contribute and we will be glad to get back in touch. </p>
<p>There are no registration fees. However, we would like to see participants take their own initiative in covering their own travel costs and making their own arrangements for stay so far as possible. If specific needs are perceived, please communicate them to the organizers. </p>
<h3>Institutional Participation</h3>
<p>Confederations of industry, associations of management, departments of government and diverse development sector and civil society organizations are invited to express their interest in supporting this event. </p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><strong>Organizers</strong></span></p>
<ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span">Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS)</span></li><li>Center for Internet and Society (CIS)</li></ul>
<p><strong>Sponsors<br /></strong></p>
<ul><li>Venkatramanan Associates (VA)</li><li>Center for Law and Policy (CLP)</li></ul>
<p><strong>Date and Venue</strong><br />The date for the event has been decided for Friday, the 18th of March, 2011. It will be held at the Taj Vivanta in Central Delhi.</p>
<p><strong>Thought Leadership and Dialogue<br /></strong>Dr. Aditya Dev Sood, CEO, Center for Knowledge Societies<br />aditya@cks.in</p>
<p>Naresh Narasimhan, Principal, VA Associates <br />naresh@vagroup.com</p>
<p>Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Founder, Center for Law and Policy <br />sudhir.krishnaswamy@ashiralaw.co.in</p>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">Participation Enquiries</span></h3>
<p>Sumeet Malhotra, Business Development Manager<br />sumeet@cks.in</p>
<ul><li>Download the book <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/design-public.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Design! Public">here</a> [PDF, 2.8 MB]</li><li>Download the case studies <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/case-studies.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Case Studies">here</a> [PDF, 641 KB]</li><li>Download the glossary <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/glossary.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Glossary">here</a><br /></li></ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/design-public'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/design-public</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-06-03T13:27:22ZEvent Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/free-access-to-law-is-it-here-to-stay-environmental-scan
<b>The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined. </b>
<p>
<p>The Environmental Scans are the first component of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay” global study, examining the sustainability of Free Access to Law (FAL) initiatives. The overall goal of this research is to respond to a need to study what free access to law initiatives do and how they do it. This will lead to an understanding of the effects FAL initiatives have on society and to an exploration of the factors determining their sustainability.</p>
<p>For the Environmental Scans, Local Researchers were asked to collect data according to the Environmental Scan Matrix and draft a synopsis of the data, highlighting the trends, risks and opportunities for the field of online legal research publication in general and for the FAL initiative in particular. In sum, the researchers looked at how the individual indicators listed in the Environmental Scan Matrix work together to impact free access to law. The results of the Scans provided the local researchers and their audiences with a rich knowledge on the field of law and informatics in each respective country examined.</p>
<p>The project covers the following regions: (1) Southern and Eastern Africa, (2) Western Africa, (3) Asia and the Pacific and (4) Canada. In order to complete a cross-case comparative analysis, countries have been selected to represent multiple legal traditions with FAL initiatives at various stages of development.</p>
<div>The report can be accessed <a class="external-link" href="http://www.lexum.com/en/projects/fal-es.pdf">here</a>.</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/free-access-to-law-is-it-here-to-stay-environmental-scan'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/free-access-to-law-is-it-here-to-stay-environmental-scan</a>
</p>
No publisherrebeccaOpen Access2012-03-20T18:36:08ZBlog EntryOpen Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship
<b>The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship. </b>
<p><em>Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with</em>:</p>
<p>Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy? </p>
<p><em>He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution </p>
<p>It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication. </p>
<p>There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.</p>
<p>Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.</p>
<p>The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.</p>
<p>Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?</p>
<p>Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.</p>
<p>Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.</p>
<p>From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.</p>
<blockquote>"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."<br /></blockquote>
<p>Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008</p>
<p>For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.</p>
<p>The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.</p>
<p>The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.</p>
<p>Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.</p>
<p>In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.</p>
<p>Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.</p>
<p>It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.</p>
<p>Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Country<br /></th>
<th>Percentage</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Japan</td>
<td>3.67%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sweden</td>
<td>3.60%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Finland</td>
<td>3.48%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>USA</td>
<td>2.70%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EU average<br /></td>
<td>2.16%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>China</td>
<td>1.40%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India</td>
<td>1.00%</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity. </p>
<p>India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."</p>
<p>Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.</p>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><br /></th>
<th>India</th>
<th>China</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>MathSciNet, 2006<br /></td>
<td>1,949</td>
<td>11,762</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Engineering Village, 2006<br /></td>
<td>25,954</td>
<td>199,881</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SciFinder, 2007<br /></td>
<td>41,697</td>
<td>235,309</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Web of Science, 2007<br /></td>
<td>35,450</td>
<td>98,241</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.</p>
<p>But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.</p>
<p>Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly. </p>
<p>Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.</p>
<p>India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.</p>
<p>The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.</p>
<p>There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias. </p>
<p>India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.</p>
<p>India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.</p>
<p>But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting <a class="external-link" href="http://www.osdd.net/">open source drug discovery</a> and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.</p>
<p>Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.</p>
<p>India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.</p>
<p>Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow. </p>
<p>The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.</p>
<p>The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.</p>
<p>Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research. </p>
<p>A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.</p>
<p>The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”</p>
<p>Is anyone listening?</p>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Universities</th>
<th>Scopus</th>
<th>Scholar</th>
<th>% Sco vs Sch<br /></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Univ College London<br /></td>
<td>134,950</td>
<td>8,660</td>
<td>6.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Cambridge<br /></td>
<td>114,339</td>
<td>8,320</td>
<td>7.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Oxford<br /></td>
<td>99,723</td>
<td>7,800</td>
<td>7.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Imperial College<br /></td>
<td>91,537</td>
<td>4,720</td>
<td>5.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Manchester<br /></td>
<td>83,024</td>
<td>3,840</td>
<td>4.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>King's College London<br /></td>
<td>60,407</td>
<td>1,100</td>
<td>1.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Edinburgh<br /></td>
<td>57,473</td>
<td>9,920</td>
<td>17.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Southampton<br /></td>
<td>44,013</td>
<td>14,000</td>
<td>31.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Warwick<br /></td>
<td>23,018</td>
<td>6,010</td>
<td>26.1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of York<br /></td>
<td>21,554</td>
<td>2,920</td>
<td>13.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Loughborough Univ<br /></td>
<td>18,902</td>
<td>4,030</td>
<td>21.3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.</p>
<p>UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.</p>
<p>The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.</p>
<p>Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet. </p>
<p>If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers. </p>
<p>The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA. </p>
<p>The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.</p>
<p>In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.</p>
<p>The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.</p>
<p>In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference. <br /><br />If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks. </p>
<p>The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.</p>
<p>Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.</p>
<h3>What is there already?</h3>
<ul><li>World-class Open Course Ware.</li><li>About 200 OA journals. </li><li>Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way. </li><li>A small group is promoting OJS.</li><li>There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.</li><li>National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.</li><li>There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,</li><li>Library and information science, Catalysis.</li><li>Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.</li><li>Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.</li><li>The Catalysis repository is not listed. </li><li>There are some efforts to digitize theses. </li><li>Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.</li><li>An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source. <br /></li></ul>
<p>But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches. </p>
<p>On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.</p>
<p>Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both. </p>
<p>Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.</p>
<h3>International collaboration and ways forward <br /></h3>
<p>A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access. </p>
<p>The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.</p>
<p>India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.</p>
<p>eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!</p>
<p>We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.</p>
<p>OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2011-08-23T03:13:24ZBlog EntryOpen Access to International Agricultural Research
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-international-agricultural-research
<b>Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.</b>
<p>CIS Distinguished Fellow, Subbiah Arunachalam and 15 other open access advocates wrote to the top management of CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, requesting them to mandate open access to all research publications from all CGIAR centres. The letter was addressed to Dr. Carlos Pérez del Castillo and Dr. Katherine Sierra and it was copied to the Director Generals of all the 15 CGIAR centres.</p>
<p>A permanent member of the prestigious Harvard University Trade Group, Carlos Pérez del Castillo has received the highest decorations from the Governments of Brazil, Chile, France and Venezuela. Carlos Pérez del Castillo also served as the Chairman of the WTO General Council and as Vice-Minister and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay (1995-1998) and as Permanent Secretary of the Latin American Economic System (1987-1991). He is a member of the Board of the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council (IPC), and a small cattle farmer.</p>
<p>Katherine Sierra, CGIAR Fund Council chair, is the World Bank vice president for sustainable development responsible for people and programs in environmentally and socially sustainable development and infrastructure. Sierra chairs several international consultative groups. These include the World Bank-WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Cities Alliance, Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme, and Water and Sanitation Program. Other international groups that she chairs are InfoDev, which supports information and communication technologies for development, and the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility, which promotes private participation in infrastructure.</p>
<h3>The Letter</h3>
<p>Dear Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr. Kathy Sierra:</p>
<p align="left">Subject: Please make all CGIAR research publications open access</p>
<p>About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr. William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr. Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."</p>
<p>ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the <a class="external-link" href="http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/">National Institute of Technology-Rourkela</a>. ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.</p>
<p>Since then <a class="external-link" href="http://dspace.icrisat.ac.in/dspace/">Institutional Repository</a> is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.</p>
<p>We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.</p>
<p>The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.</p>
<p>As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. The full list of ~220 mandates worldwide is available at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/">Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies</a>.</p>
<p>We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.</p>
<p>Regards<br />Sincerely,</p>
<p>Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]<br />Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]<br />Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]<br />Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]<br />Jean-Claude Gudon [University of Montreal, Canada]<br />Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]<br />Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]<br />Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]<br />Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]<br />Heather Morrison [University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada]<br />Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]<br />T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]<br />Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]<br />Alma swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]<br />John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative Commons]<br />John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]</p>
<h3>Status Report on a Suggestion made to CGIAR</h3>
<p>Sixteen open access advocates wrote to the CGIAR leadership – Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo and Dr. Kathy Sierra – on 19 May 2010, requesting CGIAR to adopt an open access mandate for all research publications from CGIAR centres. [As the names of the signatories were arranged in alphabetical order, my name appeared on the top of the list. I am one of the group and not the leader.] Mr. Richard Poynder posted a write-up on the letter in his famous blog ‘Open and Shut’.</p>
<p>The letter led to a flurry of activity among the ICT-KM professionals of CGIAR. I have heard from ICRISAT (Dr. William Dar, Director General), ILRI (Dr. Peter Ballantyne, Head, Knowledge Management and Information Services) and CIAT (Dr. Edith Hesse, Head Corporate Communications and Capacity Strengthening).</p>
<p>Dr. Dar welcomed the suggestion. Incidentally, he is a champion of open access and is on the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS). He was also the first in the CGIAR system to mandate open access to all research publications from the centre he heads.</p>
<p>From the mails of Dr. Ballantyne and Dr. Hesse, I could perceive some misgivings about the letter to CGIAR among knowledge managers of some CGIAR centres. In contrast, Dr. Francesca Re Manning of CAS-IP, CGIAR, expressed complete agreement with the proposal made by the OA advocates.</p>
<p>The response of Dr. Enrica Porcari, Chief Information Officer of CGIAR, was ambivalent, almost a tightrope walk. She didn’t say that OA was not acceptable to CGIAR and yet she was not willing to accept OA mandating as an option. She said: “Rather than a policy on ‘open access’ limited to journal articles, I would instead prefer to see us develop a strong and clear CGIAR view and set of practices that balance the need for high quality science with highly accessible outputs, and reinforces the substantial progress we have already made across all the Centers…I would advocate for a concerted effort to ‘opening access to our research’. Is not providing open access to research publications the obvious first step in opening access to our research?”</p>
<p>Probably, Dr. Porcari also thought that the advocates were promoting open access journals. Both Richard Poynder and I clarified that what we suggested for CGIR was open access and not open access journals and explained the difference between the two. Richard clarified that our emphasis was actually on open access archiving.</p>
<p>Dr. Peter Bloch and Dr. Kay Chapman of CAS-IP thought that some of the ideas we put forward were astute and relevant but had some concerns about making papers for which the copyright vests with journal publishers open access as well as papers co-authored with non-CGIAR researchers. In response we pointed out how other organizations which have mandated open access have dealt with these issues.</p>
<p>Prof. Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management , Ahmedabad, and founder of the Honey Bee network that disseminate the innovations of thousands of farmers, craftsmen, artisans and the lay public, endorsed the suggestion stating that Harvard made it obligatory for all the papers published by its faculty to be openly accessible. He said that "once this is made into a policy by CGIAR, the publishers will have to fall in line."</p>
<p>Prof. Michael Gurstein, editor of Journal of Community Informatics, welcomed the idea of making CGIAR research open access, and suggested that we should go one step further and see to it that the research is also made easily applied by the farmers and other ultimate users. Others who endorsed the suggestion include Professors Bill Hubbard, Stephen Pinfield and Chrisopher Pressler of the Nottingham University, David Bollier, Co-founder of Public Knowledge, Prof. Helen Hambly Odame of the University of Guelph.</p>
<p>In the meanwhile, I found that "the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all. This means working with organisations that hold information or that creates new knowledge – to help them disseminate it more efficiently and make it easier to access. CGIAR, FAO and DFID are CIARD partners.</p>
<p>I refer to the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ciard.net/ciard-manifesto">CIARD Manifesto</a> here. It is all for open access. Both DFID and FAO also have adopted open access. Please refer to the R4D portal of DFID. Why R4D? In the past it was difficult to find out what research topics, projects, and programmes DFID was funding or had funded. Researchers all over the world (and even DFID staff) had to rely on a network of personal contacts or inspired detective work to discover who was already working in a particular area, what was already known, and what lessons had been learned. R4D responds to a demand expressed by many DFID stakeholders for better and open access to all this information. It is and will always be only one piece of the jigsaw, but it is a high-quality piece, as in order to have received DFID funding the research posted on R4D will have met strict criteria and quality standards in both formulation and execution.</p>
<p>FAO has complied with all the 13 CIARD requirements for developing institutional readiness and increasing the availability, accessibility and applicability of research outputs. Indeed FAO is the only institution to have done so.</p>
<p>Dr. Ballantyne of ILRI himself has championed open access. Responding to New publication: Learning to Share Knowledge for Global Agricultural Progress, he wrote on 21 March 2010, "Great to see this experience all written up. I was going to complain at the lack of open access to this CGIAR research output… but then I found the author version ‘available’ in full on the CIAT website. Excellent example of I can’t remember which CIARD pathway! Would be even better if your author version was ‘accessible’ in a proper CGIAR/CIAT repository that is harvestable, etc., and not just uploaded on the web!" This is precisely what the 16 signatories to the letter to CGIAR want for all of CGIR research publications!</p>
<p>There should be no difficulty for CGIAR – the Consortium Board, the Science Council and the Programme Committee to accept the suggestion that they adopt an open access mandate for all their research publications.</p>
<p>It is likely that a few knowledge managers were unhappy that people outside the system made the suggestion. It may be their immediate response. It should not be difficult for them to realize, on sober reflection, that all we mean is to bring access to CGIAR research on par with access to research done at some of the best institutions in the world such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Southampton, and to make CGIAR policy the best in the world – even better than the OA policies of NIH, the Research Councils of the UK and the Wellcome Trust. We assure those who have any misgivings that our intentions are honourable, our suggestion was made in the best interest of CGIAR, and they can cast away their misgivings.</p>
<p>Regards,<br />Arun</p>
<p>The Central Advisory Service for Intellectual Property (CAS-IP of CGIAR) organised a successful workshop in Rome in early July. CAS-IP hopes to conduct a workshop on open access for all CGIAR librarians and knowledge managers before the end of the year.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-international-agricultural-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-international-agricultural-research</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2011-08-25T08:13:43ZBlog EntryOpenness, Videos, Impressions
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport
<b>The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The notion of free and open is under great debate even under
that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further
splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the
tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively
perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away
with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different,
often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost
endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.</p>
<p>Open video, in that matter, has gone through different
iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it
variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for
the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and
open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective
hearing, through the day: <strong>Access, Archive,
Share, Remix, Repurpose</strong>. And it is these five that we need to now
imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups
today.</p>
<p><strong>Access</strong> has been one primary question that almost everybody
dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements,
where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and
content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging
information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access,
privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To
contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something
that different participants have voiced the need for.</p>
<p><strong>Archive</strong> is a preoccupation with most people because
archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and
usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to
different people, there are older questions of representation, voice,
empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In
education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge
production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of
issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of
access, distribution etc.</p>
<p><strong>Sharing </strong>is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open
and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what
sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to
be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions
of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do
we share it with? Tools by which sharing
leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning
practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks
can be built up?</p>
<p><strong>Remix</strong> has been of great value because it means that you are
being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the
process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the
possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is
interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just
putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc.
can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic
and mechanics seems to have emerged.</p>
<p><strong>Repurpose </strong>is my additional reading of something that perhaps
needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact
remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that
enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms,
protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and
there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still
seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up
and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceOpen StandardsArtWorkshopDigital AccessFLOSSOpen ContentArchivesOpennessOpen InnovationMeetingOpen Access2011-09-22T12:23:13ZBlog EntryResources
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources
<b>A collection of resources that will help one navigate through the arguments and evidence for and against the Indian "Bayh-Dole" bill.</b>
<p><u><strong><br /></strong></u></p>
<h2><strong>PUPFIP</strong></h2>
<h3>News-related/General Coverage</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/relook-at-publicfunded-r&d-bill-to-address-red-tape/376844/0">Relook at public-funded R&D Bill to
address red tape</a> (The Financial Express)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/12/01144901/CSIR-looks-at-commercializing.html">CSIR looks at commercializing, leasing
out patent</a> (Live Mint)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2008/02/exporting-bayh-dole-to-india-whither_21.html">Exporting Bayh-Dole to India: Whither Transparency Part II</a><span class="post-author"> (Shamnad Basheer)</span></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://ww.scidev.net/es/science-and-innovation-policy/intellectual-property/news/proyecto-de-ley-de-patentes-suscita-debate-en-la-i.html">Indian Patent Bill stirs debate among scientists</a> (Science and Development Network)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/legal.asp">Letter from the Knowledge Commission</a> (GoI)</p>
<h3>Scientific
Culture</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.thehindu.com/delhi/?p=16251">Does Patenting research change the Culture of Science?</a> (The Hindu)</p>
<h3>Analytical Pieces<strong> </strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/indian-patent-bill-let-s-not-be-too-hasty.html">Indian Patent Bill: Lets not be too Hasty</a>(Shamnad Basheer)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/11/01001052/Not-in-public-interest.html">Not in public interest</a>(Live Mint)<a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/"><br /></a></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/">The Indian Public Funded IP Bill: Are we Ready?</a>(K. Satyanarayana)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>Bayh-Dole</strong></h2>
<h3>Technology
Transfer</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1476653">Innovation's Golden Goose </a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=10787664">Improving Innovation</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3><strong>Scientific
Culture</strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-129366990.html">Patents and America's Universities</a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/technology/07unbox.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print">When Academia Puts Profits Ahead of Wonder</a>(The New York Times)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_VPNSGGT">Bayhing for blood or Doling out cash?</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3>Evaluative
Pieces</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Thursby.pdf">University Licensing under Bayh-Dole: What are the Issues and
Evidence?</a>(Thursby and Thursby)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060262">Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US
Experience</a>(So et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272884/index.htm">The Law of Unintended Consequences</a>(Fortune Magazine)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V77-41NCXY8-6/2/fa828bbd7705f51ffd8fcf60338daf16">The Growth of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities and the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Mowery et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5g.htm">Overall Assessment of the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Nelson, Mowery, et al.)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>General Resources</strong></h2>
<p> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Joint Ventures and Intellectual Property</a>(Andreas Panagopoulos)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5c.htm">Patents vs. Other Knowledge Transfer</a>(Agrawal and Henderson)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5f.htm">Incentives Structure and Licensing Success</a>(Dan Elfenbein)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5e.htm">University Licensing and Research Behavior</a>(Lach and Schankerman)</p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Open Science and Private Property</a>(Paul David)
<p> <strong><br /></strong></p>
<h2><strong>IP Alternatives</strong><br /></h2>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040293">New Approaches to Filling the Gap in TB Drug Discovery </a>(Casenghi, Cole and Nathan)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://keionline.org/misc-docs/Prizes/prize_tb_msf_expert_meeting.pdf">The Role of Prizes in Developing Low-Cost Point-of-Care Rapid Diagnostic Tests and Better Drugs for TB</a>(James Love)</p>
<p>How to boost R&D for essential drugs and diagnostics</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/333/7582/1279.pdf">Scrooge and intellectual property rights</a> (BMJ January 2006)</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshBayh-DoleAccess to KnowledgeAccess to MedicineOpen AccessPublic AccountabilityOpen Innovation2009-10-20T03:29:16ZPageAfter 15 Years, Is Free Access to Law Here to Stay?
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/after-15-years-is-free-access-to-law-here-to-stay
<b>CIS, in collaboration with partners LexUM and SAFLII, is undertaking a Global Free Access to Law Study. Being the first of its kind within the Free Access to Law Movement, this comparative study will examine what free access to law initiatives do, evaluate their core benefits and identify factors determining of their sustainability. In the end, the free access to law study will provide future initiatives and existing LII networks with proven and adoptable best practices which will support the continued growth of the legal information commons.</b>
<p>The question in the title is the
driving force behind a joint research initiative the Centre for
Internet and Society has recently undertaken in collaboration with pioneering institutions, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.lexum.org">LexUM</a>,and the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.saflii.org">South African Legal Information Institute</a>. Over the past fifteen years, institutions providing free access to
legal materials have transformed the modes in which legal information
is produced and used. However, there have been few analyses of the
ways in which legal information repositories operate. Lessons
learned, best practices and successful models have not been
systematically documented, and administrators may not have access to
useful guidance or peer support. The study will bridge this gap by
analyzing a variety of free access to law initiatives around the
world in greater detail.</p>
<p>In 1992, the first Legal Information
Institute (LII) at Cornell University began to place primary sources
of law and interpretive legal materials online, free of charge. The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.worldlii.org">Free Access to Law Movement</a>
soon expanded to form a broad network of LIIs who shared the belief
that legal information is <a class="external-link" href="http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/">digital common property and should be accessible to all</a>.
Today, citizens around the world can access legal information in
multiple languages through easily searchable databases. Among the
resources available are statutes, bills, court decisions, bilateral
treaties, law journal articles, legal reform documents and much more.
This freely available legal information has helped make the law more
accessible to audiences previously underserved by costly commercial
databases, and has allowed comparative legal research to become more
practicable than ever before.</p>
<p>Research will focus on gauging the
broader societal effects of free access to law initiatives, as well
as on understanding the diverse factors which contribute to or
undermine their sustainability.The CIS will be overseeing research in
Asia, while SAFLII and LexUM will cover South and West Africa, the
South Pacific, Canada and Australia. The global scope of the study
will facilitate the sharing of expertise and best practices within
the global network of LIIs.</p>
<p>The value of creating a legal
information commons has been clearly demonstrated. Access to legal
materials helps to strengthen judicial systems, improve legal
expertise, guide policymaking and maintain the rule of law. Legal
transparency helps businesses assess risk and encourage
entrepreneurship. Citizens and civil society actors require access to
law to participate in the political process and assert their rights.
These audiences form an important constituency for open access to
legal scholarship and demonstrate the need to further examine the
core benefits of free access to law initiatives.</p>
<p>Online free access to legal materials
has also been an indispensable tool in underserved regions where a
host of factors often undermine access to legal information. The
following examples, derived from preliminary CIS research throughout
Asia, demonstrate how free access to law can bridge various gaps in
legal information accessibility. In some cases, laws may be
completely unavailable. For example, bureaucrats may demand bribes
before allowing access to copies of a law, or governments may wish to
keep certain implementing guidelines or regulations a secret. In
other cases, a law might have simply been lost through lack of proper
storage or record-keeping.</p>
<p>A second problem occurs when laws and
case law are available only in certain locations or certain forms. A
law may be available only in hard copy or in one or two libraries in
the capital city, for example. This causes difficulties for citizens
and practitioners in remote areas who lack the resources to travel.
Sometimes, the libraries containing the legal information also may
require special permissions to access. In other instances, legal
materials may have been digitized but not properly stored or
networked.</p>
<p>Digitizing and uploading laws to
organized, searchable databases presents its own challenges, and some
governments lack the technical capacity to do so. However, digitizing
and uploading laws does not guarantee general public access. In some
countries, laws may be online but placed in pay-per-use databases.
And some governments retain a copyright or similar intellectual
property rights in their laws and other documents. This may mean that
NGOs or LIIs cannot copy, consolidate, or re-post certain legal
information without exposing themselves to copyright liability. The
commercialization of legal information also restricts access to
individuals and firms able to pay costly subscription fees.</p>
<p>Copyright and the commercialization of
legal information can inhibit the free flow of legal
information—notably when legal information can be better organized,
preserved and disseminated further under more open standards.
Because of the importance of free access to law, a significant focus
of the research will be to identify factors that contribute to the
sustainability and success of free access to law initiatives. This
is of great importance in Asia, where the local capacities of LIIs
require further strengthening before their databases can begin to
rival their commercial counterparts.</p>
<p>Many <a class="external-link" href="http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art42/">challenges</a>
remain for the development and sustainability of free access to law
initiatives in the Asian region. Searchable legal information must
be provided in both English and regional languages, while local
technical capacities require further development. Mariya
Badeva-Bright
of SAFLII also <a class="external-link" href="http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2009/07/15/is-free-access-to-law-here-to-stay/">notes</a> that LIIs need to secure working partnerships
within the judicial branch of government in order to reduce the
burdens of digitization and to promote common standards in
preparation of legal material. The AsianLII has only begun to scrape
the surface of valuable legal information that is potentially
available and must continue to develop and strengthen partnerships
in the region.</p>
<p> The study will have several concrete
results. Upon completion of the study, a Free Access to Law Best
Practices Handbook will be published and will serve as a
comprehensive knowledge resource for both existing and nascent free
access law initiatives. The handbook will outline various steps in
creating and maintaining successful free access to law initiatives,
while ensuring that important aspects of design and sustainability
are not overlooked. Also, a comprehensive online library will host
current and future materials relating to the free access to law
movement, including a collection of free access to law case studies.</p>
<p>Research by the CIS, LexUM, SAFLII,
and their respective team of researchers is expected to commence
within the next few months. In the end, the free access to law study will provide
future initiatives and existing LII networks with proven and
adoptable best practices. This research will increase the chance
that nascent initiatives will be successful, and support the
continued growth of the thriving legal information commons.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/after-15-years-is-free-access-to-law-here-to-stay'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/after-15-years-is-free-access-to-law-here-to-stay</a>
</p>
No publisherrebeccaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:07:48ZBlog EntryLetter on South Africa's IPRs from Publicly Financed R&D Regulations
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations
<b>Being interested in legislations in developing nations styled after the United States' Bayh-Dole Act, CIS responded to the call issued by the South African Department of Science and Technology for comments to the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Regulations.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpen StandardsBayh-DoleIntellectual Property RightsOpen AccessOpen Innovation2011-08-04T04:42:15ZBlog Entry