The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 61 to 72.
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
<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 EntryInternational Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report
<b>Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop. </b>
<p align="left"></p>
<div align="left"> </div>
<p align="left">I was in Amsterdam
for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah
Arunachalam of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/../">CIS</a> and other participants
from UK, USA, Japan,
and Australia. The workshop was funded by <a href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/">JISC</a>, <a href="http://www.surffoundation.nl/en">SURF</a> and <a href="http://www.driver-repository.eu/">DRIVER</a> Project. The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for
the future course of international repositories’ action.</p>
<p align="left">The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on
DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he
explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories
infrastructure. Soon after the keynote,
participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to
draft action plans on the following topics:</p>
<div align="left">
<ul type="disc"><li>International Organization</li><li>Identifier Infrastructure</li><li>Citation Services </li><li>Repositories Handshake <br /></li></ul>
</div>
<p align="left">I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’
group. The handshake group, which consisted of
mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter
Burnhill of <a href="http://edina.ac.uk/">EDINA</a>, University of Edinburgh. Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching
the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually
intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support
services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled
on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered:
one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes
with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and
interoperability.</p>
<p align="left">On the
second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit
opportunities' on the principles of <em>more</em>
(content), <em>better</em> (quality metadata),
<em>easy</em> (uploading) and <em>rewarding</em> (for depositor). The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake
use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work
plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use
cases like:</p>
<div align="left">
<ul type="disc"><li>Easy deposit method for multi-authored papers, with different
affiliations from different countries, in multiple repositories</li><li>Communication between institutional, subject and funding
repositories</li><li>Publisher deposits in repositories (IR/SR)</li><li>Institute induced deposits</li></ul>
</div>
<p align="left">We had two breakout group presentations
during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made
by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.</p>
<p align="left">Finally, all participants assembled at
the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product
of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation
Services group. Leslie Carr, who was the
moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based
citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull
references from a document in repositories.</p>
<p align="left">The next impressive development came from the
Repository Identifiers group. The
moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to
build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation <a class="external-link" href="http://prezi.com/17905/view/#56">here)</a>. Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at
the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.</p>
<p align="left">Clifford Lynch of <a href="http://www.cni.org/">CNI</a> summed up of the outcomes of
the break out groups in his closing remarks.
He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger
knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs. He also prioritised 'Identifier
Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on
it. </p>
<p align="left">There was a funders' meeting after
the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface. With pre-workshop wiki discussions on
repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.</p>
<p align="left">During the workshop, I met a few key
people involved in the <a href="http://www.driver-repository.eu/">DRIVER</a> project,
particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from <a href="http://www.isti.cnr.it/">ISTI-CNR</a>,
Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about <a href="http://www.driver-repository.eu/">DRIVER</a>, which has come up with a set
of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange
of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines
have been translated into three other languages, showing their international
acceptance. To streamline repository
developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a <a href="http://www.driver-repository.eu/">DRIVER</a>-like initiative to ensure metadata
uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.</p>
<p align="left">-----<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/madhan.jpg/image_preview" alt="Madhan Muthu" class="image-right" title="Madhan Muthu" /></p>
<p align="left">Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is
coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other
libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
(MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.</p>
<div align="left"> </div>
<p align="left"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:01:34ZBlog EntryJournals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories
<b>Prof N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, discusses open access in his keynote address at the 26 March 2009 one-day conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons'. </b>
<p>On 26 March 2009, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, organised a day-long conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons', as a way to highlight the need for Open Access in Indian academia and research. The speakers and panellists included Prof N. Mukunda of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dr D.K. Sahu, MD and CEO of Medknow Publications, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow with CIS, Dr A.R. Upadhya, Director of NAL, Mr N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD. of Informatics, and Mr Sunil Abraham, Director of Policy at CIS.</p>
<p>Prof N. Mukunda gave the keynote address, which is reproduced below.</p>
<p> </p>
<div align="center"><strong>“Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories – Some Viewpoints from an Academy”</strong></div>
<p><br /><em>Invited key note address at the Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons (Open Access)’ on 26 March 2009, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore</em></p>
<p><em><strong>N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore</strong></em></p>
<p>1) Dr. Upadhya, Dr. Goudar, Prof. Arunachalam, Dr. Poornima Narayana, Prof. Chan, Prof. Willinsky, Prakash, Chandramohan from the Academy, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, may I on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences express a warm welcome to all of you to this one day Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons’. This is the Academy’s Platinum Jubilee Year, and for NAL it is the Golden Jubilee; and it is a pleasure for the Academy to join NAL and the ‘Centre for Internet & Society’ in hosting this meeting. Thanks also to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for their initiatives in organizing this event. I am here substituting for Prof. D. Balasubramanian, President of the Academy, as he has to be at a meeting at Chennai today. If only the fanciful Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were correct, the world could have split into two copies, and Prof. Balasubramanian also into two copies, one in Chennai and one here; and he could have spoken in both places simultaneously! In the tea break, I can tell you more about this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if any of you are interested.</p>
<p>I am used to giving seminars and colloquiua, on subjects of my research, but never have I given a key note address or an Executive Summary. These are new to me. Also, as you all know, President Obama always needs a teleprompter while giving his fine speeches. Similarly, I cannot speak without a written text in front of me, so please permit me this luxury. Let me also add that I believe in the well-known saying — levity is the soul of wit.</p>
<p>2) The Academy’s efforts in the Open Access direction go back to 1998. It was then that the journal Pramana was made available on the Academy website completely free for all to read. Thereafter all the other Academy journals have also been made freely available online, so now all ten Academy journals are available. Quite recently the speed of access has been considerably improved. In 2006 the Academy entered into an agreement with Springer to co-publish the international online and print editions of the ten journals, but with the proviso that world-wide open access on the Academy website would continue. So now there is the version on the Academy site, which is accessible world-wide and free, and also the value-added SpringerLink version available to paid subscribers. This arrangement is working quite well. The download figures from both sites are quite encouraging, and in any case the visibility of the journals world-wide is much better than it used to be. INSA by the way has signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration and its journals are also freely accessible.</p>
<p>3) Two important things happened in April 2008, just about a year ago. INSA arranged a meeting on Open Access and Copyright issues on 26th April, 2008, again thanks to Prof. Arunachalam’s initiative; and Prof. Balaram wrote an editorial in Current Science on 10th April 2008 on the subject ‘Science Journals: Issues of Access’. I must confess I am completely ignorant and totally naive in all these matters, so whenever necessary I turn to one of Prof. Balaram’s numerous beautiful editorials – and get educated about the finer points of English literature at the same time – I also read some of the steady stream of emails from Prof. Arunachalam which arrive each day. He is constantly exhorting us to do various things – like Mr. This or Mr. That we should give him the honorary title “Mr. Open Access”, it is a onepoint agenda with him. So I learn a lot from both these sources which are at least openly accessible to me. Incidentally a collection of Prof. Balaram’s editorials is likely to be published soon, and several of us have been asked to write editorials to introduce his editorials on various subjects. Science journals are proliferating in number and spiraling in costs. So these raise difficult problems of affordability for libraries and institutions. There are also issues of judging quality, and looking at the economics of the entire process, the whole information chain – overall costs of dissemination of research results, journal publishing and production, refereeing, circulation… who pays for what, who profits, is it reasonable or exorbitant? There is the impact of technologies on all this – these are times of extremely rapid changes, with new undreamt of opportunities appearing all the time. These are true of other arenas of life as well – in education, governance, entertainment, in news communication and so on. As a physicist I cannot help remembering that all this began in 1948 with Claude Shannon’s Classical Theory of Information – a major conceptual revolution which showed that information could be measured, and so could its transmission and fidelity and so on. Such a beautiful set of ideas – a fascinating mathematical structure embedded within the classical theory of probability. And this was accompanied and later followed by technical advances, transistors (1947), semiconductors and so on. Balaram’s view is that Institutional Repositories are more easily achievable than Open Access. This may greatly change the structure and traditional roles of libraries as we know them, at least as far as the sciences are concerned. He mentioned the recent much-heralded Harvard University faculty decision which ‘authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member’s work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost’. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a similar even wider step very recently, on the 18th of this month.</p>
<p>There is also discussion of who pays – or should pay – for the costs of publishing research results – a shift from the traditional ‘researcher pays’ era through ever increasing subscription costs to a new ‘author pays’ arrangement. The idea is that agencies that fund research – whether private or public – should include costs of publication in their support. Balaram mentions that for some high impact journals, the cost to the author for one paper can be as much as Rs. 2.5 lakhs! When I saw this, I could not help wondering – what would someone like Albert Einstein do in such a situation? He was working in a Patent Office in Berne as an assistant third class about a hundred years ago, and of course he had no research funding of any kind; but in his spare time he wrote papers that revolutionized physics! His papers were all published, he even received free reprints – but how would he fare today? One gets the impression that subscription costs for well-known journals in those days were quite reasonable; and in historical accounts one reads that people like Julius Springer were in frequent contact with figures like Arnold Sommerfeld and others in a mutually beneficial and enlightened atmosphere.<br />It seems we have to accept and acknowledge that the methods of doing science, the costs, the sociology of the scientific enterprise, have all changed enormously. It has become intensely competitive, one can even say that cut-throat methods are common, it seems the scientific enterprise is no longer the domain of scholars alone. Claims for priority are severe. In a piece that appeared on 9th February 2009 in the New York Times, celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, the writer said:</p>
<p><em>“One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; and for 12 years more before its sequel, ‘The Descent of Man’, which explored how his theory applied to people.”</em></p>
<p>The old times are gone forever, the times of Darwin and Einstein. The game has become a game, with new rules of play. The new patterns and methods however seem more natural for the younger generation to adjust to, but some of us of an older generation cannot forget the past so easily.</p>
<p>4) The INSA meeting discussed many aspects including the need to educate working scientists about their rights with respect to copyright. There is a recent email from Arunachalam on this from Amsterdam. Again I think younger scientists are aware of their rights more than old fogeys like me, we are the ones needing education. There is a need for change in Copyright patterns, especially for books out of print, to decide when something should move into the Public Domain, and so on. Some of the major INSA recommendations are to granting agencies to mandate Open Access for results of publicly funded research, and to scientists to publish in Open Access journals by choice.</p>
<p>Some tasks are set for the Academies too, such as setting up Institutional Repositories, and to work toward Open Access in all possible ways. In this context, it is possible that the three national Science Academies of India – IASc, INSA and NASI – may try to cooperate in these matters, as they have been doing in the case of science education recently.</p>
<p>5) From its inception, publication of journals has been a major effort of the Indian Academy of Sciences. There has always been a striving to maintain standards. Today we can say about our ten journals, they are reasonably good, about the best from India. The main concerns – in these times of very rapid change and impact of new technologies – are: how do we maintain refereeing and review standards, how to tackle increasing cases of plagiarism, and while coping with all these how do we move in the Open Access direction? Quality of journals is most precious for the Academy, this is hard to achieve and to maintain, the whole enterprise seems to be under pressure.</p>
<p>6) Let me end by returning to Balaram and INSA and mention a recent initiative of the Academy. With generous help from the Indian Institute of Science, we are trying and hoping to set up an Institutional Repository covering all publications of all Fellows past and present. Starting since 1934 – the total number of Fellows is about 1500, 900 present and 600 past. And the total number of research publications may be around 60,000 or 75,000. The hope is that in this Platinum Jubilee year this effort should get started and make some progress. We should try to get a substantial number of entries into the Repository within this year, catch up as soon as possible, then make it an ongoing automatic process. Otherwise many of us here today will also become past Fellows before the job is done. Getting titles and abstracts seems easy, with full text there may be problems, but here Arunachalam tells us authors have more rights than they realize. Let us see what we can do. It seems about 50 institutions in India already have set up such repositories, but we have miles to go before we sleep!</p>
<p>I am happy to have given the first key note address of my life today – I am sure the day’s discussions will be full of ideas and fruitful. It has been a pleasure to have been here, my thanks to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for inviting me, and most of all to Prof. Balasubramanian for asking me to be here in his place.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:01:28ZBlog EntryThe 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files
<b>Film-makers Jamie King (producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series) and Peter Mann, in conversation with Siddharth Chadha, on 'Dark Fibre', their latest production, being filmed in Bangalore</b>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is a documentary/fiction hybrid by J. J. King, producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series, which has already reached over six million people online and is working towards achieving international television distribution, and Peter Mann, a British film-maker whose most recent work is titled 'Sargy Mann'.</p>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal 'people's network'. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it -- but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people's imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the 'security' of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India -- possibly emissaries of a still-greater power -- are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day 'Moby Dick', with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.</p>
<h3>In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore</h3>
<p><strong>Q: How did you get the idea to make Dark Fibre, a fiction film?</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter: </strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>We first met through BritDoc--British Documentary--and they run Channel 4 which is a Film Foundation. They have been good to us. They funded both Steal This Film and 'Sargy Mann'--a film on my father who is a blind man. They organised a meeting of all the directors they had funded and we met there. We were both thinking about what to do next and felt frustrated because we were making documentaries but really wanted to make fiction. We both shared the same ideas, with regard to shooting something completely as it is but presenting it in a fictional context.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>And furthermore, we agreed that documentaries are not really real life. Because at the end of the day, I will keep only what I like, make you look at the way I want you to, I would cut you out of the picture if I don't agree with you. This happens even with the most worthy of the films. And you can be more truthful in fiction because its always a subjective truth. Fiction allows things to remain more real. I don't need an argument in the film. If I can just say, here is one guy's story and this is his story, then you can see the city with no bullshit. The story would allow you to look at things as they are; it's partly that idea behind Dark Fibre.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>This is in some way related to the concept of the artistic truth. You use all the tools at your disposal to tell a story, not just literal facts. This is about presenting things within an atmosphere, presenting things in a context. This then adds up to someone understanding something about the world, and I think fiction serves that better than documentary.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What brings you to India to make Dark Fibre?</strong> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>I think the cablewallah networks are unique. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else myself. India is also in a very, very interesting time and place. The idea of information as a commodity is alive here as it isn't in many other places. The value of information is very high here. There is a western imaginary of Bangalore which is immediately fascinating. It's the place where our information is processed. This is where our credit card and our phone data goes. And it enters a weird black market that we don't understand. This is the cliché. We already have cliché films about Bombay and call centers. We do not want to put a call center into the film because that is already the imagined cliché vision of Bangalore. It is obviously far more sophisticated than that. And in some ways it is far patchier than that. Who are these information workers? What are they doing and at which level are they doing it? Are they the street workers putting cables into walls or is it the guy at Infosys who is hiring people and teaching them to fake English accents? Which is the real information worker? That variegation of information life in Bangalore is interesting, not just to us, but, I think, to everybody. Information dexterity is perceived as the signature of Northern dominance. The ability to manipulate information, to move intellectual property, to transform an idea into a product, to transform someone else's idea into your property. That kind of dexterity is seen as the keynote of western dominance. And watching a developing country transform into an information dextrous economy, seeing information dextrous people is amazing. And then there is the patchiness of it--who gets left behind? Who gets included? Whats missed out and what is added in that vision? How is it manipulated in favor of big businesses? And all of this is fascinating not only from an orientalist's point of view but from a general economic-socio-political point of view.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the underlying concept that brought about Dark Fibre?</strong><br /><strong><br />Jamie:</strong><br /> <br />While making 'Steal This Film' we spent a year on a 36 minute film trying to make an argument that would be staunch, impactful, and radical. What we learned is that it's very difficult to set out to argue your way to the truth. It's relatively easier to let the world itself speak and in the meanwhile observe it in detail. The kind of issues we are engaging with in Dark Fibre are around people's relationships with information and their relationship with freedom. These are very, very hard to nail down and speak about in a radical way. These are things left to the Intellectual Property lawyers, it's already happening, it's already cliché. All the arguments are already written. And even after a year of Steal This Film, it's shown in liberal universities – Wait! Liberal universities? I was supposed to be an anarchist! We want to go further. We want to tell people things through an image.</p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter:</strong></p>
<p>Our idea of relationships is exploring the parallel physical communications networks and the virtual networks. In a city like Bangalore you see it. The traffic here is chaotic but it works. How? There is no answer to that. But it provokes questions. Through Dark Fibre, we are trying to say that there is a potential network in the city (cablewallahs) which is currently being unused and asking what it would take to unlock that potential and where would it take us if that really happens.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Why the cablewallahs? What is so fascinating about them?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie: </strong><br /> <br />Yes, we are interested in the cablewallah network and I think it's quite perverse that it makes people from around here laugh. You see cablewallahs as a fact of life, probably a mundane fact of life. Westerners, Europeans, who are used to orderly deployments of information technology are completely blown away when you tell them that this is how it works in India. Ad hoc, grassroots, messy, out of control.</p>
<strong><br />Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>To the West, it is just unthinkable that the government would allow something like these networks, which supply 24 hours television. To not have these under government control is unthinkable.</p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>So, obviously, we are at a point of transition where it's unthinkable to the Global North and it would become unthinkable here too. We are in the middle of that shift and thats one of the things we are trying to document; the network form, which is horizontal, ad hoc and on the street, becomes not only regulated but seditious.</p>
<strong>Q: Why would you call it seditious?</strong><strong><br /><br />Jamie: <br /><br /></strong>
<p>Because it begins to be seen as almost dangerous. As the regulators move in, they take Direct to Home control of all the deployments of their intellectual properties. The older networks start to look not only like intellectual property right infringements, but their disorder is also seen to be terrorist.</p>
<strong>Q: What is the film trying to propose through linking these cablewallah networks?</strong>
<p> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>Our proposal in this film is - "What if instead of just dying peacefully, someone had the idea of transforming these networks that used to deliver international and local content, by connecting them together, and turning them in to massive local media networks which are used for media sharing, file sharing, your own local channel?" There is a potential because the network is already there.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>In a way, if you think about the microcosm idea of the Internet as a whole, that essentially is what our plot is. On a certain level you would say that it's just a network but then the internet is the most important driving force of the world today.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>The point is that once this idea is out, we can create the infrastructure to connect the entire city, infrastructure we can all use. Everyone starts to have a stake in it, be it the newspapers, TV channels, pirate markets (they will say, "No one is buying our shit anymore because they can share it over the network"), the computer manufacturers, the importer of Chinese routers, a gangster who thinks he can advertise on the network, the intellectual property lawyer... different people start getting the idea that they might have something to do with this network. Basically this is a chaos scenario, from which arises the plot. It is a fictional scenario but is set in the reality of information sharing here today.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the technique you use to make the plot hybrid fictional?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />The main character is played by an actor and he will be an embedded actor, working with the real cablewallah. Parts of it will be documentary, seeing how the cablewallah works and the viewer, through watching this actor, will understand how the network works. We have already spoken to some cablewallahs. And they have been very happy about all this. We see this as sort of embedded journalism, where the embedded actor takes the place of an interviewer. The film is not going to be historical. The characters will have a background and the film is going to have a background, but what we are trying to do is show the 'now'. We want to make it speak about the past and speak about the future. About our future.</p>
<p><strong>Q: 'Steal This Film' was a critique of the international intellectual property regimes. Would this film also be similarly advocative?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />We are going to the next level from 'Steal This Film', and this is more of my argument than Peter's -- that the conversation about Intellectual Propery is over or the film is the last word at all. But I personally need to go somewhere else to say more. I am interested in information in general. And how information affects what we can think, what we can dream, what we can be, how it forms all of us -- that is what we are working on in 'Dark Fibre' and the question of intellectual property is a subset of that question. We spend a lot of time talking about ideas and that's one of the things that connects us. We want to articulate a lot of the philosophical, abstract ideas in this film. And we will see if we can manage to do it in a new context. 'Steal This Film' interested a few people and this will be the next point of departure for discussion.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Peter, do you share Jamie's passion for Intellectual Property?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Peter:</strong><br /><br />Not in the same way. I am very interested in the subject. Anybody who creates work is interested in it. In my last film, there is a constant commentary of a test match going on and as a result of it, it is almost impossible to sell it to television; people who own the rights to the cricket say that we have to pay them thousands of pounds! I am interested in documenting the world as it is and not what is cleaned up for TV. I am interested in the specifics. If you get on a bus in London, the ringtone everyone has on a mobile phone is not a ringtone but a particular song. But you can't put that on film because Mick Jagger, or whoever the artiste is, will want ten thousand pounds for it. The frustration that I face is that it is impossible to put the world that I see in front of me on film. I used to work with TV commercials and you would never see anything in commercials that is not the product being sold. I was once working on a Coca Cola commercial in New York and there was a person who was appointed by Coca Cola to go around the whole set to ensure that no one is drinking anything that is not made by Coca Cola, whether that is water or juice. Anything. And I think all that is about creating a creased world that we don't live in. I am interested in the world, through documentaries or fiction, that we live in. And it is bits of music, it is referenced films, we reference music, we reference sport. Just because people have rights over these, you never see them on film. That is my main area of interest, more than what is happening on the legal front.</p>
<p><img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/stf.jpg/image_preview" alt="stf" height="400" width="284" /> <img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/copy_of_steal_this_film_2.jpg/image_preview" alt="steal this film" height="400" width="280" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files</a>
</p>
No publishersiddharthhistories of internet in Indiainternet and societyDigital AccessIntellectual Property RightsYouTubeart and interventionPiracyOpen Accessinnovationdigital artists2011-08-04T04:41:31ZBlog EntryOpen Access Day celebrated in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance co-organised joint celebrations of Open Access Day in Jamia Millia Islamia campus on the 14th of October 2008. Around 50 people attended the event from different departments in Jamia there were also some participants from the Indian Linux Users Group. CIS also published an Open Access flyer on this day featuring quotations from Sam Pitroda, MS Swaminathan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, Frederick Noronha, Barbara Kirsop and Samir Brahmachari.</b>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0395.jpg/image_mini" alt="Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam" class="image-left" title="Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam" />Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia
Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are
over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even
the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more
than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students
are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam
called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates
for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that
publicly funded research should be freely accessible online,
immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s
first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC
(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for
FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the
Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access
journals.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0388.jpg/image_mini" alt="Dr. Zakir Thomas" class="image-left" title="Dr. Zakir Thomas" />Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the
limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for
drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open
Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of
India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which
is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas
also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems
of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community
such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely
linked career growth in an academic or university context.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0384.jpg/image_mini" alt="Dr. Andrew Lynn" class="image-left" title="Dr. Andrew Lynn" />Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department
of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced
the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over
existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers
are only provided with reference number when experiments are
discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete
experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This
is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in
attempting to re-invent the wheel.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/dsc_0393.jpg/image_mini" alt="Dr. Anshu Bharadwaj" class="image-left" title="Dr. Anshu Bharadwaj" />Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she
was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia
campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access
and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at
the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that
two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir
Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access
day.</p>
<p>Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of
Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting
spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian
context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the
authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open
access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and
cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of
a novelty.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-access-day/open%20access%20day%20flyer.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Open Access Day Flyer">Download Open Access Flyer</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersunilOpen Access2011-08-18T05:06:01ZBlog EntryA2K3 Panel XI: Open Access to Science and Research
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research
<b>Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam participated in the third Access to Knowledge hosted by The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School between September 8-10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference held at the Geneva International Conference Centre brought together hundreds of decision-makers and experts on global knowledge to discuss the urgent need for policy reforms.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://a2k3.org/2008/09/panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research/#more-184">Original Article on A2K3 website</a></p>
<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/../../open-access/a2k3/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science" class="internal-link" title="Why Do We Need Open Access to Science?: A Developing Country Perspective">Download Subbiah Arunachalam's Paper</a>
<div> </div>
<div>Audio file of Session on Open Access to Science and Research (<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/../../open-access/a2k3/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg" class="external-link">Ogg</a>, MP3)<br />
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and
free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Made possible
by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access
to knowledge. This panel featured <a href="http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/%7Echan/">Leslie Chan</a>, of the University of Toronto; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbiah_Arunachalam">Subbiah Arunachalam</a> of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Global Knowledge Partnership; <a href="http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/EveGray">Eve Gray</a> of the Centre for Educational Technology, UCT; and <a href="http://wikis.bellanet.org/asia-commons/index.php/D._K._Sahu">DK Sahu</a> of Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. <a href="http://wikis.bellanet.org/asia-commons/index.php/D._K._Sahu">Peter Suber</a> from the Yale Information Society Project and SPARC moderated this panel.</p>
<p><span id="more-184"></span></p>
<p> It’s a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors
are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from
publishers. But it’s growing quickly for scholarly journal articles,
where journals don’t pay for articles and authors write for impact, not
for money. The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate
research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for
researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where
access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of
fast-rising journal prices.</p>
<p>This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to
promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health
information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA
journals, OA repositories, the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to
Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National
Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their
peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.</p>
<p>The questions to be addressed will include:</p>
<ol><li> How do access barriers slow research in developing countries? How does OA remove those barriers?</li><li>What can universities do to promote OA?</li><li>What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?</li><li>What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?</li><li>What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?</li><li>Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?</li><li>How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?</li><li>How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?</li></ol>
<h3>
<strong>PETER SUBER</strong><br /></h3>
<ol><li>
OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of needless copyright</li><li>
OA is compatible with peer review, copyright, revenue and profit, print, preservation, prestige</li><li>
3622 peer-reviewed OA journals, 1220 OA repositories, 22 university
OA mandates (15 countries), 27 funding agencies OA mandates (14
countries)</li><li>
Part of the problem: journal prices have risen 4 times faser than
inflation since mid-1980s. Indian institute of science is the best
funded research library in india providing access to 10600 serials.</li><li>
Harvard has 98990</li><li>
Yale has 73900</li><li>
Average ARL library = 50,566</li><li>
U of Witwatersrand = 29,309</li><li>U of Malawi = 17000 ejournals, 95 print</li><li>
The case for OA is especially strong for publicly funded research, medical research, research from developing countries</li></ol>
<h3><strong>SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
Why do we needopen access to science?</li><li>
Science as Knowledge commons</li><li>
Created by researchers, a communal activity, science is about sharing, internet has opened new opportunities</li><li>
Primary goal of science is the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of humanity</li><li>
Emergence of open access – seeks to restore knowledge commons to creators. Movement, like everything else, is uneven</li><li>
Physicists vs. chemists</li><li>
UK, Netherlands and USA – have had many more successes</li><li>
Brazil – doing very well – but China and India are not doing so well with open access</li><li>
Restore the knowledge commons is to the community</li><li>
This movement is like any other movement which is uneven</li><li>Developments in India</li>
<ol><li>3.1% papers in chemical abstracts</li><li>30,000 papers a year indexed in SCI</li><li>Problems of Access and Visibility</li></ol>
<li>New Developments:</li>
<ol><li>Consortia – able to provide a lot of journals</li><li>open courseware</li><li>arXiv</li></ol>
<li>Problems: papers that are published are put in inaccessible journals,
and people in global South laboratories would be unable to access this
knowledge. The Government gives the money but the research then ends up
flying out</li><li>The policy front:</li>
<ol><li>Individual efforts</li><li>National Knowledge Commission has recommended OA</li><li>Number of institutional repositories</li><li>Need advocacy and training programmes</li><li>Action missing from key players</li></ol>
<li>Some individuals are doing a great job and putting all their materials online</li><li>Medical information and developing countries</li>
<ol><li>No nation can afford to be without access to S&T research capacity</li><li>Neglected diseases are not a priority for pharmaceutical companies</li><li>HINARI – any country that has per capita less than $1000 is eligible</li></ol>
</ol>
<h3><strong>DK SAHU</strong><br /></h3>
<ol><li>
Infectious diseases (chikungunya goes Italian)</li><li>
Non-infectious diseases (india becoming global hub for diabetes)</li><li>
Industry effects (how safe are clinical trials)</li><li>
Several examples (such as MedKnow, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) of free access to no-fee journals.</li><li>
A journal from India has the most visits from London</li><li>
A journal called International Journal of Shoulder Surgery but visitors are from Melbourne</li><li>
More original research articles, 40+ articles in 2005 vs. 160+
articles in 2008 in IJU, more issues per year for journals, check on
scientific misconduct, international recognition (11 journals in SCI in
2 years)</li><li>
Going online increases citations – this is an open access advantage</li><li>
Scientific output of new economies: medicine</li><li>
Open access publishing is not alone sufficient – there are
disappearing journals. Commercial publishers are taking over, there is
a lack of continuity, non-interoperability/archiving</li><li>
20-80 phenomenon (majority of journals are not OA)</li><li>
Local journals are not preferred (high IF journals)</li></ol>
<h3><strong>LESLIE CHAN</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
Role of Universities and Researchers</li><li>
You need citations in order to advance in academia – if your papers
get picked up and ripple throughout the research arena. What about
policy impact?</li><li>
“Impact factor” is evil. Open access was meant to counter the tyranny
of impact factor, so OA journals should not try to battle it out in
this arena.</li><li>
Issues involve “big science” and “lost science”, research literature
as infrastructure, integrating the gold and green roads to open access.</li><li>
Institutional repositories and open access journals</li><li>
There’s a lot of Big Science that costs a lot of money (like LHC)</li><li>
But we have another big hole – the 10-90Gap. 10% of the global health
research spending is allocated to diseases affecting 90% of the
population</li><li>
The G8 countries account for 85% of most cited articles indexed in ISI</li><li>
The other 126 countries account for 2.5%</li><li>
How much of these journals are relevant in terms of content?</li><li>
We are operating with a dominant model of knowledge dissemination from the Center to the Periphery</li><li>
We end up having “lost science” in the developing world because of that knowledge</li><li>
Perpetuate the cycle of knowledge poverty in this way</li><li>
African countries need to have in place appropriate mechanisms and
infrastructure for training and exploitation of knowledge. This will
enable them to make meaningful evidence based policy that pertains to
local needs</li><li>
Researchers in developing countries ranked access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems</li><li>
HINARI: health sciences</li>
<ol><li>108 countries, 1043 institutions, 5000 journals</li><li>Collaboration of >45 publishers: free or reduced-cost access to journals for developing countries</li><li>Others: eIFL.net, AGORA: agricultural sciences, OERE: environmental sciences, PERI</li><li>Dissemination through information philanthropy. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/1001/lcp100109.html</li></ol>
<li>Open access: the solution to the “lost science”</li><li>Two routes to Open Access (OA) – open access journals and respositories</li><li>African health sciences: two years ago there was a n article
published in this journal and authors found that over 50% of these
drugs were substandard or fake. This got the local newspaper, and then
BBC, and then other researchers started looking at it</li><li>Open Access repositories:</li><li>Institutionally-based (universities, etc) or subject-based (e.g. PubMet Central, arXiv.org)</li><li>Collect copies of articles published by the institutions researchers</li><li>Researchers themselves deposit knowledge</li><li>Benefits for authors (research output instantly accessible for all (higher impact)</li><li>Research output of international research community accessible to author</li><li>Partnerships/collaborative projects develop as a result</li><li>Career prospects advanced – publications noted by authorities</li><li>Opportunities for new research discoveries, data mining etc</li><li>Alternative impact assessment</li><li>Benefits for funding bodies: what has been discovered with our financial support? Was it a good investment?</li><li>Researchers have a moral and intellectual obligation to ensure that their research is accessible</li><li>Universities share a common goal and public mission advancement of knowledge for the betterment of human kind</li><li>Open access is key to the MDG</li></ol>
<h3><strong>EVE GRAY</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
When we talk about open access, we talk about change and change delivery.</li><li>It’s not just intellectual property and copyright issues, but values,
cultures, systems, practices, everything that underlie the process
moving towards scientific research</li><li>We faced the biggest problem in facing change – we’ve seen a massive
overhaul, of transformative reports, of leveraging the country into a
different direction. Undoing the damage of apartheid and colonialism</li><li>What is meant by international? What is meant by local?</li><li>African knowledge for Africa: we need to rejuvenate, regenerate our own knowledge</li><li>SA: first heart transplant in the world. Have their own vaccines. Operate as a leading scientific country</li><li>Growing international competitiveness – publication is perceived as a
matter of journal articles in international journals. Little or no
support for publication in nationally-based publications</li><li>Much research output in grey literature, not easily findable or accessible</li><li>The Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2001</li><li>Research has to address the burning economic issues of a country</li><li>Things are changing…slowly</li><li>Support for open access publications</li><li>What needs to be done – open access journals are necessary.</li><li>Changing values and promotion systems – we have to somehow pick up on
the vision of that vibrant African dance movement, translate this
feeling</li><li>Providing support for publication efforts</li><li>Expand the range of publication outputs</li><li>Ensuring the social impact of research</li><li>There is a huge amount of research being pumped out and being printed out by NGOs</li><li>Great literature is almost inaccessible in universities</li><li>Could not access African journals – no access from their own countries or neighboring countries</li><li>Electric Book Works has manuals for health-care workers – manuals are very high-quality, out of University of Cape Town</li><li>Often forgotten that science information is necessary to trickle
down, if everything is online, we can get things to trickle down</li><li>Harvard said: it is our duty to disseminate our research. Stanford:
Caroline Handy – when you publish research, research for community use
is part of the duty</li></ol>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research</a>
</p>
No publishersunilOpen Access2011-08-18T05:07:56ZBlog EntryOpen Access to Science and Research
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg
<b>Ogg format</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg</a>
</p>
No publisheradminOpen Access2008-09-22T07:39:19ZFileWhy Do We Need Open Access to Science?: A Developing Country Perspective
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science
<b>Prof. Arunachalam's paper presented at the A2k3 conference in Geneva.</b>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science</a>
</p>
No publisheradminOpen Access2008-10-11T09:45:01ZFileOpen 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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:46:11ZFileOpen Equitable Access (PDF)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access
<b>file</b>
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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>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:42:17ZFile