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Q&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>
</p>
No publishersubbiahInterviewOpen Access2023-11-01T12:41:47ZBlog 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 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 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 EntryAfter 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 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 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 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 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 Entry 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 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>
<p>
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>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:04:54ZBlog EntryWhy 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>
<p>
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 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 Access2008-09-22T07:39:19ZFileKnow your Users, Match their Needs!
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/know-your-users
<b>As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. The following post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society.</b>
<p></p>
<p>Almost ten years have passed since the Montreal Declaration on
Free Access to Law (FAL) was signed by eight legal information institutes and other
FAL initiatives. Today, the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is growing with over 30 initiatives having signed onto the Declaration and providing free, online
access to legal information. While the movement continues to gain momentum, the
big question no longer remains <em>why</em> we need
free access to law, but instead <em>how</em> FAL initiatives can continue to do so sustainably in the long-term. The principles of access
and justice underpinning the FALM have been well-argued and few would dispute the
notion that citizens ought to have access to the laws under which they are
governed. As the Montreal Declaration states: "Public legal information from
all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of
humanity…Maximizing access to his information promotes justice and the rule of
law" (2002).</p>
<p>Regardless of legal system or political context, the
importance of securing free online access to the law has been recognized from a
variety of perspectives. Whether FAL is considered a critical democratic
function or simply an essential efficiency within any legal system, it is
difficult to contest that the internet has increased the accessibility of and
ease with which legal information is being published and shared online. Setting
the ideological and practical foundations of the movement aside, effectively
demonstrating the impact of FAL initiatives and to secure their sustainability in
the long-term remains the next big challenge for the FALM. Today, there is a
growing necessity for grounded and realistic indicators that can validate some
of the long-held assumptions around the impacts and outcomes of FAL initiatives.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, there is also a need for a more
nuanced understanding of the factors that influence the sustainability of FAL
initiatives— particularly in resource-scarce and often nebulous legal systems of
the Global South.</p>
<p>This blog post provides some insight into the questions
above through a brief summary of the results of the study <a class="external-link" href="http://crdi.org/ar/ev-139395-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html">Free Access to Law—Is
it Here to Stay?</a> This global comparative study was carried out by LexUM (Canada)
and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for
Internet and Society. The project set out to begin providing answers to some of
these critical questions around the impacts and sustainability of the FALM. It
was initially hypothesized in the study that the sustainability of a FAL
initiative rests upon a particular string of contingent factors. To begin, a particular
condition would incentivize the creation of the FAL initiative — more often than
not meeting the unmet needs of those requiring access to legal information. Next, if the FAL initiative is able to provide
the service within a favourable context, it was suspected that it would produce
favourable outcomes for both users and society at large. In turn, if the FAL
initiative was able to provide benefits to users, it was theorized that these benefits
would then stimulate reinvestment into the FAL initiative — forming a positive
and sustainable feedback loop. </p>
<p>As the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/docs/a2k/Best%20Practices%20Hand%20Book_03sept11.pdf">Good Practices Handbook</a> highlights, the research
hypothesis provided an accurate reading of what the sustainability chain of a
FAL initiative might look like in<em> practice</em>.
If unable to keep up with the evolving information requirements of their users,
this study suggests that FAL initiatives run the risk of FAL becoming outdated
and even outperformed by either government-based or private sector
initiatives. This is why FAL initiatives
must continue to be innovative and find new ways to meet users’ needs. Approaches take my include keeping their
collections up to date, fine-tuning their services or even reinventing
themselves through the provision of value-added services. Gathered from the
experiences of the eleven countries across Africa and Asia examined in this
study, the following is a brief summary of the nine “Good Practices” that emerging
FAL initiatives can consider:</p>
<ol><li><strong>The FAL initiative
should establish clear objectives</strong>: Before doing anything, the FAL initiative
should decide what exactly it’s setting out to do…critical components such as
content selection, targeted audience, expected reach, search functionalities
and other website features help determine priorities and evaluate capacity to
achieve these objectives.</li><li><strong>How to be small and
do big things</strong>: Most of the FAL initiatives studied as part of this project
were formed of small teams (often less than five individuals). Initially, this may
appear to pose a risk for sustainability. However, we saw a number of ways in
which small teams have proven to be innovative, flexible, and able to thrive in
environments of scarcity. However, as much as small teams can be seen as a
source of innovation, they may also pose a risk in the medium to long-term. </li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
require expertise in both IT and legal information</strong>: Legal information management
experts understand how the law is applied, how different texts and parts of
texts speak to one another, and how these documents are used. IT experts can
imagine a variety of ways to address these needs. If both forms of expertise is
not available within the team of a FAL initiative, institutional partnerships
provide promising sites for collaborative support. For example, the FALM
constitutes a rich source of expertise and has proven to be a site of
collaboration between established and emerging FAL initiatives. Further,
universities have proven to be a significant source of human and financial
resources for several FAL initiatives.</li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
should look to where they are headed (but not too far ahead)</strong>: Because the
purpose of a FAL initiative is to provide free online access to the law, it
must secure access to this data for regular publication. How will legal
information be received and organized by the initiative? In what format will it
be published in? Early on, FAL initiatives need to develop both internal and
external workflow processes to ensure that the initiative is able to provide regular
access to updated information. Furthermore, an important finding of the study
suggests that context plays a much larger role in a project’s sustainability. Consideration
should be given to a country’s ICT infrastructure, the transparency of a
government and their access to information regimes, and the nature of the legal
information market when designing the workflows of an FAL initiative.</li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
should work with the ICT infrastructure in place</strong>: The quality and
consistency of internet access varies across countries in the Global South. FAL
initiatives should remain aware of how stakeholders and users are accessing the
internet and develop their service accordingly. Considering the often
intermittent nature of internet connectivity in the Global South, providing
users with offline access to databases is a practical alternative.</li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
should use Free and Open Source Software</strong>: FAL initiatives should maximise
their use of FLOSS. All FAL initiatives use FLOSS to some extent and without
these flexible and cost-effective alternatives, it would be safe to infer that
the FALM would have grown as quickly as it has.</li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
should be sensitive to culture</strong>: FAL initiatives rely on stakeholders and
communities of users. Staying mindful of the professional and organizational
cultures within a country may provide the initiative with a source of community
support which may become a sustainability strategy. Further, integrated or parallel social
networking platforms can play an essential role in community-building around
the FAL initiatives and can also serve as another source of content in
resource-scarce environments.</li><li><strong>Find your users,
match their needs</strong>: Project goals and appropriate strategies should be based
on an in-depth understanding of the needs of those using the FAL initiative. As
the sustainability chain suggests, when FAL initiatives produce positive
outputs and outcomes, stakeholders will reinvest in the initiative to ensure
its sustainability. If a user’s needs are effectively met by an FAL initiative,
this group can provide either the resources or impetus for its continued
success. Identifying who your users are and staying aware of their needs is a
good way to secure reinvestment into the project.</li><li><strong>FAL initiatives
should diversify funding sources</strong>: This may be easier said than
done — reinvestment can be the most challenging aspect of sustaining a FAL
initiative. Early on, initiatives that receive donor-based funding benefit
substantially upon investment. However, these initiatives are put at
significant risk once initial seed funding has been depleted. Similarly, FAL
initiatives that partnerships with other during their start up phase face
similar fates as securing long-term service delivery can become a challenge.
Possible funding sources included throughout the study include, among others:
government, international development agencies or NGOs, the judiciary, law
societies and the sale of value-added services.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>In addition to these good practices, this study has emphasized
the role the that the FALM has played in helping redefine online legal information as a public good. Each
of the case studies demonstrates in a unique way the value openness plays in a
legal information ecosystem, and how a robust digital legal information commons can be of
benefit to users. Traditionally, the legal information market has been dominated by a select
number of commercial players. In response, the FALM has created an important
transnational space within which conversations around the provision of and
access to legal information as a political right <em>rather</em> than a commodity to be bought and sold
can take place. Encouragingly, governments in the Global South are catching and FAL initiatives from the South have proven to be immense sources of innovation in their own right. In Indonesia, for example, FAL initiatives have laid the
groundwork for emerging government initiatives that are now prioritizing the provision of free, online access to legal and other government information. Today, I believe that we are witnessing an important paradigm
shift as governments are beginning to recognize that “access” to legal information is a
right to be held by the public.</p>
<p>Despite such headway, it is needless to say that FAL initiatives in the Global South
continue to face immense sustainability challenges. However, it is hoped that this
study can provide some practical insights for emerging initiatives
and partnerships. However, as more FAL initiatives begin entering into the next
stage of maturity and growth, it is more important than ever that they are
able to adapt to adverse environmental changes and form
long-lasting partnerships with information sources within government. Most
importantly, FAL initiatives must remain dynamic and responsive to users’
needs. To do so, they must be able to tailor and expand their services, offerings
and user-base. To secure their sustainability and relevance in the long term, they must also be continuously strengthening their ties and maintain open communication flows with
users. If FAL initiatives are able to successfully make the
transition from being supply side initiatives to becoming demand driven services,
the FALM will be well-positioned for another decade of sustainable growth. </p>
<p>Download the collection below:</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/Links%20in%20the%20Chain%20-%20Volume%20I%20issue%20I.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Links in The Chain - Volume I"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pdf.png" title="Know your Users, Match their Needs!" height="16" width="16" alt="" class="subMenuTitle" /></a><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/good-practices.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Good Practices Handbook">Good Practices
Handbook </a>(426 kb)<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/Links%20in%20the%20Chain%20-%20Volume%20I%20issue%20I.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Links in The Chain - Volume I"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pdf.png" title="Know your Users, Match their Needs!" height="16" width="16" alt="" class="subMenuTitle" /></a><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/environmental-scan.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Environmental Scan Report">Environmental Scan Report</a> (860 kb)<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/Links%20in%20the%20Chain%20-%20Volume%20I%20issue%20I.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Links in The Chain - Volume I"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pdf.png" title="Know your Users, Match their Needs!" height="16" width="16" alt="" class="subMenuTitle" /></a><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/local-researchers-methodology-guide.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Local Researcher's Methodology Guide">Local Researcher's Methodology Guide</a> (1225 kb)</p>
<p>The full collection of case studies and the Good Practices
Handbook was originally published on the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/cij/acces-libre-au-droit/resultats">Project Website</a>. The Centre for Internet and Society oversaw the following case studies: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/docs/a2k/resultats/indiafinaljul11.pdf">India</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/docs/a2k/resultats/hongkongfinaljul11.pdf">Hong Kong</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/docs/a2k/resultats/indonesiafinaljul11.pdf">Indonesia</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.informationjuridique.ca/docs/a2k/resultats/Berne_Final_2011_July.pdf">Philippines</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/know-your-users'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/know-your-users</a>
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No publisherrebeccaResearchFeaturedOpen AccessOpennessPublications2012-02-27T15:06:14ZBlog EntryThe Violence of Knowledge Cartels
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels
<b>We are all struck with a sense of loss, grief and shock since we heard of the death of Aaron Swartz, by suicide. People who have been his friends have written heart-felt obituaries, saluting his dreams and visions and unwavering commitment to a larger social good. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The blog post was <a class="external-link" href="http://hybridpublishing.org/2013/01/the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels/">published in the Hybrid Publishing Lab</a> on January 17, 2013.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/">Colleagues</a> who have worked with him and have been inspired by his achievements have documented the quirky intelligence and the whimsical genius that Swartz was. <a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/2013/01/the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels/#disqus_thread">His fellow crusaders</a>, who have stood by him in his impassioned battle against the piracy centred witch-hunt have helped spell out the legal and political conditions, which might not have directly led to this sorry end, but definitely have to be factored in his own negotiations with depression. All these voices have enshrined Aaron Swartz, the 26 year old boy-wonder who was just trying to make the world a better place where information is free and everybody has unobstructed access to knowledge. They have shown us that there is an ‘Aaron sized hole’ in the world, which is going to be difficult to fill. These are voices that need to be heard, remembered, and revisited beyond the urgency of the current tragedy and it is good to know that this archive of grief and outpouring of emotional support will stay as a living memory to the legend that Swartz had already become in his life-time.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, I want to take this opportunity to not talk about Aaron Swartz. I am afraid that if I do, I will end up either factualising him – converting him into a string of data sets, adding to the already burgeoning details about his life, his achievements, and of course the gory court case that has already been the centre of so much rage and debate. I am also afraid that if I do talk about Aaron Swartz, I will end up making him into a creature of fictions – talking about his dreams and his visions and his outlook and making him a martyr for a cause, forgetting to make the distinction that Aaron died, not for a cause, but believing in it. I, like many people who were affected, in many degrees of separation and distance, am taking the moment to mourn the death of somebody who should have lived longer. But I want to take the moment of Aaron’s death to talk about heroisms and sacrifices and everyday politics of what he believed in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let me talk about Shyam Singh, who is as far removed from Swartz as possible. Shyam Singh is a 74 year-old-man in India, who runs a corner photocopying shop on the Delhi School of Economics campus in New Delhi. Singh is not your young, charismatic, educated, tech-savvy oracle. He spent a large part of his life – 3 decades – working at the University’s Central Research Library and the Ratan Tata Library, operating unwieldy machines that were panting to keep up with new innovations in technologies of digital reproduction. It took him thirty years of work to muster enough savings so that he could buy a couple of photocopying machines and start a small photocopying shop at Ramjas College in New Delhi. After his retirement, the Delhi School of Economics actually invited him to come and set up the Rameshwari Photocopying shop on the campus, for the students at the school. He had an official license from the University, for which he paid a sum of 10,000 Indian Rupees, to work on a profit model that depended on high volume and low costs. The shop was more or less a landmark for students and professors alike, who would come to get their course material photocopied out of books that they could almost never afford to buy and were not easily available in public lending libraries. The shop keeper also compiled course-packs, which allowed students to buy all the texts prescribed for their curricula (but not necessarily available in multiple or digital copies in the library), at affordable rates.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It came as quite a shock to Singh, when one day, he was told that a consortium of publishers – Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor and Francis Group – had filed a case in the high court of New Delhi against him, claiming damages of 6 million Indian Rupees for wilful copyright infringement for commercial gains. Singh did not have the ideological apparatus that was available to Swartz, nor the competence to talk about the unfairness of the legal claim. He did, in several interviews, talk about India’s avowed policy on universal education and how he had always thought of himself as helping in that process of equal access to students who would otherwise have been unable to afford the education. The case against Singh is already in the courts, and the High Court has issued an injunction restraining him from providing copies of chapters from textbooks published by the three international publishers who have moved the court. And while he has found support from the academic, legal and student community from around the country, there is no denying that he is going to be fighting an expensive battle against a large Intellectual Property protection conglomeration of publishers who are all ready to make a ‘scapegoat’ and an ‘example’ of this small photocopy shop, in their efforts at enforcing paid access to scholarly and academic material in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I desperately hope that Singh shall not find himself as persecuted as Swartz did, by the publishers, by the public prosecutors, and by an indifferent citizenry who is quite happy to benefit from the fruits that might fall out of this case about loosened Intellectual Property and symbolically support the idea that knowledge should be free, but do not think that this is a problem that affects them in particular. True, in both these instances, we have seen people oscillating between rue and rage, expressing their dissatisfaction with these market driven information cartels which refuse to unleash the information and knowledge that we all believe should be made free. But in those expressions of anger and shock, is also a denial of the fact that we have all been complicit in building, supporting and sustaining these worlds because doing otherwise would inconvenience our schedules, lives and careers. Swartz and Singh, in their own way, had to become the poster-children, the martyrs, for us to take notice about a battle that affects us uniformly but doesn’t feature in our everyday practices and conviction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/">Intellectual Property and Openness</a> are seen as legal battles for somebody else to fight. Even with academia and research, which is the most complicit in building these exploitative knowledge industries, there is very little discussion or even recognition of the untenable behemoths that we have been feeding in our quest for tenures, publications and popularity. For an everyday person, as you can imagine, this is even more removed from their quotidian life practices. The distancing and alienation gets even more acerbated by the fact that these battles are often fought silently. We have legal stalwarts fighting it out in court rooms. Academic scholars and researchers are drawing their pens and swords in academic journals. Political activists are championing their causes in conferences and summits. And in all of this, we have produced a gated activism, where the threshold of engagement and investment is so high that unless there are these dying and the wounded to hold out for public scrutiny, the world moves on, grumbling slightly at the restriction on torrent downloads or the unavailability of its favourite book in the local markets, but thinking that it has nothing to do with them. They are not even an audience to these battles. And if indeed, they are audiences, they are the kinds that go to a play, eat loudly out of crinkly wrappers, talk on their cellphones in the middle of the denouement and leave before the play ends, because they don’t want to miss their favourite TV show about dancing animals back at home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I do not want to hyperbolise and so I will not endorse the often suggested idea that knowledge should be as free as air and water – for a lot of us who have been looking at the private-public nexus in developing globalised countries already know that free air and water are a myth and that there are heavy prices to be paid for them. But I do want to suggest that it is time to think of the knowledge wars as human wars, as deeply implicated in our understanding of who we are, what kind of societies we want to live in, and what worlds we want to build for the future generations to inherit. These are fights that are not only about getting things for free – they are about understanding what is sacred and central to our civilization impulse and disallowing a small clutch of private bodies to make their profits by selling it to us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is time to maybe look around and see how manipulations of power and the algebra of survival has made us support corrupt and corrupting systems that restrict free information and knowledge. It is time to learn about the issues at stake – from providing cheap drugs to those in underprivileged areas to offering conditions of affordable education for the masses – when we talk about intellectual property regimes. It is time to organize, question, re-evaluate our own everyday practices, and realise that the fights against intellectual property are not battles that are fought once-every-heroic-death. That these are things that we need to strive for on a daily basis, without the need of an external catalyst or a dramatic death of somebody who died believing in a cause that was supposed to make the world a better place for those in the audience.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The next time, let us not wait for shame, guilt, horror, or surprise to catalyse us in taking note of the growing restrictions on information and knowledge in our world. Let us not wait for the emergence of another Swartz or Singh, persecuted by exploitative knowledge cartels that do untold harm to our sense of being human and being free in information societies. And let us keep our fingers crossed, that wherever he is, Swartz has found peace, solace, and the freedom that he was fighting for, and that Singh does not suffer a fate that might denude him of his livelihood and life’s savings.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah (<a href="https://twitter.com/latelyontime" title="latelyontime">@latelyontime</a> / <a href="mailto:nishant.shah@inkubator.leuphana.de">nishant.shah@inkubator.leuphana.de</a> )is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels</a>
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No publishernishantOpennessOpen Access2013-01-18T07:33:53ZBlog Entry