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Towards 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>
<p>
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>
</p>
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>
<hr />
<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>
<hr />
<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>
<hr />
<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>
<p>
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>
</p>
No publishernishantOpennessOpen Access2013-01-18T07:33:53ZBlog EntryCelebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013
<b>Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013</a>, a two day event organized by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a> to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Indic_Languages">Spoken Wikipedia</a>, and to bridge the <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/27/nine-out-of-ten-wikipedians-continue-to-be-men/">gender gap</a> of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Day 1</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.</p>
<h3>Day 2</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.</p>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/IMG_4124.jpg/@@images/31ee6a90-3009-45fa-8166-6a30bbf5d590.jpeg" style="float: left; " title="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" class="image-inline" alt="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" /></p>
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<p>One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org">WikiCommons</a>. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases.</p>
<br />"Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on <a class="external-link" href="http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%9C">Marathi Wikipedia.</a>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.</p>
<h3>Also see:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Wikipedia Summit Pune: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Wikipedia Club Pune: <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune</a></li>
<li>Pictures: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Spoken Wikipedia Project: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India</a></li>
<li>Pune Club facebook page: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune">https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Video</h3>
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<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" height="371" width="450">
<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature"><embed height="371" width="450" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaDigital ActivismAccess to KnowledgeDigital AccessWikimediaWikipediaYouthVideoOpen AccessOpennessEvent2013-04-16T12:48:40ZBlog EntryAaron Swartz: The First Martyr of the Free Information Movement
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement
<b>Well known American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist died on January 11, 2013. Lawrence Liang from the Alternative Law Forum discusses with Newsclick the tragic loss. The interview was conducted by Prabir Purkayastha. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">This interview was originally published by <a class="external-link" href="http://newsclick.in/international/aaron-swartz-first-martyr-free-information-movement">NewsClick</a> on January 19, 2013.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Discussing on the immediate background in which this tragic event happened, Lawrence says that all of us are collectively mourning the death of an extremely talented individual. He adds that Aaron was facing a very difficult trial ahead. A couple of years ago he had plugged his computer on to the MIT network and had downloaded approximately four million articles from JSTOR (primary database for social science and other science journals) and he had intended to make freely available. This act of his in many ways marks Aaaron's short life but one which is marked by a certain commitment and activism around the idea of free knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Lawrence further says that his anger at databases like JSTOR was the fact that they were charging extraordinary amounts of money to provide access (which meant that they were not available to most people in the world) without paying any royalty to the authors contributing to the article or to the people who do the peer review of the articles. Here is a scenario which is rent control of the worst kind essentially of knowledge which is completely privatised and enclosed (public knowledge which is enclosed in this particular way).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most researchers and academics who work and contribute towards making of journals do not get compensated for it but are paid for by public money because they happen to be employed by universities or research centres. And then all this material goes behind pay walls. And that is the context in which we need to understand Aaron's life. Click below to watch the full interview:</p>
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<h2>Video</h2>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Bg87SR0TRw4" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement</a>
</p>
No publisherlawrenceOpennessVideoOpen Access2013-01-24T12:26:02ZBlog EntryWikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session
<b>On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a>'s <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge</a> team was invited to demonstrate the usefulness of Wikipedia for the consultants of <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nic.in/">National Informatics Centre</a> (NIC) working for the <a class="external-link" href="http://data.gov.in/">Data.gov.in</a> and the <a class="external-link" href="http://india.gov.in/">National Portal of India</a> at NIC's New Delhi office. Data portal being one of the very important open data portal of the Government of India has worked immensely to populate over 2400 datasets from 32 departments participating in it.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many of the data need to be transcribed in popular medias especially on web. Wikipedia being world's largest online encyclopedia could be one such primary platform to use these useful data. <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish">Subhashish</a> from A2K team explained the usefulness of Wikipedia for the people associated with this project. The session went with discussing about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_policies">policies</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style">Manual of style</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars">Five pillars of Wikipedia</a> followed by a demonstration of editing articles on English Wikipedia. Post editing session there was a discussion session about the notability and how to check accuracy of articles by using valid references.</p>
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<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/11DMH5w">http://bit.ly/11DMH5w</a></p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpen StandardsDigital GovernanceDigital AccessOpen DataOpen ContentOpen AccessOpennessOpen Innovation2013-07-17T06:33:20ZBlog EntryUse made of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers to Publish their Findings
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings
<b>Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) ournals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><span class="person_name">Muthu, Madhan</span> and <span class="person_name">Subbiah, Arunachalam</span> (2011) <em>Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings.</em> Current Science, 100 (9). pp. 1297-1306.</strong><strong> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-of-open-access-journals-for-publishing-findings" class="internal-link">Download the full research paper</a></strong></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">How aware are Indian researchers of open access (OA) and its advantages 10 years after Stevan Harnad<a name="fr1"></a> visited India and spoke about the need for adopting OA archiving? To answer this question, we looked at India’s participation in both OA institutional archiving and Indian researchers using OA journals to publish their findings. In this article, our emphasis is on the use made of selected high impact OA journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E, the three leading publishers of open access papers in terms of number of papers published annually.<a name="fr2"></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR)<a name="fr3"></a> lists 2,047 repositories (data gathered on 17 December) of which 59 are from India. Included in the 59 repositories are the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) journals repository, the Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology Journal repository and repetitive entries of five institutional repositories, viz. EPrints@CMFRI, EPrints@IIMK, EPrints@MKU, repository of INFLIBNET and the repository at the Cochin University of Science and Technology. Many Indian repositories listed in ROAR are inactive. There are at least five other Indian repositories not listed in ROAR, viz. Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, and Vidyanidhi, Mysore, both repositories of theses; International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Ministry of Earth Sciences and SARAI. In all, there are 33 OA repositories in India which include 24 institutional repositories, 4 subject repositories and 5 dedicated theses and dissertation repositories. The quality of tese repositories varies widely as well as their maintenance. Considering that there are more than 450 universities and several hundred research laboratories in the government, corporate and the non-government sectors, one would expect a very large number of institutional repositories in India. Furthermore, many of these repositories are not filling fast enough.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Out of the 5,897 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or DOAJ (data accessed on 17 December 2010)<a name="fr4"></a> 276 are from India. Another database, Open J-Gate 5 , developed by the Bangalore-based Informatics India, lists 7,967 OA periodicals worldwide which include 4,773 peer-reviewed journals including 339 peer-reviewed Indian journals (Figure 1). There are a few other Indian OA journals which are yet to be listed in DOAJ and indexed in Open J-Gate. For example, two journals published by the Indian National Science Academy (Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy) and two journals published by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences) are neither indexed in Open J-Gate nor listed in DOAJ. DOAJ does not index Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources (formerly known as Natural Product Radiance), published by NISCAIR. In all, there are more than 360 Indian OA journals. Needless to say a vast majority of papers, published in the Indian OA journals, are mostly written by Indian researchers. Incidentally, two Indian journal publishers, viz. Indian Academy of Sciences and MedKnow Publications figure in the top 14 OA journal publishers in the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) survey. <a name="fr5"></a> Our focus here is papers published by Indian researchers in high-impact OA journals published outside India. We chose all seven journals published by PLoS, 10 BMC journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. We gathered data from the Science Citation Index – Expanded section of Web of Science between 11 and 29 December 2010. Countries were assigned to papers based on addresses in the by-line. If three authors then the paper was assigned to all three countries. Therefore, the sum of papers from different countries will be far more than the actual number of papers indexed in Web of Science.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Results</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>BioMed Central Journals</strong><br />BioMed Central, established in May 2000, is the world’s leading OA publisher<a name="fr6"></a> in the fields of medical research and biology and publishes 208 OA journals as noted on 28 December 2010. Not all of them commenced publication at the same time, not even the same year. Different journals started publication in different years. So far these journals together have published 99,717 articles, including 83,893 original research papers and 15,824 other types of articles (Table 1). Indian researchers have published 1,872 original research papers and 92 other types of articles (such as review articles) in these 208 journals. To see India’s record in perspective, we have provided data for 11 other countries. These include the other three BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China), South Korea and Israel, both of which have scientific enterprises comparable in size to that of India, and six advanced countries. USA stands out with close to 29,300 papers, followed by Great Britain (9,464 papers) and Germany (9,340 papers). China is way ahead of other BASIC countries, and India is ahead of Israel, Korea and South Africa in the number of papers published. Brazil is ahead of India in total number of papers but falls behind in the number of original research papers. It will be interesting to see why researchers from Brazil publish such a large number of review articles.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of these 208 journals, only 77 have been listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2009 and assigned an impact factor. (For a journal to get indexed in JCR it should have been in existence for longer than two years). We list in Table 2 those journals with impact factor greater than 4.000. Among BMC journals, Genome Biology has the highest impact factor (6.626). Other high impact factor journals are Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases (5.825), BMC Biology (5.636) and Breast Cancer Research (5.326). The following nine journals have published more than 2,000 papers so far (since they became OA journals): BMC Bioinformatics (4,078), BMC Genomics (3,204), Critical Care (2,787), BMC Public Health (2,580), Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica (2,575), BMC Cancer (2,344), Arthritis Research and Therapy (2,286), Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research (2,255) and Genome Biology (2,069). Ten journals have published more than 1000 papers but less than 2000. Four journals have published less than 100 papers. Five journals have citations per paper (CPP) higher than 10. These are Genome Biology (18.35), Veterinary Research (12.27), Genetics Selection Evolution (11.71), Respiratory Research (11.03) and Breast Cancer Research (10.33).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The number of papers published by authors in India in 10 BMC journals during 2003–2010 (data gathered on 13December 2010), the number of citations to these papers and cites/papers are provided in Table 3. To see the Indian papers in perspective, we have also given the total number of papers published in these 10 journals during the same period, number of citations received by them and the average number of citations per paper (CPP) as well as similar data for 11 other selected countries including five scientifically middle-level countries and six advanced countries. A quick look at the table reveals that there is a perceptible difference between the middle-level countries and the advanced countries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers have published 4.53% of the papers that have appeared in Malaria Journal, 2.49% of papers appearing in BMC Genomics, 1.77% of papers appearing BMC Public Health, 1.7% of papers appearing in BMC Bioinformatics, and 1.61% of papers appearing in BMC Evolutionary Biology. India’s participation in the other five journals is rather meagre. Looking at CPP, Indian contributions in nine of the ten journals have a lower CPP than the world papers. Year after year, Thomson Reuters’s ScienceWatch has shown that Indian research papers on an average have been cited less often than world papers in every field<a name="fr7"></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But Indian papers in BMC Public Health have been cited on average 7.45 times compared to the world average of 5.59 CPP. This is rare and the researchers responsible for this deserve to be congratulated. It will be worth examining if India’s performance in public health research is of a higher class overall than research in other areas of medicine. The number of papers from China in BMC journals accounts for a much larger per cent than papers from India. For example, papers from China account for 10.0% in BMC Cancer, 7.75% in BMC Genomics, 5.74% in BMC Bioinformatics and 5.41% in BMC Evolutionary Biology. This is to be expected, as China is second only to USA in the number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and publishes more than three times the number of papers as India. Except in Breast Cancer Research, in which journal China publishes about 1% of papers, in all other journals, China’s CPP value is less than the journal average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although Brazil publishes fewer papers than India, it has an enviable CPP record in at least five journals considered here: Arthritis Research and Therapy (15.88; journal average 8.64), Genome Biology (23.43; journal average 22.50), Critical Care (11.96; journal average 8.23), Breast Cancer Research (10.71; journal average 8.52) and BMC Public Health (6.54; journal average 5.59). Israel, a small country with only a few research institutions and universities, has published fewer papers, but has a CPP higher than the journal average in seven of the ten journals. South Korea has a higher CPP for its papers in Arthritis Research and Therapy than the journal average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Except for BMC Public Health, in all the other journals USA accounts for not less than 25% of papers and in some well over 40%. Also, in each of the 10 journals, USA has recorded higher CPP than the journal average. Great Britain is a distant second, but its share of papers in BMC Public Health and Malaria Journal is even higher than that of USA. Britain’s interest in public health and malaria research could be explained by over two centuries of her colonial connections. Also, in both these journals, Britain’s CPP is greater than the journal average. In fact, in both BMC Genomics and Malaria Journal, the CPP is highest for Britain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Germany has published a larger number of papers in BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Cancer than Britain and France and these have been cited more often as well. Germany has published close to 10% of the papers in Genome Biology and these papers have recorded the highest CPP (33.08 compared to 25.78 for USA).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Acta Crystallographica<br /></strong>The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) publishes Acta Crystallographica in six sections. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online is the IUCr’s first electronic-only journal<a name="fr8"></a> It is a rapid communication journal for the publication of concise reports on inorganic, metal-organic and organic structures. Unlike other fee-based OA journals published in the western world, this journal charges a modest USD 150 per article and it also offers a fee waiver for authors from developing countries.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">During the seven years 2003–2009, this journal published 22,887 papers which were cited 35,078 times (Table 4). China accounted for more than 47% of these papers, followed by India (9.1%). However, papers from India averaged a higher CPP (2.13) than Germany, Britain and USA. Crystallography is a known area of strength in India. The earliest Indian paper in this field by Banerjee<a name="fr9"></a> of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science appeared in 1930. Today, chemical crystallography is arguably stronger than all other aspects of crystallography in India, although in the early years physicists dominated the field. Work in biological crystallography started when G. N. Ramachandran, a physicist, started his work at the University of Madras in the 1950s. It will be interesting to look at the historical evolution of crystallography in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>PLoS journals</strong><br />We will now turn our attention to the PLoS journal<a name="fr10"></a> There are seven journals in all. PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is somewhat different from the other six PLoS journals. It is an international, peer-reviewed, OA, online publication that accepts reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. In-house PLoS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards ensure fast, fair, and professional peer review. In Table 5, we provide data on the number of papers published each year by authors from the 12 countries during 2006–2010. The USA has published the largest number of papers, viz. 6,501, which is more than four times that of Britain, its nearest rival. India has published 262 papers and has the least CPP, viz. 2.34, whereas all the other countries have a CPP of above 3.0. Britain has the highest, viz. 4.76, closely followed by Germany (4.73). The values for other countries are: USA (4.36), France (4.23), Canada (4.29), Israel (3.98), Japan (3.86), South Korea (3.82), South Africa (3.46), China (3.24) and Brazil (3.01). The journal has published during this period 14,071 papers at a CPP of 3.99. The number of papers published by the other six journals, number of times they are cited and impact factors of these journals are given in Table 6. In these journals, India has published 120 papers and these have been cited 1,022 times for an average of 8.52 CPP. The corresponding figures for other middle-level countries are: China (212 papers and 11.39 CPP), South Korea (62 papers and 17.47 CPP), Brazil (131 papers and 10.21 CPP), South Africa (137 papers and 18.42 CPP) and Israel (184 papers and 15.46 CPP).</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Looking at individual journals (Table 7), one sees that in general the middle-level countries have published very few papers compared to the advanced countries. There are exceptions though. Israel has published 73 papers in PLoS Computational Biology, comparable to France’s 92 and higher than Canada’s 55 and Japan’s 46. In this journal Israel’s CPP (8.5) is comparable to the world average (9.1) and the CPP of Britain and higher than the CPP of Japan. In PLoS Medicine, India’s 38 papers have a CPP of 6.92, far below the journal average of 14.12, and less than that of the other 11 countries considered. In PloS Biology, India has a CPP of 15.77, far below the journal average of 31.69, whereas South Korea (54.78) and China (32.12) have a CPP higher than the journal average. In PLoS Genetics, Brazil, South Africa and Israel have a higher CPP than the journal average. Authors from USA publish the largest number of papers in each of the six PLoS speciality journals, followed by Britain. But USA leads in CPP in only two of them, viz. PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Computational Biology. Britain has the highest CPP for PLoS Genetics followed by USA. Japan has the highest CPP for PLoS Medicine followed by France. Canada has the highest CPP for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS Biology, the first of the PLoS journals.</p>
<h3 align="JUSTIFY">Discussion</h3>
<p align="JUSTIFY">There has been a perceptible increase in the number of OA papers published in journals. Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories.<a name="fr11-12"></a> A recent forecast by Springer based on Web of Science data has shown that at the current rate of growth journal articles which are OA will likely grow from 8.7% in 2010 to 27% by 2020 assuming a constant annual growth rate of 20% as against 3% growth rate of papers indexed in Web of Science.<a name="fr13"></a> It will be interesting to see if the number of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals also increase year after year. Sathyanarayana of Informatics India tells us that the per cent of OA papers published by Indian researchers as revealed by Open J-Gate is higher than the world average (private communication), but we need a proper scientometric study to confirm this. Evans and Reimar have shown that for authors from developing countries free-access articles are cited much higher when they make them freely accessible over the Internet and that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists’ investigation.<a name="fr14"></a>An analysis of many MedKnow journals has shown that OA journals do not lose subscribers to print editions; on the contrary, the number of subscribers is increasing in most cases. Again, OA has helped MedKnow journals attract a larger number of paper submissions, hits and downloads, win more citations and improve impact factors.<a name="fr15"></a>The Indian Academy of Sciences has also seen similar trends for their journals (G. Chandramohan, pers.commun). Data in Table 5 show that the number of papers published by each one of the 12 countries in PLoS ONE has increased over the years dramatically. We found similar trends for all PLoS journals (except PLoS Medicine) and several BMC journals including BMC Public Health, BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Genomics <a name="fr16"></a></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Both BMC and PLoS charge article processing fees as do many other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $ 1450 and $ 1640, PLoS ONE charges $ 1350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $ 2900 and other PLoS journals $ 2250. This could be a deterrent to most Indian and other developing country researchers. However, these journals waive the processing fees if authors request before submitting their papers. But not all Indian scientists would like to request such waivers. Here is what Balaram<a name="fr17"></a>a leading Indian molecular biophysicist, says: ‘As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds to be subsidising Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals or any other non-Indian open access journal. Some journals waive these charges for authors from developing countries. But I do not think we should go begging for waivers.’</p>
<h3 align="JUSTIFY">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad <a name="fr18"></a> and Balram One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi<a name="fr19"></a> and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi<a name="fr20"></a> starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.</p>
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<p><i>Muthu Madhan is in the ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No.194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India</i>. <br />*For correspondence. (e-mail: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com">subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn1"></a>]. Arunachalam, S., Advances in information access and science communication. Curr. Sci., 2001, 80, 493–494.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn2"></a>]. Dallmeier-Tiessen, S., First results of the SOAP project. Open access publishing in 2010; http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0506v11</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn3"></a>]. Registry of Open Access Repositories; http://roar.eprints.org</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn4"></a>]. Directory of Open Access Journals; http://www.doaj.org</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn5"></a>]. Open J-Gate; http://www. openj-gate.com</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn6"></a>]. BioMed Central: The Open Access Publisher; http://www.biomedcentral.com/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn7"></a>]. Science in India 2004-2008, Scib ytes 2010, ScienceWatch.com; http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/10/jan10-10_2/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn8"></a>]. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online;http://journals.iucr.org/e/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn9"></a>]. Banerjee, K., Structure of anthracene and naphthalene. Nature, 1930, 125, 456.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn10"></a>]. Public Library of Science Journals; http://www.plos.org/journals/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn11"></a>]. Björk, B.-C., Roos, A. and Lauri, M., Scientific journal publishing – yearly volume and open access availability.<br />Inform. Res., 2009, 14, Paper 391; http://InformationR.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn12"></a>]. Björk, B.-C., Welling, P., Laakso, M., Majlender, P., Hedlund, T.and Guðnason, G., Open access to the scientific journal literature: Situation 2009.PLoS One, 2010, 5 (6), e11273; http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn13"></a>]. Hendriks, P., Open Access Publishing at Springer, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8_OA_Conference_PH_v1.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn14"></a>]. Evans, J. A. and Reimer, J., Open access and global participation in science. Science, 2009, 323, 1025.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn15"></a>]. Sahu, D. K., MEDKNOW: Open Access Publishing for Learned Societies and Associations, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn16"></a>]. Comparison of BioMed Central’s article processing charges with those of other publishers; http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn17"></a>]. Jayaraman, K. S., Open archives – the alternative to open access, interview with Prof. P. Balaram, SciDev.Net, 9 July 2008; http://www.scidev.net/en/features/q-a-open-archives-the-alternative-to-open-access.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn18"></a>]. Harnad, S., How India can provide immediate open access now? Curr. Sci., 2008, 94, 1232.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn19"></a>]. Joshi, N. V., Institutional E-print archives: liberalizing access to scientific research. Curr. Sci., 2005, 89, 421–422.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn20"></a>]. Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute; http://eprints.cmfri.org.in</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings</a>
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No publisherMadhan Muthu and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ContentOpen Access2013-07-04T04:45:39ZBlog EntryOpen Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/euroscience-september-25-2013-subbiah-arunachalam-open-access-an-opportunity-for-scientists-around-the-globe
<b>Researchers face two problems related to information access: making their own research more visible to researchers elsewhere and making worldwide research readily available to them. Open access (OA) can solve both of them. </b>
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<p>This article by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was <a class="external-link" href="http://euroscientist.com/2013/09/open-access-an-opportunity-for-scientists-around-the-globe/">published in Euro Scientist on September 25, 2013</a>.</p>
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<p>Open access is particularly important in developing countries, where the research and higher education budgets are nowhere near those in advanced countries. For example, libraries in most universities in sub-Saharan Africa subscribe at best to only a few journals, and are thus forced to do research literally in a literature vacuum.</p>
<p>Elsewhere like in India, some institutions such as the <a href="http://www.iisc.ernet.in/" target="_blank">Indian Institute of Science</a>, Bangalore, subscribe to a few thousand journals. But many of them go unused. Thus this approach results in non-productive investment of scarce resources. In addition, when developing country scientists publish their work in expensive journals, then all too often it goes unnoticed by other researchers in their own country.</p>
<p>To make OA more widespread, there are two possible routes: OA journals and OA archives. OA journals and archives help to integrate the work of scientists everywhere into the global knowledge base, reduce the isolation of researchers, and improve opportunities for funding and international collaboration. OA, if adopted widely, can raise the profile of an entire nation’s research output.</p>
<h3><b>OA journals</b></h3>
<p>For now, there are already many successful OA journals initiatives in the developing world. <a href="http://www.bioline.org.br/" target="_blank">Bioline International</a> , for example, hosts electronic OA versions of more than 35 peer reviewed bioscience journals from 17 developing countries. It is backed, among others, by the <a href="http://www.epublishingtrust.org/" target="_blank">Electronic Publishing Trust for Development</a> (EPT), established in 1996. EPT promotes open access to the world’s scholarly literature, and provides an annual award for the best contribution to the advancement of OA in the developing world.</p>
<p>Other worldwide OA initiatives include the African Journals Online (<a href="http://www.ajol.info/" target="_blank">AJOL</a>), which provides free online access to 462 African journals. Latin American initiatives– some of which have overlapping content—include <a href="http://www.scielo.br/" target="_blank">SciELO </a>with 1,013 Iberoamerican OA journals, <span><a href="http://www.redalyc.org/" target="_blank">RedALyC </a></span>,<b><i> </i></b><i>which</i> supports 809 OA journals and <a href="http://www.latindex.unam.mx/" target="_blank">Latindex</a>, with more than 4,600 OA journals. In parallel, India alone publishes more than 400 OA journals. For example, the ten journals of the <a href="http://www.ias.ac.in/" target="_blank">Indian Academy of Sciences</a> and the 17 journals published by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research are OA. <b> </b></p>
<p>With the emergence of OA, many new commercial publishers have sprouted recently. They are publishing OA journals largely to earn through Article Processing Charges (APC). So much so India is considered a leader in publishing predatory OA journals.</p>
<p>Not all commercial publishers are predatory, though. For example,<a href="http://www.medknow.com/" target="_blank">Medknow Publications</a>, a commercial publishing company founded by a paediatrician based in Mumbai, has helped more than 100 OA medical journals make the transition from print to electronic open access. In doing so, they realised that most of them are now doing much better than before in terms of readership, print subscription, quality of editing and production, and as a result a major multinational STM publishing company acquired the company from the founder a few years ago.</p>
<h3><b>OA archives</b></h3>
<p>The trouble is that a lot remains to be done in extending open access. Indeed, there are about a hundred functioning academic papers repositories in India. However, only two of them are backed by a mandate. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), for example, recently came up with an <a href="http://aims.fao.org/community/open-access/blogs/icar-adopts-open-access-policy" target="_blank">OA mandate</a> for research performed in its own research institutions and for research it funds, but its implementation may take a while. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, has a <a href="http://repository.ias.ac.in/" target="_blank">repository</a> for all papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. This is the only science academy in the world to have such a repository. The Academy was also the first in India to adopt OA for its journals. For instance, its physics journal, <a href="http://www.ias.ac.in/pramana/">Pramana</a>, became OA as far back as 1998.</p>
<p>To extend open access further, the archives route appears to be particularly appealing in developing countries. Setting up institutional archives does not cost much. The software needed is absolutely free and the technological infrastructure, such as the server and the internet connectivity, is already available in most institutions.</p>
<p>About a decade ago, I thought that the scarcity of computers and high bandwidth access in many developing countries would put them at a disadvantage. But now prices are falling and the situation has improved. Thus, OA archiving is even more promising than OA journals. It is less expensive, allows faster turnaround, and is compatible with publishing in conventional journals.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/euroscience-september-25-2013-subbiah-arunachalam-open-access-an-opportunity-for-scientists-around-the-globe'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/euroscience-september-25-2013-subbiah-arunachalam-open-access-an-opportunity-for-scientists-around-the-globe</a>
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No publishersubbiahOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2013-09-26T06:00:48ZBlog EntryDepartment of Biotechnology and Department of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, release first draft of Open Access Policy
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-ministry-of-science-and-technology-government-of-india-release-open-access-policy
<b>The Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, recently published a draft Open Access Policy in consultation with several open access experts, government officials and CIS. This post discusses open access and the exercise undertaken to draft this policy.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Department of Biotechnology (<strong>“DBT”</strong>) and the Department of Science (<strong>“DST”</strong>), Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, released their draft Open Access Policy (<strong>“the Policy)</strong> on July 5, 2014 (the Policy may be accessed <a href="http://dbtindia.nic.in/docs/DBT-DST_Open_Access_Policy.pdf">here</a>and comments may be sent to <a href="mailto:madhan@dbt.nic.in">madhan@dbt.nic.in</a> by July 25, 2014). This step by the Ministry of Science and Technology is laudable, especially from the view of increasing access to research undertaken at these institutions. DBT/DST’s endeavour to provide open access applies to scientific research directly (including ad-hoc) or indirectly funded by them. It also applies to scientific research which has received benefits, infrastructure or other support from the DBT/DST. Providing open access may also ensure percolation of cutting edge research at a rapid pace into higher education curriculum, thereby raising the standard of technical and scientific education.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (<strong>“CSIR”</strong>), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (<strong>“ICAR”</strong>) and Institute of Mathematical Sciences (<strong>“IMSc”</strong>) are the few Indian government institutions to have implemented open access policies applicable to the research undertaken at their respective institutions. While the <a href="http://oasis.csir.res.in/utube/CSIR_OPEN_ACCESS_MANDATE.pdf">CSIR</a> and <a href="http://icar.org.in/en/node/6609">ICAR</a> present outlines of their open access policies, the <a href="http://www.imsc.res.in/e_resources_alpha">IMSc</a> provides access to a <a href="http://www.imsc.res.in/xmlui">digital repository</a> containing digital theses/dissertations, matscience reports and other publications of institute members. CIS had sent <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/comments-on-draft-icar-open-access-policy">comments</a> to the ICAR upon <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/icar-adopts-open-access-policy">release</a> of ICAR’s draft policy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Open Access in Scientific Research</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Presently two models of scientific research publications exist, namely, the commercial model and the open access model. The scientific research ecosystem traditionally functioned on the commercial model, until open access was embraced by a part of the scientific community. It is <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf">reported</a> that presently, there exist approximately 25,000 journals in the areas of science, technology and medicine. The conventional model of communicating research is by publishing it in printed journals. These journals are usually subscription based, and demand <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111.abstract"> hefty amounts from interested authors for publication</a>. Further, research was only accessible to that select <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111.abstract">group of persons willing to pay a high monetary sum</a> for the same. These industry practices led to restrictions on access to scholarly research, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1403006111.abstract">including restrictions on sharing and building further</a> on work already created. . Over the past few years, this trend has witnessed a change, with research being increasingly published in online, open access journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Open Access is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, web-wide, without severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. Open access was first defined in 2002 at the Budapest Initiative. The Bethesda Statement (2003) provided:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The <a href="http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration">Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities</a> is another significant milestone of the Open Access movement. Globally, USA and Europe have been instrumental in adopting open access policies across a wide range of institutions. Illustratively, the US’ <a href="file:///E:/CIS/publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm">National Institute of Health open access policy</a> is a comprehensive document detailing every aspect of the policy and its implications. Several premier academic institutions (<a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/hoap">Harvard</a>) under experts (<a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm">Peter Suber)</a> have drafted documents containing <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/8603">guidelines on drafting a suitable open access policy.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> The advantages of adopting an open access policy are manifold- free access to scientific research irrespective of subscription affiliation, decrease in publishing and research costs for industry and academia; It has also been argued that <a href="http://eprints.rclis.org/5463/1/do_open_access_CRL.pdf">restricting access to government funded research is unethical</a>, since scientific research conducted by government agencies is partly, if not entirely, funded by the taxpayers’ money. Further, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf">adoption of open access alone could improve visibility and impact of Indian science</a>,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Open Access and Intellectual Property</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Intellectual property is the essential instrument used to effect principles of open access. The extent of rights under copyright which the owner chooses to exercise over scholarly publication in question<a id="_GoBack" name="_GoBack"></a> determines whether a publication may be openly accessed or not. Traditionally, journal publishers ran an inequitable policy which required all publication and reproduction rights (copyright) to be exclusively transferred by the author or institution to the publishers in consideration of publication in reputed journals. This practice created artificial and expensive barriers to scholarly research. Contrast this with open access principles wherein to provide open access- Generally, the author or the institution (depending on the jurisdictional copyright laws) retain certain rights in the publication, whilst permitting zero-barrier access to their research. This requires careful balancing and distribution of rights between three stakeholders- author, institution and the publisher.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>About the DST/DBT’s Open Access Policy</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Open Access Policy Document for DBT/ DST was drafted by the Open Access Policy Committee on a specific request from Dr. VijayRaghavan, Secretary, DBT. The Policy was drafted after multiple rounds of consultation with Ministry officials, eminent academics and experts on open access, government officials with prior experience of set-up of institutional repositories and CIS. Prof Subbiah Arunachalam led the discussions along with the Open Access Policy Committee and brought different perspectives to the fore. The Policy may be accessed <a href="http://dbtindia.nic.in/docs/DBT-DST_Open_Access_Policy.pdf">here</a>. The Policy will be applicable to publications in peer reviewed journals, and aims to maximise the distribution of these publications by providing free online access by depositing them in a gratis open access repository (deemed mandatory). Authors can make their publications open access by publishing in an open access journal, or if they choose to publish in a subscription journal, by posting the final accepted manuscript to an online repository. The Policy suggests a maximum embargo period placed on authors by journals to not exceed one year. It also addresses the methodology of depositing in a repository and provides for a proposed copyright addendum between the author and publisher.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>CIS’ Contribution</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">CIS participated in discussions along with experts brought on board by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam to develop and review an open access policy for the purposes of DST and DBT. CIS, <em>inter alia,</em> commented on the legality of clauses in the policy pertaining to Indian copyright law and supplied a note on utilisation of ‘public domain’ in open access policies. Legally, a work is said to have entered the public domain when it is free from copyright protection. The note recommended usage of the phrase “made available to public” as opposed to “public domain” since the said policy permitted the institution and/or author to retain rights in the scientific paper. You may access the note <a href="https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=6a817f82b1&view=att&th=1468bf26575deb58&attid=0.1&disp=inline&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P-PBLwn5kd8ui-u7aB5Qa9u&sadet=1405338416902&sads=yB4NV3RRIEXQyLVsYEewjYZfm4I">here</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-ministry-of-science-and-technology-government-of-india-release-open-access-policy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-ministry-of-science-and-technology-government-of-india-release-open-access-policy</a>
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No publishersinhaOpen Access2014-12-26T11:20:59ZBlog EntryPrivacy vs. Transparency: An Attempt at Resolving the Dichotomy
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency
<b>The right to privacy has been articulated in international law and in some national laws. In a few countries where the constitution does not explicitly guarantee such a right, courts have read the right to privacy into other rights (e.g., the right to life, the right to equal treatment under law and also the right to freedom of speech and expression).</b>
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<p><i>With feedback and inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Geetha Hariharan</i>. I would like to apologize for not providing proper citation to Julian Assange when the first version of this blog entry was published. I would also like to thank Micah Sifry for drawing this failure to his attention. The blog post originally published by Omidyar Network <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openup2014.org/privacy-vs-transparency-attempt-resolving-dichotomy/">can be read here</a>. Also see <a class="external-link" href="http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/">http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/</a></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In other countries where privacy is not yet an explicit or implicit right, harm to the individual is mitigated using older confidentiality or secrecy law. After the Snowden affair, the rise of social media and the sharing economy, some corporations and governments would like us to believe that “privacy is dead”. Privacy should not and cannot be dead, because that would mean that security is also dead. This is indeed the most dangerous consequence of total surveillance as it is technically impossible to architect a secure information system without privacy as a precondition. And conversely, it is impossible to guarantee privacy without security as a precondition.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The right to transparency [also known as the right to information or access to information] – while unavailable in international law – is increasingly available in national law. Over the last twenty years this right has become encoded in national laws – and across the world it is being used to hold government accountable and to balance the power asymmetry between states and citizens. Independent and autonomous offices of transparency regulators have been established. Apart from increasing government transparency, corporations are also increasingly required to be transparent as part of generic or industry specific regulation in the public interest. For instance, India’s Companies Act, 2013, requires greater transparency from the private sector. Other areas of human endeavor such as science and development are also becoming increasingly transparent though here it is still left up to self-regulation and there isn’t as much established law. Within science and research more generally, the rise of open data accompanied the growth of the Open Access and citizen science movement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So the question before us is: Are these two rights – the right to transparency and the right to privacy – compatible? Is it a zero-sum game? Do we have to sacrifice one right to enforce the other? Unfortunately, many privacy and transparency activists think this is the case and this has resulted in some conflict. I suggest that these rights are completely compatible when it comes to addressing the question of power. These rights do not have to be balanced against one another. There is no need to settle for a sub-optimal solution. <b>Rather this is an optimization problem and the solution is as follows: privacy protections must be inversely proportionate to power and as Julian Assange says transparency requirements should be directly proportionate to power.</b><a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In most privacy laws, the public interest is an exception to privacy. If public interest is being undermined, then an individual privacy can be infringed upon by the state, by researchers, by the media, etc. And in transparency law, privacy is the exception. If the privacy of an individual can be infringed, transparency is not required unless it is in the public interest. In other words, the “public interest” test allows us to use privacy law and transparency law to address power asymmetries rather than exacerbate them. What constitutes “public interest” is of course left to courts, privacy regulators, and transparency regulators to decide. Like privacy, there are many other exceptions in any given transparency regime including confidentiality and secrecy. Given uneven quality of case law there will be a temptation by the corrupt to conflate exceptions. Here the old common-law principle of “there is no confidence as to the disclosure of iniquity” – which prevents confidentiality law from being used to cover malfeasance or illegality – can be adopted in appropriate jurisdictions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Around 10 years ago, the transparency movement gave birth to yet another movement – the open government data movement. The tension between privacy and transparency is most clearly seen in the open government data movement. The open government data movement in some parts of the world is dominated by ahistorical and apolitical technologists, and some of them seem intent on reinventing the wheel. In India, ever since the enactment of the Right to Information Act, 2003, 30 transparency activists are either killed, beaten or criminally intimidated every year. This is the statistic from media coverage alone. Many more silently suffer. RTI or transparency is without a doubt one of the most dangerous sectors within civil society that you could choose to work in. In contrast, not a single open data activist has ever been killed, beaten or criminally intimidated. I suspect this is because open data activists do not sufficiently challenge power hierarchies. Let us look a little bit closely at their work cycle. When a traditional transparency activist asks a question, that is usually enough to get them into trouble. When an open data activist publishes an answer [a dataset nicely scrubbed and machine readable, or a visualization, or a tool] they are often frustrated because nobody seems interested in using it. Often even the activist is unclear what the question is. This is because open data activist works where data is available. Open data activists are obsessed with big datasets, which are easier to find at the bottom of the pyramid. They contribute to growing surveillance practices [the nexus between Internet giants, states, and the security establishment] rather that focusing on sousveillance [citizen surveillance of the state, also referred to as citizen undersight or inverse surveillance]. They seem to be obsessed only with tools and technologies, rather than power asymmetries and injustices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, a case study to make my argument easier to understand – Aadhaar or UID, India’s ambitious centralized biometric identity and authentication management system. There are many serious issues with its centralized topology, proprietary technology, and dependence on biometrics as authentication factors – all of which I have written about in the past. In this article, I will explain how my optimization solution can be applied to the project to make it more effective in addressing its primary problem statement that corruption is a necessary outcome of power asymmetries in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In its current avatar – the Aadhaar project hopes to assign biometric-based identities to all citizens. The hope is that, by doing authentication in the last mile, corruption within India’s massive subsidy programmes will be reduced. This, in my view, might marginally reduce retail corruption at the bottom of the pyramid. It will do nothing to address wholesale corruption that occurs as subsidies travel from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. I have advocated over the last two years that we should abandon trying to issue biometric identities to all citizens, thereby making them more transparent to the state. Let us instead issue Aadhaar numbers to all politicians and bureaucrats and instead make the state more transparent to citizens. There is no public interest in reducing privacy for ordinary citizens – the powerless – but there are definitely huge public interest benefits to be secured by increasing transparency of politicians and bureaucrats, who are the powerful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government has recently introduced a biometric-based attendance system for all bureaucrats and has created a portal that allows Indian citizens to track if their bureaucrats are arriving late or leaving early. This unfortunately is just bean counting [for being corrupt and being punctual are not mutually exclusive] and public access to the national portal was turned off because of legitimate protests from some of the bureaucrats. What bureaucrats do in office, who they meet, and which documents they process is more important than when they arrive at or depart from work. The increased transparency or reduced privacy was not contributing to the public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Instead of first going after small-ticket corruption at the bottom of the pyramid, maximization of public interest requires us to focus on the top, for there is much greater ROI for the anti-corruption rupee. For example: constructing a digital signature based on audit trails that track all funds and subsidies as they move up and down the pyramid. These audit trails must be made public so that ordinary villagers can be supported by open data activists, journalists, social entrepreneurs, and traditional civil society in verification and course correction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I hope open data activists, data scientists, and big data experts will draw inspiration from the giants of the transparency movement in India. I hope they will turn their attention to power, examine power asymmetries and then ask how the Aadhaar project can be leveraged to make India more rather than less equal.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Videos</h3>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights</p>
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<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tDf8TFjxqiQ" width="560"></iframe></td>
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<td><b>Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector</b></td>
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<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lPHWkYZjqzo" width="560"></iframe></td>
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<p>The videos can also be watched on Vimeo:</p>
<ol>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/111729069">Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights </a></li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/111748146">Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector </a></li>
</ol>
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<p>[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>].<a class="external-link" href="http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks">http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks</a> “Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has.”</p>
<p>Read the presentation on Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy made at the Pecha Kucha session <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/risky-business.odp" class="internal-link">here</a>. (ODP File, 35 kb)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author(s) of this blog are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Omidyar Network. We make no representations as to accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of any information presented by individual authors of the blogs and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries or damages arising from its display or use.</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency</a>
</p>
No publishersunilPrivacyFeaturedVideoAadhaarOpennessOpen Access2015-03-08T06:26:21ZBlog EntryHeads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose
<b>A few commercial publishers dominate provision of access to scientific and technical information sought after by researchers around the world. Increasing subscription prices of journals at rates higher than general inflation caused librarians to think of forming consortia, but publishers started selling online journals as bundles, and libraries ended up with many journals their researchers have very little use for. Scientists and librarians adopted open access, but publishers came up with hybrid journals and article processing charges to beat any adverse effect on their profits caused by the fast-spreading open access movement. We compare the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India. We end with a few suggestions. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/PINSA/Vol80_2014_5_Art04.pdf">published in the Indian National Science Academy Journals</a>, <i>Proc Indian Natn SciAcad</i> 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Introduction</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists in India, as elsewhere, will be happy if their libraries provide them access to thousands of journals. Librarians, even in the most affluent institutions, have only limited budgets and they have to balance between journals on the one hand and books, monographs and reference material on the other, and can subscribe to only a limited number of journals. In the past decade and a half, thanks to generous funding by several government agencies (e.g., UGC, CSIR), librarians formed consortia so they could access online journals at more attractive prices and in large numbers. Also, during the same period, many open access (OA) journals became available and some subscription journals came forward to make articles OA if the authors paid a fee. There also came up a large number of repositories, both institutional (such as the ones at Indian Institute of Science and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute) and subject-based central repositories (such as PubMed Central). As a result, scientists now have much easier access to a much larger volume of current literature. But, it appears that publishers seem to profit far more than scientists. They keep increasing the subscription prices at a rate higher than general inflation. Even affluent institutions like Harvard University are forced to cut down the number of journals they subscribe. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a group of about 125 research libraries in North America, is concerned about this crisis in scholarly communication (or ‘serials crisis’ as they call it) and is working to promote open access as one way to counter it. The publishers continue to make their unusually large profits unmindful of the hardship researchers are put to. In business circles, publishing scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals is considered to be one of the most profitable businesses. Efforts made by groups of researchers to make scholarly communication more cost effective have not met with expected success levels. For example, entire editorial boards of a few commercial journals resigned and started new journals in the same field. But this happened only in a handful of cases and not all of them succeeded. In this paper, we look at what is happening currently in India in the context of the unusually large influence wielded by journal publishers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-the-intransigence-of-stm-publishers/" class="external-link">Click to download</a> the full text article.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose</a>
</p>
No publishersubbiahOpennessOpen Access2015-02-12T00:28:14ZBlog EntryFrancis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award
<b>The Electronic Publishing Trust recently announced a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developed countries who have made significant contribution for the cause of open access and free exchange of research findings. There were 30 nominations from 17 countries around the world and Dr. Francis Jayakanth from the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was selected for the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in the Developing World by a committee that went through all the nominations. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The award function organised by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore was held at the Sambasivan Auditorium, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai on 14 February 2012. Leading luminaries such as Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. G Baskaran and Prof. K Mangala Sunder participated in the award felicitation ceremony.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Giving the welcome speech, Prof. Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at CIS said that Dr. Jayakanth works for the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has trained many students and helped a number of institutes to set up open access repositories. Prof. Arunachalam added that the event is being celebrated in India as the winner is from India and specified that it is being held at the MS Swaminathan Foundation as this was the institution that hosted the first workshop to promote open access. Prof. Swaminathan had a vital role in arranging funds for the workshop. About 50 people had learnt what open access was, how to set up open access repositories, how to use the EPrints software, etc. For this very reason it was decided to hold the event in Chennai and not Bangalore where Dr. Jayakanth is based.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Francis7.jpg/image_preview" alt="Participants in the Award Function" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Participants in the Award Function" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Felicitating Dr. Jayakanth, Prof. Swaminathan who presented the award added that it is important to highlight the contributions of those who really convert the concept of social inclusion to reality. He said that today every politician talks about inclusive growth. What is this inclusive growth, how do you convert exclusion to inclusion? Exclusion creates large problems, social problems, economic problems, etc. On a concluding note, Prof. Swaminathan said that the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh has declared 2012-13 as the year of science and he hopes that there will be a new science policy and technology policy and that he hopes that a very important component of that should be methods of ensuring open access including open access to knowledge and open access to literature.</p>
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<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Francis3.jpg/image_preview" title="Francis Jayakanth" height="166" width="174" alt="Francis Jayakanth" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Jayakanth said that the atmosphere was very overwhelming and never in his two-and-a-half decade old career he had the opportunity to speak amidst such luminaries and added that it was a privilege and prestige to have received the award from Prof. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India. He also added that no event in India or elsewhere is complete without the active participation and mentioning of the name of Prof. Arunachalam, the greatest advocate of open access that India has seen so far, and that he wouldn’t have been here at the award ceremony but for the timely intervention of Prof. Arunachalam. <br /></td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Jayakanth concluded by saying that he would like to thank Prof. NV Joshi, Prof. Derek Law, Prof. Alma Swan, Prof. Balaram, Prof. N Balakrishnan, Prof. Giridhar, and Prof. TB Rajashekar, and particularly the students of the information and knowledge management programme at the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, who were responsible for the growth of a repository granting more visibility to the 32,000 publications that are part of the repository.</p>
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<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Mangala.jpg/image_preview" title="Mangala Sunder" height="130" width="177" alt="Mangala Sunder" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Prof. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras and Prof. G Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, also participated in the event. Prof. Sunder said that it is for the kind of information that we talk about, which we want to make public for which champions like Dr. Jayakanth have been working on the sidelines but working so efficiently to get institution after institution to convert what is known as a rigid framework into a flexible more open policy of bringing their scientific content to their intellectual information content. He said that he works in the area of content development from the point of view of education and he understands the difficulty of bringing material to the public. <br /></td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are many issues, such as issues about copyright, issues about people owning the information, issues about people feeling very rigid on what they want to say in the public, etc. Dr. Jayakanth has gone through all these exercises for the last 30 years in slowly creating the “little after little” what are called the waterways to finally see that everyone benefits. The linking of science, knowledge and sustainable development to open access to information, open access to research and open access to content completes the whole cycle of knowledge.</p>
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<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Baskaran.jpg/image_preview" title="Prof. Basakaran" height="177" width="117" alt="Prof. Basakaran" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Prof. Baskaran said that it is a very well deserved award and Dr. Jayakanth has definitely raised the bar for future awardees. Prof. Baskaran stressed upon the aspects of open access. He said that as a theoretical physicist he understands the need for open access very well. Physicists, when they have new research results place them in arXiv, the open access repository for preprints in physics. Some people wonder what if some physicists deposit all kinds of articles in the arXiv. Experience has shown that 99 per cent of the articles appear in good journals later. He added that once it is put in the arXiv, the whole world gets access and a bad paper will be noticed and commented upon by many. No one likes to be the author of such a paper! He urged that other sciences, especially the life sciences should have a repository similar to arXiv and requested Prof. Swaminathan to take the intiative at MSSRF. <br /></td>
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<h2>Dr. Francis Jayakanth</h2>
<p align="left"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Francis1.jpg/image_preview" alt="Francis with the Award" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Francis with the Award" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Francis Jayakanth is a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. He has played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (<a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in">http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in</a>). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and open access journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, open access journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, and the benefits of open access to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. Dr. Jayakanth can indeed be considered an open access ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of open access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/francis-jayakanth-presentation" class="internal-link" title="Francis Jayakanth's Presentation">See Francis's presentation on Who Benefits from Open Access to Scholarly Literature?</a> [Powerpoint, 1523 KB]</p>
<p><b>See the video of the award function below:</b><b> </b></p>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLtr00A.html?p=1" width="250"></iframe>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAwardOpen ContentVideoOpen AccessOpenness2013-08-03T05:36:54ZBlog EntryWill open access replace costly commercial publishing models?
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models
<b>Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.</b>
<p>Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/multimedia/archive/00929/Open_Access_929199a.pdf">Download the PDF</a></p>
<p>But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.</p>
<p>Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals. </p>
<h3>Boycott <br /></h3>
<p>Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. <br /><br />"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers. <br /><br />India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free. <br /><br />Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate. <br /><br />Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable. </p>
<h3>Trustworthy</h3>
<p>The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article2910344.ece">Read the article in Hindu</a>. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2012-02-23T09:12:10ZNews Item