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Research Publishing: Is ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ Pragmatic Reform for India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india
<b>Anubha Sinha examines the feasibility of the proposed 'One Nation, One Subscription' approach in the draft national Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (2020) on access to scientific literature. This article was first published in The Wire Science on October 23, 2020.</b>
<p>The story of open access (OA) publishing in India has been a chequered
one. While we have had some progress with institutional initiatives, the
landscape remains fractured without a national OA mandate. And now <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4">some reports</a>
suggest that the Indian government is considering striking a ‘one
nation, one subscription’ deal with scholarly publishers for access to
paywalled research for all of India’s citizens. Only last year, India
had <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan/">decided against joining Plan S</a>. K. VijayRaghavan has been at the helm of these decisions, as the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India.</p>
<p>OA refers to the level of access different people have to a published
paper, like a scientific paper. Typically, a researcher submits their
manuscript to a journal to consider for publication. If the paper passes
peer-review, the journal publishes the paper in its pages, and online.
In the ‘conventional’ research publishing model, a reader who wishes to
read the paper pays a fee to the journal to do so. In the (gold) OA
model, the journal makes its money by having the researcher – or their
funder – pay to have their paper published.</p>
<p>While it is heartening to see the momentum towards settling on a
suitable OA approach, the ‘one nation, one subscription’ scheme is a
curious proposition for India. A consortium of Indian science academies
had <a href="http://insaindia.res.in/pdf/Publication_of_Literature.pdf">recommended it</a>
last year. The scheme entails the Government of India to negotiate for
and purchase a single, unified subscription from a consortium of
publishers of scientific books and journals, after which the books and
papers will be available to all government-funded institutions as well
as all tax-payers.</p>
<p>Around the world, this scheme has been implemented in Uruguay and Egypt,
while some European countries have adopted versions of it. Experts
around the world <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/03/06/plan-s-and-the-global-south-what-do-countries-in-the-global-south-stand-to-gain-from-signing-up-to-europes-open-access-strategy/">have suggested</a>
that the model could be a feasible interim solution for developing
countries. Note that both Egypt and Uruguay obtained financial
assistance from the World Bank to secure their deals.</p>
<p>In Uruguay, since 2009, citizens have enjoyed free access to (otherwise)
paywalled scientific and technological journals and platforms via the
online platform <a href="https://foco.timbo.org.uy/home">Portal Timbó</a>. However, some content remains <a href="https://gospin.unesco.org/frontend/full-info/view.php?id=1853&table=operational&action=search&order=general.country">available only</a> to scientific, academic, and educational institutions and researchers. The 2019 budget for Portal Timbó was <a href="https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Plan_S.pdf">$2.3 million</a> (Rs 16.94 crore).</p>
<p>Egypt launched its Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) initiative in 2015. EKB
provides a population of 92 million people access to journals, e-books
and archives from multiple publishers across the sciences, humanities
and cultural disciplines, and has certainly benefited society. However,
the question remains whether incurring an annual expense of <a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cihe/pdf/Korber%20bk%20PDF.pdf">$64 million</a>,
in 2017 (Rs 416.47 crore), in subscription costs is justified. In both
Egypt and Uruguay, it is not clear if all material is readable
immediately upon publication or whether there is a delay.</p>
<p>So what could a ‘one nation, one subscription’ deal look like for India?</p>
<p>Currently, India spends <a href="https://thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan">Rs 1,500 crore a year</a>
to read research via journal subscriptions (about $205 million). So
while a shift to nationwide subscription could yield a low per capita
cost of access, our limited ICT infrastructure and digital divide remain
barriers to unlocking the full potential of the deal. It is equally
crucial to ensure that the deal covers <a href="https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/bitstream/handle/1912/4587/Cristiani%20PANEL_iamslic%202010.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">key journals and databases</a> – which may have to be negotiated with publishers with different types of collections across multiple disciplines.</p>
<p>Further, and perhaps more importantly, a nationwide subscription deal
will not solve for an uneven OA publishing culture among Indian
researchers. A <a href="https://thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan">rough calculation</a>
suggests India’s annual publishing spend is Rs 985 crore ($134.5
million), including article-processing charges (APCs) for both OA and
hybrid-OA journals (which have a mix of OA and ‘conventional’ publishing
policies). While a common national subscription could potentially lower
the cost of reading research, we don’t know if authors will still have
to pay APCs to publish their papers in publications covered by the deal.</p>
<p>Irrespective of how the deal plays out, the Indian research community is
currently divided over the issue of paying to publish. Some researchers
and disciplines argue that APCs should not be the basis for ruling out
publication in a journal – the choice should rather be balanced against
the journal’s disciplinary relevance and its ‘prestige’ factor (captured
in a controversial metric known as the <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/impact-factors-fail-in-evaluating-scientists-why-does-the-ugc-still-use-it/">journal impact factor</a>). In India, publishing charges are typically fronted by government grants and private funders, and it costs <a href="https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf">Rs 70,000</a> on average to publish in OA journals.</p>
<p>On the other hand, OA supporters and several institutional initiatives
advocate ‘green’ OA – which requires posting the preprint version of
papers in an open online repository, often immediately after
publication. It remains to be seen whether India will unanimously decide
to adopt green OA.</p>
<p>We also need to deliberate further as to what a nationwide subscription
would mean for the country’s and the world’s OA movement. While a ‘one
national, one subscription’ plan would appear to temporarily alleviate
the financial problem of access, how far can it really go towards
solving for legal and technical barriers of access? For example, the
reader may still not have legal permissions to reuse the article, or
reuse may be prevented technically by anti-copy measures. Or should we
brush these concerns aside since the deal is somewhat of an incremental
reform for India?</p>
<p>The OA movement was conceived to address global inequality in accessing
scientific research. Would India’s position and contribution to the
movement – as a large consumer and producer of scientific research – get
sidelined? It appears that the nationwide subscription deal could
feature in India’s upcoming ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Policy’
as well. Then, to address the gaps, it is necessary to add other policy
solutions to complement the deal’s impact. The goal for a national
science policy should be to create a sustainable, longer term
environment that improves the quality of access and production of
scientific research, and does so in alignment with the values of OA.</p>
<p>Access this article on The Wire Science <a class="external-link" href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/india-research-publishing-open-access-one-nation-one-subscription-k-vijayraghavan/">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2021-04-28T17:09:14ZBlog EntryResearch papers will be available in public domain
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain
<b>IIT-Madras intends to make circle of knowledge complete, writes Vasudha Venugopal in this article published in the Hindu on 15 February 2012. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is quoted in the article.</b>
<p>2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.</p>
<p>The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.</p>
<p>What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.</p>
<p>Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.</p>
<p>Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.</p>
<p>While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.</p>
<p>Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says. </p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/article2893901.ece">The original article was published in the Hindu</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2012-02-17T05:38:36ZNews ItemQ&A on open access with Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam
<b>Amrit Dhir, a 1L at Harvard Law School, has been working with the Harvard Law School Library on open access activities. He recently had an opportunity to interview Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The interview was published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University on May 5, 2011.</b>
<p><i>Thanks to the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/">HLS Library</a> for permitting us to share this Q&A!</i></p>
<p><b>Amrit Dhir</b>: What is your association with the Bangalore-based <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a> (CIS)?</p>
<p><b>Subbiah Arunachalam</b>: I am one of the founding members of the Board of the Centre for Internet and Society. Mr Sunil Abraham invited me to join and I agreed as I found the group to be a talented bunch of people much younger to me and interested in questions, the answers to which would be of interest to me.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What has been your involvement with the Open Access (OA) movement for the past ten years?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: For the past ten years, I have been literally breathing OA! I always believed that knowledge should be free and open, but my formal engagement with OA began in 2000. That was the year when Eugene Garfield, the well-known information scientist, turned 75. He has been a great influence in my life and so I wanted to celebrate his 75th birthday with a conference. Gene had written hundreds of essays and he had put all of them together in fifteen volumes (Essays of an Information Scientist). What is more, long before the formal movement for OA began, Gene had put all his essays - in fact, all his writings - up on the University of Pennsylvania website.</p>
<p>For the conference, I invited another friend of mine, Alan Gilchrist, Editor of Journal of Information Science, and a world leader in advancing knowledge about thesauri. For the second speaker I invited Stevan Harnad, as I had read his article on scholarly skywriting (which was included in Garfield's Essays). I was working as a volunteer at the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation whose main thrust was development, but my chairman Prof. M. S. Swaminathan helped me raise some funds. From then on I started dividing my time between development and promoting OA in India and the developing world. My prior experience as editor and publisher of science journals (at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Indian Academy of Sciences) was a great help. For one thing, I knew a large number of scientists and academics. For another, as I had no big official position I was free to make statements freely. And I took advantage of both.</p>
<p>In 2001, I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to convene a meeting of editors of Indian S&T journals and convince them of the advantage of their journals going electronic. About 50 editors were trained in two three-day workshops. One of them, Dr. D. K. Sahu is today the world's leading OA publisher who neither charges the authors nor the readers [<a class="external-link" href="http://www.medknow.com/">http://www.medknow.com</a>].</p>
<p>In 2005, the Open Society Institute (OSI) invited me to Toronto to plan a conference. I had proposed to bring scientists from India, Brazil and China and to promote OA in these three countries. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that if OA takes roots in these three countries then it would be easy to promote it in the rest of the developing world. The conference itself was held at the Indian Institute of Science in November 2006, with support from OSI and the Indian Academy of Sciences. It was at this conference, with the help of Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan, that we produced the Bangalore Declaration, which could be used by governments and funding agencies in developing countries to mandate OA.</p>
<p>In January 2006, I organized a full session on OA as part of the Annual Science Congress held at Hyderabad. In 2008, I spoke to Prof. Samir Brahmachari, Director General of <a class="external-link" href="http://rdpp.csir.res.in/csir_acsir/Home.aspx?MenuId=1">CSIR</a> and convinced him of the need to adopt OA. He accepted the idea immediately and opened up all the sixteen journals published by CSIR's publishing arm, NISCAIR. I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to set up a repository for all papers by all Fellows and currently the repository is getting ready and I expect it to be available online in July or August. The Academy took nearly four years, but I am glad it is finally happening.</p>
<p>I have groomed a number of young people to take up OA advocacy and implementation. In particular, Muthu Madhan (now at ICRISAT) has done well. He has helped six institutions set up their repositories. I took him along with me (CIS funded his trip) to the International Conference on Repositories in Amsterdam jointly organized by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/">JISC</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.surf.nl/en/Pages/home.aspx">SURF</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>I have written about OA both on my own and in coauthorship with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan. I have given interviews to key outlets and spoken at many national and international conferences including two A2K conferences organized by Yale University, several Berlin conferences, and the ICSU-UNESCO conference where I was one of two keynote speakers.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What is the potential of OA, and what makes it unique to India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: OA has tremendous potential not only to India, but to the world as a whole. But its value to developing countries is much greater than to advanced countries, because the serials crisis and the access to knowledge problems are felt far more acutely in developing countries. Currently higher education and R&D (Research and Development) are in an unprecedented expansion phase and therefore we would need huge investments to meet information needs if only traditional methods of access were available to us. As large publishing corporations are raising subscription costs year after year at an unacceptably high rate, Indian researchers and students would benefit if more and more scientists in the West were to make their work OA.</p>
<p>There is nothing unique about OA in India. Whatever applies to India applies to the larger developing countries (China and Brazil, South Africa). That is why I believe these four countries should work together in promoting OA.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What do you see as the future of the OA movement in India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: As far as India is concerned, currently, a higher proportion of Indian work (12.5%) appears in OA journals than the world average (estimated to be between 8.5 and 10%). The two major Academies and CSIR in favor of OA. I and others are trying to persuade other funding agencies and research councils to adopt OA. It is a question of time before OA becomes accepted by at least some of the leading institutions. There are about 40 active repositories, but the number has started increasing.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What are the impediments to realizing that future? Are there any legal concerns or legal obstacles that you anticipate approaching?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: There are no impediments. At least I do not see any. You may then ask why the progress is slow. It is largely because of author inertia and general ignorance. Yes, ignorance. Not many scientists really know about what is possible and what is not possible with regard to depositing their papers in a repository. They are needlessly afraid of copyright infringements. Thus all the 'impediments' are imaginary!</p>
<p>When it comes to journals, it is easy. We publish the journals and we decide if we want to be closed or open. MedKnow publishes 150 journals, of which 148 are open. All 11 journals of the Indian Academy are open. Even when they entered into an agreement with Springer [Publishing], they retained the right to keep all of them open on their site!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you compare the institutional openness of India and the US to the potential and needs of OA?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: I have already explained why I believe OA is far more important to developing countries. But even in the West, the serials crisis is forcing librarians to adopt OA. In the West, prestigious institutions such as Harvard, MIT, NIH, Wellcome Trust, RCUK (Research Councils UK), have adopted OA and that has made a big difference. Now the US Congress is considering the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act). Eventually, all institutions will have to adopt OA.</p>
<p>There is one advantage of institutions in the developing countries adopting OA that may be missed by many. Often research done in the South in problems like SARS, tsunami, HIV/AIDS, climate change will be of global relevance. These issues do not know any national boundaries.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: You have spoken of a social mission and a human-rights-based justification for supporting greater OA, particularly with regard to the hard sciences and scientific research. What is the relationship between justice and OA, both on an international scale and as it relates to India more specifically?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: A very good question. When Kofi Annan was heading the United Nations, it came up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On top of the list was poverty alleviation. What use is all the science that we do if fellow human beings are unable to even buy food and keep dying of hunger and malnutrition? This is the basis for the argument on opening up of scientific knowledge as an issue of justice. In India, the government has invested millions on R&D in atomic energy, space science, new biology and biotechnology and so on, and yet more than 60 years after we had became a Republic, poverty is rampant, the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and both the number of billionaires and the number of people below the poverty line are increasing every year. All our science and technology have not ensured basic necessities for the poor. We do not use what we know, and what we know is not known widely.</p>
<p>In an excellent article “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector” in 22 Quarterly Journal of Economics 879 (2007), Robert Jensen of Harvard's Kennedy School used the example of how the introduction of mobile phones in coastal areas of Kerala opened up information and brought many benefits to the community as a whole and not just to fishing families.</p>
<p>There is another angle to the urgent need to reduce poverty, viz. the security angle. Two years ago, I was invited to write a short essay on information and livelihood and I began my essay with these words: "We live in a divided world where far too many people live in abject poverty. To help these people get out of poverty is good for the world as a whole, for great disparities in wealth will lead to violence and terrorism and no one can live in peace and harmony."</p>
<p>There is yet another issue. This is related to drugs and pharmaceuticals. Many pharma companies do not want to bring to market products from their latest research because the previous products are still doing well. Profit is the motive, and it trumps public good. Also, Western pharma companies send out scouts to the old world and learn from local wisdom the medicinal value of plants and herbs and take advantage but without sharing the profits with the local people. A clear case of the North exploiting the knowledge of the South. And yet their own drugs are all under patent protection!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: Some see Indian civil society and even Indian government insisting on greater transparency and access to information, with such movements as the one behind the Right to Information (RTI) Act as an example. Are you optimistic about such efforts at governmental and legal reform? And, how does it relate to your work and the broader objectives you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: About two years ago, the Department of Biotechnology entered into a partnership with the Wellcome Trust. The was born with a view to providing generous fellowships to scientists at three stages of their careers. One of the features was that all papers published by these Fellows have to be OA. The Minister for science and technology (Mr Kapil Sibal at that time) announced this proudly. I wrote him that he should also make OA all papers by scientists receiving grants from DBT, but he did not bother to reply. There is a lot of political doublespeak. I also wrote to Members of Parliament belonging to all the major parties suggesting that they consider legislation similar to the one which brought OA to all NIH-funded research in the US. No one replied. The RTI Act and the recent happenings on the corruption front (the government yielding to the request of Gandhian Anna Hazare) are indeed very good. And I believe one day the need for OA will be recognized as important and worthy of legal status. But one may also achieve a lot through bottom-up approaches by talking to individual institutions, universities and scientists.</p>
<p>I am not losing hope. I will keep making my requests until OA is accepted as the norm.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you call upon American universities and institutes to act or reform in light of the OA measures you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: The larger the number of American universities, research institutions and funding agencies adopting OA, the better it would be for us, as we would have more papers in the open domain. More than that, we could cite their example and convince Indian institutions to adopt OA.</p>
<div class="pullquote">Read the original interview published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society <a class="external-link" href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6825">here</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam</a>
</p>
No publishersubbiahInterviewOpen Access2023-11-01T12:41:47ZBlog 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>
<hr />
<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>
<hr />
<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>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tDf8TFjxqiQ" width="560"></iframe></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lPHWkYZjqzo" width="560"></iframe></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<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>
<hr />
<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>
<p>
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 EntryPanel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge
<b>Pranesh Prakash was a panelist and moderator in a panel discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge on October 23, 2018 at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The event was hosted by DST Centre for Policy Research (IISc), Bangalore.</b>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy3_of_FB.png/@@images/7840cc15-fc34-412c-8b60-196d35cb4009.png" alt="FB" class="image-inline" title="FB" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Open Access seeks to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose: to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not prevent students, researchers (or anyone) from getting access to research they need. Open Access, and the open availability and searchability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the practice of medicine to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.</span></p>
<h3><span>Panelists</span></h3>
<ul>
<li><span><span>Arul George Scaria - National Law University, Delhi</span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Carl Malamud - <a href="http://Public.Resource.Org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Public.Resource.Org</a> <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Pranesh Prakash (Moderator) - Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Richard Poynder - Journalist (covering OA movement around the world) <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>S Nayana Tara - Indian Institute of Management Bangalore</span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Shahid Jameel - Welcome Trust DBT India Alliance </span></span></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>This event was a part of International Open Access week activities planned at IISc Bangalore, organized by DST-Centre for Policy Research at IISc in association with National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Karnataka State Library Association (KALA), JRD Tata Memorial Library, Science Policy Group (SPG) and International Scientific and Technological Education Program (i-STEP).</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>Read more about the event on <a class="external-link" href="https://www.facebook.com/events/174784246787715/">Facebook page</a><br /></span></span></span></p>
<hr />
<p> </p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iH_kjoFRjAQ" width="500"></iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen Access2019-02-22T15:32:46ZNews ItemOSOD 2013: International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/international-workshop-open-science-and-open-data
<b>Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist at the International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data, 2013, held on October 07, 2013 at the Indian Statistical Institute. She gave a presentation on "Government Copyright and the Open Access Conundrum" </b>
<p>Parts of this presentation draw from <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/yojana-august-2013-pranesh-prakash-copyrights-and-copywrongs-why-the-govt-should-embrace-the-public-domain" class="external-link">Pranesh Prakash's views on Government Copyright</a>. Special thanks to Bhairav Acharya for his valuable inputs and feedback.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute along with Creative Commons USA held this workshop. The main objective of this workshop was to bring together international experts, practitioners and advocates of Open Access to information to discuss and contemplate on key issues contributing to Open Science. The workshop also aimed to serve as a platform for institutions, academicians, scientists and researchers interested in Open Science to exchange thoughts and processes 'How To' create Open content within legal framework.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Key Speakers</h3>
<ol>
<li><span><b>Puneet Kishor</b> (Policy Coordinator for Science and Data, Creative Commons)</span></li>
<li><span> <b>ARD Prasad</b> (DRTC, Indian Statistical Institute, India)<br /></span></li>
<li><span><b>Devika P. Madalli</b> (DRTC, Indian Statistical Institute, India)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><b>Giridhar Manepalli</b> (CNRI, USA)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><b>Usha Munshi</b> (Indian Institute of Public Administartion, India)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><span><b>Subbiah Arunachalam </b>(Information Scientist, India)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><span><span><b>Sridhar Parishetty</b> (</span></span></span></span></span><span><span><span><span><span>Centre for Inclusive Governance, Bangalore)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><span><span><span><b>Nehaa Chaudhari</b> (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore)</span><span><span><b> </b></span><span><b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><b>R. Prabhakar</b> (India Biodiversity Portal, Bangalore)<span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><b>Nisha Thompson</b> (Arghyam)<span><b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
<li> <span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><b>Yashas Shetty</b> (Srishti, Centre For Experimental Media Arts, Bangalore) </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></li>
</ol> <ol> </ol>
<hr />
<ul>
<li> <a class="external-link" href="http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/osod/programme">Read the agenda here</a></li>
<li>Download Nehaa's presentation titled <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/osod-2013.ppt" class="internal-link">Government Accessibility and Copyright Conundrum here</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/international-workshop-open-science-and-open-data'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/international-workshop-open-science-and-open-data</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen ContentOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2013-10-22T11:02:49ZNews ItemOpenness, Videos, Impressions
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport
<b>The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The notion of free and open is under great debate even under
that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further
splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the
tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively
perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away
with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different,
often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost
endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.</p>
<p>Open video, in that matter, has gone through different
iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it
variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for
the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and
open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective
hearing, through the day: <strong>Access, Archive,
Share, Remix, Repurpose</strong>. And it is these five that we need to now
imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups
today.</p>
<p><strong>Access</strong> has been one primary question that almost everybody
dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements,
where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and
content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging
information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access,
privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To
contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something
that different participants have voiced the need for.</p>
<p><strong>Archive</strong> is a preoccupation with most people because
archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and
usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to
different people, there are older questions of representation, voice,
empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In
education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge
production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of
issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of
access, distribution etc.</p>
<p><strong>Sharing </strong>is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open
and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what
sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to
be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions
of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do
we share it with? Tools by which sharing
leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning
practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks
can be built up?</p>
<p><strong>Remix</strong> has been of great value because it means that you are
being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the
process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the
possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is
interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just
putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc.
can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic
and mechanics seems to have emerged.</p>
<p><strong>Repurpose </strong>is my additional reading of something that perhaps
needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact
remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that
enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms,
protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and
there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still
seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up
and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceOpen StandardsArtWorkshopDigital AccessFLOSSOpen ContentArchivesOpennessOpen InnovationMeetingOpen Access2011-09-22T12:23:13ZBlog EntryOpenness
http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/openness
<b>The philosophy of openness is one that concerns itself with shifting power from centralized authorities of knowledge like owners to the community with its varied components like users, producers or contributors.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many people think of openness as being merely about the digitization of pre-existing knowledge or content but it is far more than that. Often, as Nishant Shah puts it in his article “Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness”<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1] </a>“it (openness) is about claiming access to knowledge and information hidden behind paywalls and gateways that are often produced using public resources.” Openness is important for the same reasons that access to knowledge is important, but it takes many different forms. We will be discussing Open Content, Open Access, Open (Government) Data, Free and Open Source Software and Open Standards.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After a quick narration of what we mean by commons and contents, we move on to open access to science and scholarship. We distinguish openness of knowledge as it prevails today from the public libraries of the print era and then move on to developments that led to the open access movement. We then discuss the status of open access in India and end with the bright future awaiting open access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The notion of the ‘commons’ (meaning open to all) has been in existence for a very long time. For example, as early as the 4<sup>th</sup> Century B C, Aristotle commented “What is common to the greatest number gets the least care!” [1] Ecologist Garret Hardin developed this notion into the ‘tragedy of the commons’ for explaining the numerous environmental crises and ecological dilemmas we face today [2]</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Commons is defined as "resources accessible to all members of a society“. A good example of the commons is the village greens in Great Britain around which people reside and have their church and school. Then there are grazing lands for their cattle, and water bodies, which no one owns but everyone can use. The moment someone has a title deed for a piece of land he ‘encloses’ it with a fence. Even here, if that piece of land has been used for long by people to cross to the other side, the owner keeps open a narrow footpath.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is only three or four decades ago the commons became an object of serious study. The idea of the ‘knowledge commons’ draws upon the work of people like Elinor Orstom on ‘common pool resources,’ ‘natural resource commons’ and ‘public good’ such as forests, water systems, fisheries, grazing fields and the global atmosphere all of which are common-pool resources of immense importance for the survival of humans on this earth [3-5].Ostrom and her colleague Charlotte Hess also contributed to knowledge commons and in particular to our understanding of scholarly communication and cultural resources as commons. Their work brought out the essential role of collective action and self-governance in making commons work [6].</p>
<p><b>Definitions</b><br />Before talking about knowledge commons let us define these terms:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Knowledge includes all useful ideas, information and data in whatever form in which it is expressed or obtained, and useful knowledge can be indigenous, scientific, scholarly, or non-academic. It also includes music and the visual and theatrical arts – humanity’s literary, artistic and cultural heritage. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ostrom and Hess define a commons as a resource shared by a group of people that is subject to social dilemmas.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Social dilemma in the context of knowledge includes enclosure by intellectual property (IP) regulations, loss due to inadequate preservation or simple neglect, and different laws being applied to print and digital forms. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open Knowledge Definition defines openness in relation to content and data thus: A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it without technical or legal restrictions, subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/ or share-alike [http://opendefinition.org]. And ‘digital commons’ is defined as "information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that is (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favour use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity."</li>
</ol>
<h3>Free and Open Software</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Definition</b><br />Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is both free and open source. Free software is software for which the source code is released when it is distributed. The users are free to adapt study and distribute the software.<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a>Most commercially available software is proprietary software so the free software is mostly developed cooperatively. The free software movement was launched in 1983 which was a social movement for the attaining these freedoms for software users. It basically draws upon the 1970’s hacker culture but the founder of the movement Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in 1983.<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a> Open source software (OSS) is released with its source code and the license is one where the copyright holder extends the right for users to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. OSS is also often developed collaboratively in a public endeavor. Free software licenses and open-source licenses are often used by many software packages instead of proprietary software licenses which have restrictive copyrights. Usually all software and bug fixes under this are also made available under the same free and open licenses which creates a kind of living software. These types of software are essential for society moving forward because they help reduce costs, increases productivity, enhance security, and improve compliance standards. FOSS presents the lowest risk among software systems because they have the best long term investment protection.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">UNESCO has recognized the importance of FOSS as a practical tool in development and in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4] </a></p>
<p>It recognizes that:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Software plays a crucial role in access to information and knowledge;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Different software models, including proprietary, open-source and free software, have many possibilities to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice and to enable all users to develop solutions which best meet their requirements;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The development and use of open, interoperable, non-discriminatory standards for information handling and access are important elements in the development of effective infostructures;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The community approaches to software development has great potential to contribute to operationalize the concept of Knowledge Societies;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) model provides interesting tools and processes with which people can create, exchange, share and exploit software and knowledge efficiently and effectively;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">FOSS can play an important role as a practical instrument for development as its free and open aspirations make it a natural component of development efforts in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs);</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Consistent support plays an important role in the success and sustainability of FOSS solutions;</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">All software choices should be based upon the solution's ability to achieve the best overall return on technology investments.<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5] </a></li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Organizations</b><a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6]</a><br />There is no rule that excludes anyone who wants to support FOSS from doing so. Usually, however, the trend shows that non-profit organizations (NPO), academic institutions, developers and support/service businesses invest their time and resources in these projects. Here are some of the important organizations that have supported FOSS:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">FLOSS Manuals -- FLOSS Manuals is a community that creates free manuals for free and open source software.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">FOSS Learning Centre – They are an international NPO that is a center for information and training about FOSS.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">GOSLING - "Getting Open Source Logic Into Governments" is a knowledge sharing community assist with the introduction and use of free/libre software solutions in the Canadian Federal and other government operations.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">International Open Source Network -- "The vision is that developing countries in the Asia-Pacific Region can achieve rapid and sustained economic and social development by using effective FOSS ICT solutions to bridge the digital divide."</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open Source for America – This is a combination of NGO’s, academic institutions, associations, technology industry leaders that advocates and helps raise the awareness of FOSS in the US Government.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open Source Initiative – This was the organization that first gave mass market appeal to the term “open source. They are the recognized certification authority for whether or not a given software license is FOSS.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open Source Software Institute – This is another NPO that consists of government, academic and corporate representation and they encourage open-source solutions in U.S. government agencies and academic entities.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">OSS Watch – This is a public institution in the UK which provides advice on the development and licensing of FOSS.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">SchoolForge – They offer references to references to open texts and lessons, open curricula, and free open source software in education.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Types of Licenses</b><a href="#fn7" name="fr7">[7]</a><br />Source Code: This is a code that is readable by humans. It has statements like:*Simple Hello Button () method.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When a computer is running, a source code is translated into binary code which is not readable or modifiable by humans. It reads something like:01011001101.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The licenses that will illuminate where FOSS licenses stand relatively are GPL licenses (that are the most restrictive) and BSD licenses (which are almost public domain). The primary distinction between these two is the way in which source code is treated as opposed to binary code.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The GPL license differed from prior ones because they stipulated that the source code has to be provided along with the binary code which meant that the licensees could use and change the source code. This requirement was an important part of the domino effect in driving innovation since old industrial standards did not apply to software. However, though this freedom with binaries produced exists, there are no requirements to make the source available. The prime difference between the two being that legally, the release of the BSD source is completely at the discretion of the releasing entity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The following table compares different kinds of FOSS licenses. In order to be considered as such, the bare minimum is for the licenses to pass the first four tests in the table.<a href="#fn8" name="fr8">[8]</a></p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th><th>Source must be free</th><th>Must retain copyright notice</th><th>Can sell executable without restriction</th><th>Modifications covered under license</th><th>Prevented from use for software or data locking</th><th>Linked code covered under license</th><th>New updates to license will apply</th><th>Patent retaliation, loss of use if suit brought</th><th>Can sell source code</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>GPL V3</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>?</td>
<td>N</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Mozilla (V1.1)</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>N</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>BSD</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>Y</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>N</td>
<td>Y</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Differences</b><a href="#fn9" name="fr9">[9]</a><br />The most salient distinction between the two types of software comes from the principles behind them. For the “open source” movement, the idea that software should be open source is a practical one and isn’t concerned with the ethical dimensions behind the question. For the free software movement, the problem behind software licenses is a social one for which free software is the solution.</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Openness.png" alt="Openness" class="image-inline" title="Openness" /></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Openness poster depicting the 4 freedoms of Free and Open Source Software. By 2016 approximately 86% of all video content will be internet video.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">FOSS in India</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many support groups like the Free Software Movement of India and various NGO’s have spawned in order to campaign for FOSS in India.<a href="#fn10" name="fr10">[10] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) was an initiative by the DIT in 2005 in order to be the central point for all FOSS related activities in India. Through awareness campaigns, training programs and workshops a large collection of FOSS trained teacher and student communities have been formed across India.<a href="#fn11" name="fr11">[11] </a>In many curricula in technical institutes, FOSS is even offered as an elective. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) boasts of “BOSS – Bharat Operating System Solutions External website that opens in a new windowis a GNU/Linux based localized Operating System distribution that supports 18 Indian languages - Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu.”<a href="#fn12" name="fr12">[12] </a></p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Curoverse<a href="#fn13" name="fr13">[13] </a></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Open source software is a mainstream enterprise that can be both beneficial to society, academia and companies. This was the underlying assumption when $1.5 million was invested in an open source genomics tool project at Curoverse, Boston. The Personal Genome Project (PGP) endeavors to sequence 100,000 human genomes in the U.S. The storage of these massive amounts of data is facilitated by Arvados, which is an open source computational platform. Curoverse, which is a product of the PGP is planning to release its commercial products next year and in anticipation, Boston Global Ventures and Common Angels have invested $1.5 M. The PGP, according to George Church (the creator), the database needed to hold almost one Exabyte of data for the researchers to efficiently analyze the data. Some of the functions necessary were the ability to share the data between research centers and to make sure that complex analyses could be reproduced. In order to satisfy these requirements, the software had to open source. Although similar to the new age cloud computing the software Arvados was programmed to hold extremely high amounts of genetic data. It can run on both public and private cloud services, so it’ll be available both on Amazon and other cloud platforms. Although this software was developed in 2006, the project hadn’t officially taken off but this investment in open source software coming from high impact technology companies like Boston Global Ventures.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Open-Sorcerers<a href="#fn14" name="fr14">[14] </a></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many magical tricks can be protected by copyright. For example, Teller from Penn and teller fame is suing a Dutch magician for allegedly stealing his “shadow” illusion. Litigating on these matters is proving to be extremely difficult so magicians, like programmers are taking the route of open-source licenses. This doesn’t mean that they would just share magical secrets in violation of the Alliance of Magicians on a forum like YouTube. This is more congruous with what open source technology activists advocate which is the idea of collaboration. If magicians work with more technologists, artists, programmers, scientists and other magicians, there could be better illusions and a general cross-pollination of magical ideas among various disciplines. For this, the technology behind these illusions needs to be freely available and the licenses have to open up for open sorcerers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Techno-illusionist Marco Tempest and Kieron Kirlkland from a digital creativity development studio in Bristol are the main proponents of open source in magic. Tempest has stated that famous magicians in the status quo contract illusion engineers, technologists or other magicians to design new effects for their acts and make them all sign secrecy agreements and the creators have no ownership of what they have created. This has been detrimental to innovation and perfection of techniques as they are not allowed to refine their work over time. If the ownership is instead shared and freely available to the co-creators and developers, then it would lead to better illusions and speed up the process faster.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Open Standards</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Definition</b><br />Interoperability has many social, technical and economic benefits and interoperability on the internet magnifies these benefits many fold. Interoperability, unlike a lot of other economically beneficial changes, was not a result of the adapting markets. It came about in what modest existence it has, through a concerted effort from processes and practices by the IETF, the W3C and the Interop conferences among others.<a href="#fn15" name="fr15">[15] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open standards are applicable to any application programming interface, a hardware interface, a file format, a communication protocol, a specification of user interactions, or any other form of data interchange and program control.<a href="#fn16" name="fr16">[16]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The billions of dollars of capital investment in the past few years since the internet’s advent into the mainstream has come from an understanding of very basic laws of the market. Metcalfe’s law says the value of interoperability increases geometrically with the number of compatible participants. Reed’s law states that a network’s utility exponentially increases as the number of subgroups increase.The problem with having standards for this interoperability is that the open standard either needs to be most open or most inclusive and unlike in many other cases we have discussed, here it can’t be both. If it wants to be inclusive, it should have standards that permit any license that is free, closed or open. It should have standards that have any type of implementation under any implementor.<a href="#fn17" name="fr17">[17] </a>On the other hand, if it to support the idea of openness, the best practices will exclude certain practices in the market like proprietary standards. Though traditionally meant to incentivize compliance by claiming a set of standards to be best practices, under this, some try to be unique in the market by adding on additional properties that are not a part of the open standards but claim that they implement “open standards” for strategic advantage. Others even defy the logic of having standards by claiming that their new additions embody open standards better.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As we have seen, due to the various conceptions of the good in open standards, there isn’t a universally accepted definition of open standards. The FOSS community largely accepts the following definition with contention from the industry.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[S]ubject to full public assessment and use without constraints [royalty-free] in a manner equally available to all parties; without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves; free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilization by any party or in any business model; managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties; available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.<a href="#fn18" name="fr18">[18] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A standard can be considered open if it does the job of achieving the following goals. It has to increase the market for a particular technology by facilitating investment in that technology by both consumers and suppliers. It has to do this by making sure these investors don’t have to pay monopoly rent or deal with trade secret, copyright, patent or trademark problems. In retrospect, we have learned that the only standards that have achieved these goals are ones that encourage an open-source philosophy.</p>
<p>Proprietary software manufacturers, vendors and their lobbyists often provide a definition of open standards that is not in line with the above definitions on two counts (Nah, 2006).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One, they do not think it is necessary for an open standard to be available on a royalty-free basis as long as it is available under a “reasonable and non-discriminatory” (RAND) licence. This means that there are some patents associated with the standard and the owners of the patents have agreed to license them under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (W3C, 2002). One example is the audio format MP3, an ISO/IEC [International Organisation for Standardisation/International Electrotechnical Commission] standard where the associated patents are owned by Thomson Consumer Electronics and the Fraunhofer Society of Germany. A developer of a game with MP3 support would have to pay USD 2,500 as royalty for using the standard. While this may be reasonable in the United States (US), it is unthinkable for an entrepreneur from Bangladesh. Additionally, RAND licences are incompatible with most FOSS licensing requirements. Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems says that FOSS “serves as the canary in the coalmine for the word ‘open’. Standards are truly open when they can be implemented without fear as free software in an open source community” (Phipps, 2007). RAND licences also retard the growth of FOSS, since they are patented in a few countries. Despite the fact that software is not patentable in most parts of the world, the makers of various distributions of GNU/Linux do not include reverse-engineered drivers, codecs, etc., in the official builds for fear of being sued. Only the large corporation-backed distributions of GNU/Linux can afford to pay the royalties needed to include patented software in the official builds (in this way enabling an enhanced out-of-the-box experience). This has the effect of slowing the adoption of GNU/Linux, as less experienced users using community-backed distributions do not have access to the wide variety of drivers and codecs that users of other operating systems do (Disposable, 2004). This vicious circle effectively ensures negligible market presence of smaller community-driven projects by artificial reduction of competition.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Two, proprietary software promoters do not believe that open standards should be “managed and further developed independently of any single vendor,” as the following examples will demonstrate. This is equally applicable to both new and existing standards.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) is a relatively new standard which the FOSS community sees as a redundant alternative to the existing Open Document Format (ODF). During the OOXML process, delegates were unhappy with the fact that many components were specific to Microsoft technology, amongst other issues. By the end of a fast-track process at the ISO, Microsoft stands accused of committee stuffing: that is, using its corporate social responsibility wing to coax non-governmental organisations to send form letters to national standards committees, and haranguing those who opposed OOXML. Of the twelve new national board members that joined ISO after the OOXML process started, ten voted “yes” in the first ballot (Weir, 2007). The European Commission, which has already fined Microsoft USD 2.57 billion for anti-competitive behaviour, is currently investigating the allegations of committee stuffing (Calore, 2007). Microsoft was able to use its financial muscle and monopoly to fast-track the standard and get it approved. In this way it has managed to subvert the participatory nature of a standards-setting organisation. So even though Microsoft is ostensibly giving up control of its primary file format to the ISO, it still exerts enormous influence over the future of the standard.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">HTML, on the other hand, is a relatively old standard which was initially promoted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community of techies. However, in 2002, seven years after the birth of HTML 2.0, the US Department of Justice alleged that Microsoft used the strategy of “embrace, extend, and extinguish” (US DoJ, 1999) in an attempt to create a monopoly among web browsers. It said that Microsoft used its dominance in the desktop operating system market to achieve dominance in the web-authoring tool and browser market by introducing proprietary extensions to the HTML standard (Festa, 2002). In other words, financial and market muscle have been employed by proprietary software companies – in these instances, Microsoft – to hijack open standards.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Importance</b><br />There are many technical, social and ethical reasons for the adoption and use of open standards. Some of the reasons that should concern governments and other organisations utilising public money – such as multilaterals, bilaterals, civil society organisations, research organisations and educational institutions – are listed below.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Innovation/competitiveness:</b> Open standards are the bases of most technological innovations, the best example of which would be the internet itself (Raymond, 2000). The building blocks of the internet and associated services like the world wide web are based on open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, POP3 and SMTP. Open standards create a level playing field that ensures greater competition between large and small, local and foreign, and new and old companies, resulting in innovative products and services. Instant messaging, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), wikis, blogging, file-sharing and many other applications with large-scale global adoption were invented by individuals and small and medium enterprises, and not by multinational corporations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Greater interoperability:</b> Open standards ensure the ubiquity of the internet experience by allowing different devices to interoperate seamlessly. It is only due to open standards that consumers are able to use products and services from competing vendors interchangeably and simultaneously in a seamless fashion, without having to learn additional skills or acquire converters. For instance, the mail standard IMAP can be used from a variety of operating systems (Mac, Linux and Windows), mail clients (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook Express) and web-based mail clients. Email would be a completely different experience if we were not able to use our friends’ computers, our mobile phones, or a cybercafé to check our mail.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Customer autonomy: </b>Open standards also empower consumers and transform them into co-creators or “prosumers” (Toffler, 1980). Open standards prevent vendor lock-in by ensuring that the customer is able to shift easily from one product or service provider to another without significant efforts or costs resulting from migration.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Reduced cost: </b>Open standards eliminate patent rents, resulting in a reduction of total cost of ownership. This helps civil society develop products and services for the poor.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Reduced obsolescence: </b>Software companies can leverage their clients’ dependence on proprietary standards to engineer obsolescence into their products and force their clients to keep upgrading to newer versions of software. Open standards ensure that civil society, governments and others can continue to use old hardware and software, which can be quite handy for sectors that are strapped for financial resources.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Accessibility: </b>Operating system-level accessibility infrastructure such as magnifiers, screen readers and text-to-voice engines require compliance to open standards. Open standards therefore ensure greater access by people with disabilities, the elderly, and neo-literate and illiterate users. Examples include the US government’s Section 508 standards, and the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) WAI-AA standards.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Free access to the state:</b> Open standards enable access without forcing citizens to purchase or pirate software in order to interact with the state. This is critical given the right to information and the freedom of information legislations being enacted and implemented in many countries these days.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Privacy/security:</b> Open standards enable the citizen to examine communications between personal and state-controlled devices and networks. For example, open standards allow users to see whether data from their media player and browser history are being transmitted along to government servers when they file their tax returns. Open standards also help prevent corporate surveillance.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Data longevity and archiving: </b>Open standards ensure that the expiry of software licences does not prevent the state from accessing its own information and data. They also ensure that knowledge that has been passed on to our generation, and the knowledge generated by our generation, is safely transmitted to all generations to come.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Media monitoring:</b> Open standards ensure that the voluntary sector, media monitoring services and public archives can keep track of the ever-increasing supply of text, audio, video and multimedia generated by the global news, entertainment and gaming industries. In democracies, watchdogs should be permitted to reverse-engineer proprietary standards and archive critical ephemeral media in open standards.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Principles<a href="#fn19" name="fr19">[19] </a></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Availability:Open Standards should be available for everyone to access.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Maximize End-User Choice:Open Standards should lead to a competitive and fair market and shouldn’t restrict consumer choices.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">No Royalty:Open Standards should be free of cost for any entity to implement while there maybe some fee for certification of compliance.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">No Discrimination:Open Standards should not show preference to one implementer over another as previously discussed except for the tautological reason of the compliance with the standard. The authorities that are certifying these implementers should offer a low or zero-cost implementation scheme.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Extension or Subset:Open Standards may be allowed in a subset or can allow for extensions form but certifying authorities can decline from certifying subset implementations and have specific conditions for extensions.</li>
</ol>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/HTTP.png" alt="HTTP" class="image-inline" title="HTTP" /></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, SSL, etc., are all royalty free open standards and are building blocks on the Internet.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ol> </ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>OSI Criteria<a href="#fn20" name="fr20">[20] </a></b><br />In addition, to make sure that the Open Standards also promote an open source philosophy, the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which is the steward of the open source definition, has a set of criteria for open standards.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">“<b>No Intentional Secrets:</b> The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Availability:</b> The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.</li>
<li><b>Patents:</b> All patents essential to implementation of the standard must:<br /> - be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or<br /> - be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software</li>
<li><b>No Agreements:</b> There must not be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.</li>
<li><b>No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies:</b> Implementation of the standard must not require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.”</li>
</ol>
<p><b>W3C Criteria</b><a href="#fn21" name="fr21">[21]</a><br />The W3C also has a list of criteria in order to be called “Open Standards”.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><b>Transparency</b> (due process is public, and all technical discussions, meeting minutes, are archived and referencable in decision making)</li>
<li><b>Relevance</b> (new standardization is started upon due analysis of the market needs, including requirements phase, e.g. accessibility, multi-linguism)</li>
<li><b>Openness</b> (anybody can participate, and everybody does: industry, individual, public, government bodies, academia, on a worldwide scale)</li>
<li><b>Impartiality and consensus</b> (guaranteed fairness by the process and the neutral hosting of the W3C organization, with equal weight for each participant)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Availability</b> (free access to the standard text, both during development and at final stage, translations, and clear IPR rules for implementation, allowing open source development in the case of Internet/Web technologies)</li>
<li><b>Maintenance</b> (ongoing process for testing, errata, revision, permanent access)”</li>
</ol>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<h3>Case Study: Digital Colonialism</h3>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Imagine back to a world in which a foreign power leases out a piece of land and you grow crops on it. You have produced crops there for many seasons and used the sales to buy a nice windmill. One day, the lease expires and the foreign power come and seizes not only your crops but also your windmill. Now if we apply the same story in a proprietary standards regime, imagine you were to license a copy of Microsoft Office for 28 days. You have stored documents in .doc, .xls and .ppt format. On the day that the license expires, you will not only lose your ability to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, you will in fact lose all your documents in .doc, .xls and .ppt formats!</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>Additional Readings</b><b> </b></p>
<ol>
<li>Internet Engineering Task Force, <i>OpenStandards.net</i>,<a href="http://www.openstandards.net/viewOSnet2C.jsp?showModuleName=Organizations&mode=1&acronym=IETF">http://www.openstandards.net/viewOSnet2C.jsp?showModuleName=Organizations&mode=1&acronym=IETF</a></li>
<li>Standards, <i>W3C</i>, <a href="http://www.w3.org/standards/">http://www.w3.org/standards/</a></li>
<li>Open Standards, <a href="http://www.open-std.org/">http://www.open-std.org/</a></li>
<li>Pranesh Prakash, “Report on Open Standards for GISW 2008”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society</i>, 2008, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Open-Standards-GISW-2008.pdf/at_download/file">http://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Open-Standards-GISW-2008.pdf/at_download/file</a></li>
<li>Sunil Abraham, “Response to the Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society</i>, 2008, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/the-response">http://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/the-response</a></li>
<li>Pranesh Prakash, “Second Response to Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance”, Centre for Internet and Society, 2008,<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/second-response">http://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/second-response </a></li>
<li>Definition of “Open Standards”, <i>International Telecommunication Union</i>, <a href="http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ipr/Pages/open.aspx">http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ipr/Pages/open.aspx</a></li>
</ol>
<h3>Open Content</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Definition</b><br />The premise of an Open Content license is that, unlike most copyright licenses, which impose stringent conditions on the usage of the work, the Open Content licenses enable users to have certain freedoms by granting them rights. Some of these rights are usually common to all Open Content licenses, such as the right to copy the work and the right to distribute the work. Depending on the particular license, the user may also have the right to modify the work, create derivative works, perform the work, display the work and distribute the derivative works.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When choosing a license, the first thing that you will have to decide is the extent to which you are willing to grant someone rights over your work. For instance, let us suppose you have created a font. If you do not have a problem if people create other versions of it, then you can choose a license that grants the user all rights. If, on the other hand, you are willing to allow people to copy the font and distribute it, but you do not want them to change the typeface or create versions of it, then you can choose a more restrictive license that only grants them the first two rights.</p>
<p>Most open content licenses share a few common features that distinguish them from traditional copyright licenses.</p>
<p>These can be understood in the following ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>Basis of the license/ validity of the license. (Discussed above)</li>
<li>Rights granted. (Discussed above)</li>
<li>Derivative works.d. Commercial/ non-commercial usage.e. Procedural requirements imposed.</li>
<li>Appropriate credits.</li>
<li>They do not effect fair use rights.</li>
<li>Absence of warranty.</li>
<li>Standard legal clauses</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Derivate Works</b><br />Any work that is based on an original work created by you is a derivative work. The key difference between different kinds of Open Content licenses is the method that they adopt to deal with the question of derivative works. This issue is an inheritance from the licensing issues in the Free Software environment. The GNU GPL, for instance, makes it mandatory that any derivative work created from a work licensed under the GNU GPL must also be licensed under the GNU GPL. This is a means of ensuring that no one can create a derivative work from a free work which can then be licensed with restrictive terms and conditions. In other words, it ensures that a work that has been made available in the public domain cannot be taken outside of the public domain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the other hand, you may have a license like the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) software license that may allow a person who creates a derivative work to license that derivative work under a proprietary or closed source license. This ability to control a derivative work through a license is perhaps the most important aspect of the Open Content licenses. They ensure, in a sense, a self perpetuity. Since a person cannot make a derivative work without your permission, your permission is granted on the condition that s/he also allows others to use the derivative work freely. In Open Content licenses, the right to create a derivative work normally includes the right to create it in all media. Thus, if I license a story under an Open Content license, I also grant the user the right to create an audio rendition of it. The obligation to ensure that the derivative work is also licensed under the terms and conditions of the Open Content license is not applicable, however, in cases where the work is merely aggregated into a collection / anthology / compilation. For instance, suppose that I have drawn and written a comic called X, which is being included in a general anthology. In such a case, the other comics in the anthology may be licensed under different terms, and the Open Content license is not applicable to them and will only be applicable to my comic X in the anthology.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Commercial / Non-Commercial Usage<br /></b>Another important aspect of Open Content licenses is the question of commercial / non-commercial usages. For instance, I may license a piece of video that I have made, but only as long as the user is using it for non-commercial purposes. On the other hand, a very liberal license may grant the person all rights, including the right to commercially exploit the work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Procedural Requirements Imposed<br /></b>Most Open Content licenses require a very strict adherence to procedures that have to be followed by the end user if s/he wants to distribute the work, and this holds true even for derivative works. The licenses normally demand that a copy of the license accompanies the work, or the inclusion of some sign or symbol which indicates the nature of the license that the work is being distributed under, for instance, and information about where this license may be obtained. This procedure is critical to ensure that all the rights granted and all the obligations imposed under the license are also passed onto third parties who acquire the work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Appropriate Credits<br /></b>The next procedural requirement that has to be strictly followed is that there should be appropriate credits given to the author of the work. This procedure applies in two scenarios. In the first scenario, when the end user distributes the work to a third party, then s/he should ensure that the original author is duly acknowledged and credited. The procedure also applies when the end user wants to modify the work or create a derivative work. Then, the derivative work should clearly mention the author of the original and also mention where the original can be found.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The importance of this clause arises from the fact that, while Open Content licenses seek to create an alternative ethos of sharing and collaboration, it also understands the importance of crediting the author. Very often, in the absence of monetary incentive, other motivating factors such as recognition, reputation and honour become very important. Open Content licenses, far from ignoring the rights of the author, insist on strict procedures so that these authorial rights are respected. You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or non-commercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this license applies to the document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsover to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open content licenses do not effect fair use rights<br /></b>Under copyright law, there is an exception to infringement and this is known as the fair use exception. Fair use exceptions generally include using portions for critique or review, and certain non-commercial or educational academic uses etc. Open content licenses make it clear that 48 49the terms and conditions of the license do not affect your fair use rights. Thus even if someone is in disagreement with the terms and conditions, and refuses to enter into the open content license, s/he may still have the freedom to use the work to the extent that is allowed by the principles of his/her fair use rights.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Absence of warranty<br /></b>Since more often than not the work is being made available at no financial cost and also gives the user certain freedoms, most open content licenses have a standard clause which states that the work is being provided without any warranty or on an ‘as is’ basis. The licensor cannot be in a position to provide any warranty on the work. A few licenses however provide the end-user the option of providing a warranty on services, or a warranty on the derivative work so long as that warranty is one between the licensee and the third party.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Standard legal clauses<br /></b>A few other clauses that appear at the end of most open content licenses are the standard legal clauses that are included in most legal agreements, and you don’t have to worry too much about them while choosing a license.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">These generally include:</p>
<ol>
<li>Severability: This means that even if one portion of the license is held to be invalid the other portions will still continue to have effect.</li>
<li>Limitation on liability: The licenses normally state that the licensor will not be liable for anything arising from the use of the work. Thus, for instance, an end-user cannot claim that he suffered mental trauma as a result of the work.</li>
<li>The licenses do not allow you to modify any portion of the license while redistributing works, etc.</li>
<li>Termination: Most licenses state that the rights granted to the licensee are automatically terminated the moment s/he violates any obligation under the license. </li>
</ol>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Libraries as Content Providers and the Role of Technology</b><br />Content is for people’s use. First it was the library which facilitated access to knowledge for the use by the lay public. The first among the five laws enunciated by the famous Indian librarian Ranganathan [7] emphasizes this point: “Books are for use.”<span> </span>And it was technology which enabled large scale production of content in the form of books and subsequently facilitated ease of access.<span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Let us take text as content first. Before Gutenberg invented printing using movable types (c. 1436-1440) scribes used to write on vellum by hand. It was a painfully slow process and the reach was very limited. Gutenberg brought about probably the greatest game changing technology which within a very few years revolutionized many aspects of human life and history like never before.<span> </span>Peter Drucker has captured this revolution beautifully in an article in <i>The Atlantic</i> [8]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The public library became the content commons in the print era. Of course, long before Gutenberg there were some great libraries, e.g., Royal Library of Alexandria (Egypt), Taxila University Library, Nalanda University Library (Bihar, India), Bayt Al Hiqma (Baghdad, Iraq) and the Imperial Library of Library of Constantinople (in the capital of the Byzantine Empire). None of these could survive the ravages of time. Thanks to printing, the numbers increased rapidly and the library movement spread to far corners of the globe.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The major public libraries of today are performing a great job with huge collections. The US Library of Congress in Washington DC has 155 million items occupying 838 miles of shelf space, of which 35 million are print material, 68 million are manuscripts, and 5.4 million are maps. Besides these, LoC has 6.5 million pieces of sheet music, 13.6 million photographs and 3.4 million recordings.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The British Library in London has more than 150 million items with 3 million being added annually. If one reads 5 items a day, it will take 80,000 years to complete the current collection. The National Library of Russia stocks more than 36.4 million items. The Russian State Library,<span class="apple-converted-space"><span> </span></span><span>the legendary 'Leninka,' comprises a unique collection of Russian and foreign documents in 247 languages, stocking over 43 million items.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now every major library emphasizes improved access. Here are some excerpts from Mission statements of some large institutions around the world.</p>
<ol>
<li>British Library: “Enable access to everyone who wants to do research.”</li>
<li>National Library of the Netherlands: “Our core values are accessibility, sustainability, innovation and cooperation.”</li>
<li>German Federal Archives: “legal responsibility of permanently preserving the federal archival documents and making them available for use.”</li>
<li>Danish National Gallery: “Through accessibility, education, and exhibition.” </li>
<li>Victoria & Albert Museum: “To provide diverse audience with the best quality experience and optimum access to our collections, physically and digitally.” </li>
</ol>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">I have included in this sample of galleries, archives, and museums as well as all of them deal with cultural content. Indeed the Open Knowledge Foundation has a major project called OpenGLAM.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">In India the first network of public libraries covering a whole state was set up more than a hundred years ago by the Maharaja of Baroda (Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III), a truly benevolent king [9]. In the US though, the public library movement was essentially the gift of a ruthless industrialist who was believed to have been unfair to the workers in his steel mills. But the more than 2,000 libraries Andrew Carnegie helped set up are truly a democratizing force.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Today the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promotes libraries in the developing and emerging economies and through their Access to Knowledge award they leverage the use of ICT in libraries.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">While public libraries opened up a vast treasure of knowledge to a large number of people many of whom could not have had an opportunity to read even a few of the books in their collections, they had not provided ‘open access.’ That has to wait a little longer.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The Internet era not only helped traditional libraries to introduce new services but also gave birth to many free and open libraries such as Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. The Internet Archive aims to provide ‘universal access to all knowledge’ and includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. Project Gutenberg encourages the creation of ebooks.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The best known examples of more recent initiatives are Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) both of which take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet. Europeana provides access to 22.6 million objects (from over 2,000 institutions). These include 14.6 million images – paintings, photographs, etc. and 8.4 million books, magazines, newspapers, diaries, etc. DPLA is not even a year old but it already provides access to more than 5.4 million items from a number of libraries, archives and museums.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">In India there are efforts to digitize print material, paintings, images, music, films, etc. The Digital Library of India (DLI) and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGCNA) are two examples. Currently, the Ministry of Culture is toying with the idea of a setting up a National Virtual Library.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Apart from libraries which provide electronic access to millions, a very large number of newspapers and magazines and websites also are freely accessible on the net.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Perhaps one of the most important development in Open Content that has affected people’s access to knowledge worldwide has been Wikipedia. Alexa rans it 6th among all websites globally and approximately 365 million users worldwide read Wikipedia content.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Creative Commons System</b><br />Critiquing a system is merely one side of the coin. Offering viable alternatives or solutions to the lacunae identified in the status quo significantly buttresses critical claims. Alternatives have moved to the internet and understood the logic of its read-write culture. New media such as YouTube and platforms like WordPress have made each one of us not mere consumers of information but potential authors, film makers. Any viable alternative must contemplate this transformation of the read-only culture of the internet to the read-write culture.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that functions across the world to provide licensing tools to authors of creative works. The key distinguishing feature of this system is that the authors have the right to decide under what license they want to make their work available. The system was conceptualized by a number of individuals at the helm of the copyleft movement, of whom the most prominent was Professor Lawrence Lessig.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">The creative commons system stands for ‘Some Rights Reserved’, a deviation from the ‘all rights reserved’ model of strict copyright law. The rights to be reserved are left to the discretion of the author.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Types of Licenses<br />1. Attribution License – CC BY<br />2. Attribution-ShareAlike : CC BY-SA<br />3. Attribution-NoDerivatives License : CC BY-ND <br />4. Attribution-NonCommercial License : CC BY-NC<br />5. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike : CC BY-NC-SA<br />6. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs- CC BY-NC-ND LICENSE</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>Exceptions to Open Content</b><br />There are two kinds of critiques that have been made about the limitations of Open Content initiatives. The first is a policy - level critique which argues that the voluntary nature of Open Content projects diverts from the larger issue of the need for urgent structural transformations in the global copyright regime. It is argued, for instance, that by relying on copyright, even in a creative variation of it, it still ends up strengthening the copyright system. The larger problem of access to knowledge and culture can only be solved through a long-term intervention in the global copyright regime from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS agreement.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Open Content has also been criticized on the grounds that it privileges the traditional idea of the author at the center of knowledge / culture at the costs of focusing on users. By giving authors the right to participate in a flexible licensing policy, Open Content initiatives end up privileging the notion of the desirability of creating property rights in expressions; cultural and literary products are considered as commodities, albeit ones that the creator can decide to make accessible (or not0, much like a person can decide whether or not to invite someone into his / her house.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">A second-level critique asks the question of the relevance of Open Content projects, with their heavy reliance on the Internet. According to the Copysouth group:<br /><i>It is unlikely that more than a tiny percentage of the works created on a global basis in any year will be available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Will the percentage be even less within the Southern Hemisphere? This seems likely. Hence, CC licenses will be of limited value in meeting the expansive access needs of the South in the near future. Nor do CC licenses provide access to already published works or music that are still restricted by copyright laws; these form the overwhelming majority of current material. Focusing on CC licenses may potentially sideline or detour people from analyzing how existing copyright laws block access and how policy changes on a societal level, rather than the actions of individual "good guys", are the key to improving access and the related problems of copyright laws and ideology which are discussed elsewhere in this draft dossier. Nor does it confront the fact that many creators (e.g. most musicians, most academic authors) may be required, because of unequal bargaining power, to assign copyright in their own work to a record company or publisher as a condition of getting their work produced or published</i>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, a number of Open Content initiatives have an uncomfortable take on other modes through which most people in developing nations have access to knowledge and cultural commodities, namely, piracy, and its critical relation to infrastructure. The emphasis of Open Content on the creation of new content of course raises the question of who uses the new content, and what is the relationship between such content and the question of democratization of infrastructure?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">In most cases, the reason for the fall in price of electronic goods, computers, great access to material, increase in photocopiers (the infrastructure of information flows), etc. is not caused in any manner through any radical revolution such as Free Software or Open Content, but really through the easier availability of standard mainstream commodities like Microsoft software and Hollywood. Open Content is unable to provide a solution to the problem of content that is locked up within current copyright regimes. As much as one would like to promote new artists, new books, etc., the fact remains that a bulk of the people do want the latest Hollywood / Bollywood films for a cheaper cost; they do want the latest proprietary software at a cheaper cost; and they do want to read Harry Potter without paying a ransom.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">We can either take the moral higher ground and speak of their real information needs or provide crude theories of how they are trapped by false consciousness. Or, we can move away from these judgmental perspectives, and look at other aspects of the debate, such as the impact that the expansion of the grey market for these goods has on their general pricing, the spread of computer/IT culture, the fall in price of consumables such as blank CDs, DVDs, the growing popularity of CD-writing equipment, etc.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">There is no point in having a preachy and messianic approach that lectures people on the kind of access that should be given. While in an ideal world, we would also use Free Software and Open Content, this cannot be linked in a sacrosanct manner to the question of spreading access.</p>
<hr />
<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia</h3>
<hr />
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>History of Wikipedia</b><span><br />January 15</span><sup><span>th</span></sup><span> is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this day 13 years back in 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a wiki-based project after experimenting with another project called Nupedia. Nupedia was also a web-based project whose content was written by experts to have high quality articles comparable to that of professional encyclopedia. Nupedia approved only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><span>In concept, Wikipedia was intended to compliment Nupedia by providing additional high quality articles. In practice, Wikipedia overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project providing free information in multiple languages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><span>As of January 2014, Wikipedia includes over 30.5mn articles written by 44 million registered users and numerous anonyms volunteers in 287 languages; including over 20 Indian languages.[1] Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular internet property with about 450 mn unique visitors every month, according to Alexa Internet.[2]<br /></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Wikipedia in Indian Language<br /></b>With one of the globe’s largest populations, world’s largest democracies, dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects, rich heritage, culture, religion, architecture, art, literature and music; India presents a remarkable opportunity for Wikipedia. For the Wikimedia movement, India represents a largely untapped opportunity to dramatically expand its impact and move toward the vision of a world where everyone can freely share in – and contribute to – the sum of human knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although the Indian population makes up about 20% of humanity, Indians account for only 4.7% of global Internet users, and India represents only 2.0% of global pageviews and 1.6% of global page edits on Wikimedia's sites. Wikipedia projects in 20 Indic languages, will become increasingly important as the next 100 million Indians come onto the Internet, given that they are likely to be increasingly using the Internet in languages other than English. Demographically, Indic languages represent a good growth opportunity since estimates suggest only about 150 million of the total Indian population of 1.2 billion have working fluency in English.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To drive the growth of Indian language Wikipedias, WMF initiated Access to Knowledge Programme (A2K) with Centre for Internet & Society in 2012.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Challenges Faced by Indian Language Wikipedias</b><span><br />The current challenges of Indian language Wikipedias can be summarized as below:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><span>1. Indian language Wikipedia’s are under-represented in reader, editor & article counts.<br />2. Editor base is relatively low.Further, growth in editors and articles is still relatively low, even on a small base.<br />3. Technical barriers exist for use of Indian language Wikipedias, especially for editing.<br />4. Internet penetration low (~150mn) – though growing rapidly, and projected to double by 2015. [3]<br />Hari Prasad Nadig; a Wikipedian since 2004, an active Kannada Wikipedian, sysop on both Kannada Wikipedia and Sanskrit Wikipedia, talks about challenges and opportunities of Indian Language Wikipedias in a video.<a href="#fn22" name="fr22">[22] </a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><span><b>Development of Indian Language Wikipedias</b><br />Between 2002-04, about 18 Indian language Wikipedias had started. As of Jan 2014, Hindi Wikipedia is the largest project with over 1-lakh articles and Malayalam Wikipedia has the best quality articles amongst all Indian language Wikipedia projects.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>In India there are two main organisational bodies that are:</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">First is Wikimedia India Chapter which is an independent and not-for-profit organization that supports, promotes and educate the general Indian public about the availability and use of free and open educational content, which includes the ability to access, develop and contribute to encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books, images, etc.The chapter helps coordinate various Indian language Wikipedias & other Wikimedia projects and spread the word in India. Chapter's latest updates can be accessed from its official portal <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Main_Page">wiki.wikimedia.in</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Second is Access to Knowledge Programme at Centre for Internet & Society (CIS-A2K) that provides support to the Indian Wikimedia community on various community-led activities, including outreach events across the country, meetups, contests, conferences, and connections to GLAMs and other institutions. CIS-A2K's latest updates can be accessed from its official portal Wiki.<a href="#fn23" name="fr23">[23] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Some ideas for development of India language Wikipedias (also adopted by India Chapter and CIS-A2K) are:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><span><b>Content addition/donation in Indian languages<br /></b>Particular emphasis is placed on generating and improving content in Indic languages. The Indian language Wikipedias can be strengthened by finding content that is relevant and useful to the Wikimedia movement that is (a) already in the public domain and (b) contributed to the movement under an acceptable copyright license. Such content will include, but not be limited to, dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias and any other encyclopedia-like compilations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span>A precedent for content addition/donation exists in the gift of an encyclopedia to the Wikimedia movement by Kerala government in 2008 and Goa government in 2013.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b><span>Institutional Partnerships</span></b><span><b><br /></b>To partner with higher education institutions in developing thematic projects and create a network of academicians that will actively use Indian language Wikipedias as part of their pedagogy. Conduct outreach workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><i><span>An example of this would be 1600 students of Christ University undergraduate courses who study a second language as part of the course are enrolled in a program where they are building content on Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu Wikipedias.</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Strengthening existing community</b><br />Facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst current contributors, with an aim to a) foster creation of new project ideas; b) periodic review and mitigation of troublesome issues; c) foster a culture of collective review of the expansion of Indian language Wikipedias.</p>
<p><i>This is currently been done by capacity building meet-up or advanced user trainings organized for existing Wikimedia volunteers from different language communities.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Tapping into User Interest Groups</b><br />Setting up smaller special interest groups by tapping into existing virtual (Facebook pages/groups, bloggers communities, other open source groups/mailing lists), and physical communities and supporting key Wikipedians to bring new Wikipedians on board.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Building ties with DiscoverBhubaneshwar in Odisa [4] and Goa.me in Goa [5], which are photographer’s communities. Useful pictures from different states can feed into Wikipedia articles there by enriching the content. Collaboration with Media lab at Jadhavpur University, Kolkota has helped create articles on Indian cinema and media, Indian film history etc.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Creating awareness</b><br />Creation of short online editing videos tutorials and editing guides to be published on Wikimedia commons, YouTube, Facebook and similar websites that could help us reach out to larger audiences. Production of videos in local language will avoid existing issues with global videos such as low comprehensions because of accents and relevance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hindi Wikipedia tutorial videos were produced in collaboration with the Christ University students, faculty and staff, as part of the Wikipedia-in-the-UG-Language-Classroom program. A total of 10 videos are thoughtfully produced to teach anyone how to edit Hindi Wikipedia.<a href="#fn24" name="fr24">[24] </a>Video tutorials on Kannada Wikipedia are currently in pipeline.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Technical support</b><br />Liaising between language communities and WMF & Language Committee in finding effective solutions for any script issue, input method issue, rendering issues or any bugs.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Wikipedians Speak</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><i>Netha Hussain</i> is a 21-year-old medical student from Kerala, India. She first began editing Wikipedia in May 2010, contributing to English Wikipedia and Malayalam Wikipedia along with uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons. She said “I started editing Wikipedia every day. In school, we studied subjects like microbiology, pathology, pharmacology and forensic medicine. After class, I'd go straight to Wikipedia. I'd review the information related to the day's lecture, and add a few more facts and sources. It was a lot of work, and I always went to bed tired, but it was worth it. Everybody reads Wikipedia. If they want to learn something, they turn to Wikipedia first. I know I’ve helped a little — maybe even a lot. And that’s the greatest feeling I know.”<a href="#fn25" name="fr25">[25] </a></p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Netha.png" alt="Netha Hussein" class="image-inline" title="Netha Hussein" /></p>
<p></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span>Image Attribution:</span></b><span><span>Netha Hussain</span></span><span> by Adam Novak, under <span>CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported</span>, from Wikimedia Commons. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Poongothai Balasubramanian is a retired Math teacher from Tamil Nadu, India. She began editing Wikipedia in 2010. Since then, she's created 250 articles and recorded pronunciations for 6,000 words. She has created several articles on quadratic functions, probability, charts, graphs and more on Tamil Wikipedia. She has over 7,000 Wikipedia edits. She said, “As a teacher and a mother, I was always busy. But now that I'm retired and my children are grown, my time is my own — all 24 hours of it! And I spend every day on Wikipedia. I'm a volunteer. No one pays me. But helping edit Wikipedia has become my life's work. Even though I'm not in the classroom, I'm still doing what I care about most: helping a newgeneration of students learn, in the language I love.”<a href="#fn26" name="fr26">[26] </a><br /></span></p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Balasubramaniam.png" alt="Balasubramanian" class="image-inline" title="Balasubramanian" /></p>
<p><b>Image Attribution:</b> Balasubramanian Poongothai by Adam Novak, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>Additional Reading</b></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds.), “Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society and the Institute of Network Cultures</i>, <a href="http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%237reader_Wikipedia.pdf">http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%237reader_Wikipedia.pdf</a>.</li>
<li>Links to 2 videos </li>
<li>Yochai Benkler</li>
</ol>
<h3>Open Access</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Definition</b><br />Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">OA removes <i>price barriers</i> (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and <i>permission barriers</i> (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The <a href="http://www.plos.org/index.html">PLoS</a> shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Here's how the <a href="http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml">Budapest Open Access Initiative</a> put it: "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Here's how the <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm">Bethesda</a> and <a href="http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/">Berlin</a> statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "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...."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://www.soros.org/openaccess/">Budapest</a> (February 2002), <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm">Bethesda</a> (June 2003), and <a href="http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/">Berlin</a> (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm#progress">BBB definition</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When we need to refer unambiguously to sub-species of OA, we can <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre">borrow</a> terminology from the kindred movement for free and open-source software. <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre">Gratis OA</a> removes price barriers alone, and<a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm#gratis-libre">libre OA</a> removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers as well. Gratis OA is free of charge, but not free of copyright of licensing restrictions. Users must either limit themselves to fair use or seek permission to exceed it. Libre OA is free of charge and expressly permits uses beyond fair use. To adapt Richard Stallman's famous <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">formulation</a> (originally applied to software), gratis OA is free as in 'free beer', while libre OA is also free as in 'free speech'.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full texts, not just abstracts or summaries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is true that many libraries and other content providing organizations provide free access to vast quantities of textual (and other kinds of) information. Today a variety of contents is thrown open by the creators and these include hundreds of educational courses, open government data, open monographs, open images and so on.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But when we talk of ‘open access’ the term is restricted to science and scholarship and especially to research publications and in particular journal articles. Unlike most newspaper publishers, not all publishers of professional journals are ready to allow free use of the material they publish. Indeed, they levy hefty subscription prices and some journals cost in the range of US $ 20-30 thousand per year. Large publishing houses earn a profit of upwards of 35%. ”Elsevier's reported margins are 37%, but financial analysts estimate them at 40–50% for the STM publishing division before tax” [10].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Publishers protect their ‘rights’ with copyright and are ever vigilant in protecting those rights.</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Aaron Swartz</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let us begin with an extreme example – the case of Aaron Swartz, the hacker-activist, who was forced to end his life early this year after being pursued by the US Department of Justice.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What did Aaron do? He downloaded a very large number of full text papers from JSTOR, a database of scholarly journal articles, from an MIT server.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why should anyone think downloading scholarly research articles was a crime in the first place? “Why, twenty years after the birth of the modern Internet, is it a felony to download works that academics chose to share with the world?” asks Michael Eisen, a renowned biologist at UC Berekeley and cofounder of the Public Library of Science [11].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The most important component of the Internet, the World Wide Web, was invented by CERN researchers essentially to help scientists communicate and share their research.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Today we can view thousands of videos on Indian weddings and pruning roses. But we are barred from downloading or reading research papers without paying a large sum! These are papers written by scientists, reviewed by scientists, their research often paid for by government agencies. And the knowledge therein is of relevance not only to other scientists but to the lay public as well. Especially, health related research.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization founded with support from Andrew Mellon Foundation, and MIT were keen to go to court, and the prosecutor was keen to argue for the severest punishment.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Rover Research</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Recently, Michael Eisen placed in his website four research papers resulting from the Rover exploration of Mars published in the AAAS journal <i>Science</i>. This is something no one has done before. His logic: the research was funded by NASA, a US government agency, and most of the authors were working in government institutions, and therefore the citizens have the right to access. While everyone was expecting AAAS and the authors to drag Eisen to court for violating copyright, the authors also made the papers freely available on their institutions’ websites! But I wonder if Eisen could have got away so easily had he placed papers published in a journal published by Elsevier or Springer. Possibly not. Recently Elsevier had sent thousands of take down notices to Academia.edu for placing papers published in Elsevier journals (in the final PDF version) in their site. Elsevier had also sent similar missives to many individual scientists and universities including Harvard for a similar ‘offence’ [12].</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists do research and communicate results to other scientists. They build on what is already known, on what others have done – the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Getting to know the work and results of others’ research is essential for the progress of knowledge. Any barrier, including cost barrier, will hurt science or for that matter production of knowledge in any field.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When it comes to information (and knowledge) scientists everywhere face two problems, viz. Access and Visibility. These problems are acutely felt by scientists in poorer countries.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">They are unable to access what other scientists have done, because of the high costs of access. With the nation’s an annual per capita GDP of about US $3,500 (ppp) or even less, libraries in most developing countries cannot afford to subscribe to key journals needed by their users. Most scientists are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Thanks to spiraling costs many libraries are forced to cancel subscription to several journals making the situation even worse.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists elsewhere are unable to access what developing country researchers are publishing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Take for example India. As Indian scientists publish their own research in thousands of journals, small and big, from around the world, their work is often not noticed by other scientists. even within India, working in the same and related areas. Thus Indian work is hardly cited. </li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely both within and outside the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities</b><a href="#fn27" name="fr27">[27]</a><br />Due to the changes that have come about in the production and distribution of scientific and cutlural knowledge in the age of the internet, there needed to be an agreement to move towards a global and interactive representation of human knowledge with worldwide access guarunteed. The Berlin Declaration of 2003 was an attempt at just that and it was in accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. The declaration lays down the measures that need to be adopted by research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums among others in order to utilize the internet for open access to knowledge. There are more than 450 signatories including various government, funding agencies, academic and other knowledge based institutions. According to the Declaration, open access contributions have to include:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, 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 (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving."</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open Access – Green and Gold</b><br />With the Internet and the Web becoming ubiquitous, we need not suffer these problems. If science is about sharing, then the Net has the potential to liberate the world of science and scholarship and make it a level playing field.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Till a few decades ago scholarly communication was a quite affair. Scientists and professors did research in their laboratories and sent the papers they wrote to editors of refereed journals. These journals were often published by professional societies, academies and in some countries government departments devoted to science. Many societies gave the responsibility to bring out the journals to commercial publishing houses. These publishers found in journal publishing a great business opportunity and started raising subscription prices. Initially no one seemed to notice or bother. But from around 1980, the rise in the cost of journals outstripped the general inflation by a factor of 3 or 4. Members of the Association of Research Libraries felt the pinch; many academic libraries had to cut down on their purchase of books and monographs so as to be able to subscribe to as many journals as possible. Then they had to cut down on the number of journals. Their levels of service to their academic clients fell badly. The ‘serials crisis’ forced them to protest. By then web technologies and online sharing of information had sufficiently advanced. Together these two developments led to the open access movement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are two ways research papers published in journals can be made open access: Open access journals and open access repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Open Access Journals</i> - The journal can allow free downloading of papers by anyone, anywhere without paying for it. Such journals are called open access journals. Making papers open by this method is referred to as the Gold route to open access. Traditionally, journals used to charge a subscription fee from libraries (or individuals who may choose to take personal subscriptions) and not charge authors submitting papers for publication. Occasionally, some journals may request authors to pay a small fee to cover colour printing of illustrations. Many open access journals do charge a fee from the authors, which is often paid by the author’s institution. The APC collected by different journals varies from a few hundred dollars to a few thousands.<span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">But not all OA journals levy an article publishing charge, e.g.,<span> </span>journals published by the Indian<span> </span>Academy of Sciences, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-NISCAIR), Indian Council of Medical Research, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research do not charge authors or their institutions.As of today, there are more than 9,800 OA journals published from 124 countries and these are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, [www.doaj.org], an authoritative database maintained at Lund University. On average four new journal titles are added to DOAJ every day.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Open Access Repositories</i> - Authors of research papers may make them available to the rest of the world by placing them in archives or repositories. This is the ‘Green route’ to open access. There are two kinds of repositories: Central and distributed or institutional. arXiv is a good example of a central repository. Any researcher working in a relevant field can place his paper in arXiv and it can be seen almost instantaneously by other researchers worldwide. Developed in 1991 as a means of circulating scientific papers prior to publication, arXiv initially focused on e-Prints in High Energy Physics (HEP). In time, focus broadened to related disciplines. All content in arXiv is freely available to all users. Currently, it provides access to more than 900,000 “e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.” There are other central repositories such as SSRN (Social Science Research Network;<a href="#fn28" name="fr28">[28] </a>abstracts on over 521,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection of over 426,600 downloadable full text documents ), Research Papers in Economics<a href="#fn29" name="fr29">[29] </a>(and ideas.RePEc.org; 1.4 million items of which 1.3 million are downloadable full texts), and CiteSeerX (for computerand information science).<a href="#fn30" name="fr30">[30] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Then there are institutional repositories. Registry of Open Access repositories<a href="#fn31" name="fr31">[31]</a> lists more than 2,900 repositories from around the world. The Directory of Open Access Repositories<a href="#fn32" name="fr32">[32] </a>lists more than 2,550 repositories, linking to more than 50 million items, growing at the rate of 21 thousand items per day, which can be searched through the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search options. A database called SHERPA-RoMEO lists open access and self-archiving policies of journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These repositories are different from the usual websites that individual scientists may maintain. They have to use one of many standard software such as EPrints, DSpace, Fedora, or Greenstone. And they are all interoperable and ‘OAI-compliant’ which means that anyone searching for information need not know about a particular paper and the repository in which it is deposited; a mere keyword search will find the paper if it is relevant.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Prophets of Open Access</b><br />The Net and the Web have not merely replaced print by speeding up things but have inherently changed the way we can do science (e.g. eScience and Grid computing), we can collaborate, we can datamine, and deal with datasets of unimaginable size. But the potential is not fully realized, largely because most of us are conditioned by our past experience and are inherently resistant to change. Our thinking and actions are conditioned by the print-on-paper era. Added to that is the apathy of science administrators.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Three individuals have made seminal contributions to realizing the potential of the Net in scholarly communication and may be considered pioneers in ushering in an era of open access. Tony Hey calls them ‘prophets of open access.’</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Paul Ginsparg, creator of arXiv, an open access repository for preprints of much of the physics and astronomy literature. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Lipmann, Director of the NCBI, known for his leadership in making biomedical data and health information publicly and easily available to all, including scientists, medical professionals, patients, and students.By organizing and integrating genomic data for developing diagnostic and clinical applications, NCBI serves as a bridge from research to the medical community. Each day, more than 3 million users access NCBI's 40 interlinked genomic and bibliographic databases and download more than 30 terabytes of data. NCBI is home to PubMed Central and PubChem, two essential databases for biomedical researchers. PMC is a full text (ePrints) database of published research papers and PubChem is a database of about 31 million biologically important chemical compounds and their bioassays.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Stevan Harnad, author of the subversive proposal, founder of Cogprints and tireless evangelist for Green Open Access [13]. Harnad has been writing frequently on all aspects of scholarly communication and open access in his blog ‘Open Access Archivangelism,’ addressing conferences and answering questions sent to him. There are also some institutions which have contributed substantially and these include the Open Society Institute (OSI), now rechristened Open Society Foundations, which facilitated the formulation of Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Budapest Declaration, and Association of Research Libraries.Surprisingly, Microsoft, not a great admirer of open source software, is promoting eScience through its External Research Division, especially formed for this purpose under the leadership of Prof. Tony Hey, former dean of Southampton University.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open Access in India</b><br />The situation with accessing overseas journals has improved considerably thanks to many consortia which facilitate access to large groups of scientists in India (especially those in CSIR laboratories, Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science). Many universities have benefited through INFLIBNET. ICMR labs and selected medical institutions have formed ERMED, their own consortium. Rajiv Gandhi Health Sciences University, Bangalaore, provides access to literature through HELINET Consortia to a number of medical colleges in the South.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But the increased availability has not been taken full advantage by our researchers. A study of IISc in 2008 showed that the faculty and students have not used not even half the journals subscribed in their work – either for publishing their research or for quoting papers published in them. We seem to be paying for journals we do not use. Many of these journals are published by commercial publishers and they make huge profits. Publishers force consortia to buy journals as packages (bundling).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the open course ware front the NPTEL programme under which top notch IIT and IISc professors produce both web-based and video lessons in many subjects, which are available on YouTube as well, has a huge worldwide following.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many physicists in the better-known institutions use arXiv, which has a mirror site in India, both for placing their preprints and postprints and for reading preprints of others. But many others are not aware of it. What we need is advocacy and more advocacy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open access is gaining traction in India. For example, professors at National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, the first Indian institution to mandate open access for all faculty (and student) research publications, have received invitations to attend international conferences and for collaboration after their papers were made available through the institutional repository. Indian journals which embraced open access model started recording higher impact factors, e.g.<i> Indian Journal of Medical Research</i> and <i>Journal of Postgraduate Medicine</i>. MedKnow, publisher of JPGM, and Bioline International, have plenty of data to show the advantages of going open access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet many researchers are reluctant to embrace OA. They fear that the journal publishers may sue them if they deposit their published papers in IRs. They have concerns about copyright violation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Organizations such as the Open Society Foundations, ARL, SPARC and JISC (UK) and the seven research councils of UK are championing open access. Unfortunately some professional societies, notably ACS, are trying to stall the march of open access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The best way to promote open access in India is to encourage self-archiving.</p>
<p>As Alma Swan says, we can do that by highlighting the increased visibility and impact, requiringauthors to self-archive and requiring them to self-archive in an institutional repository [14].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why an institutionalrepository? Because it fulfils an institution’s mission to engender, encourage and disseminate scholarly work; an institution can mandate self-archiving across all subject areas. It enables an institution to compile a complete record of its intellectual effort; it forms a permanent record of all digital output from an institution. It enables standardised online CVs for all researchers. It can be used as a marketing’ tool for institutions [14].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An institutional repository provides researchers with secure storage (for completed work and for work-in-progress). It provides a location for supporting data yet to be published. It facilitates one-input-many outputs (CVs, publications) [14].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">First, we must help institutions build an archive and teach researchers including students how to deposit (do it for them in the beginning if necessary) [14].</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Eventually, in fact pretty soon, OA will be accepted by the vast majority of scientists and institutions. For only with OA scientific literature and data can be fully used. OA, making scientific literature and data free, is the only way to liberate the immense energy of distributed production. The moral, economic and philosophical imperatives for open access are indeed strong.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Even pharmaceutical companies like Glaxo SmithKline, Novartis and Novo Nordisk have started sharing their hard earned data in the area of drug development.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The openness movement in science and scholarship does not end with OA journals and OA repositories – both central and distributed. It includes the open data initiatives, escience and open science.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To learn more about open access please visit the Open Access Tracking Project led by Peter Suber, EOS [<i>www.<b>openscholarship</b>.org/</i>] and OASIS <openoasis.org> and join the GOAL discussion group moderated by Richard Poynder.</p>
<p>To know more about open science, read the articles by Paul David and Tony Hey.</p>
<p><b>What is Already There?</b><br />Thanks to the initiatives taken by Prof. M S Valiathan, former President of the Indian National Science Academy, the journals published by INSA were made OA a few years ago.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Academy also signed the Berlin declaration. The Indian Academy of Sciences converted all its eleven journals into OA. The Indian Medlars Centre at the National Informatics Centre brings out the OA version of about 40 biomedical journals published mostly by professional societies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">All journals published by CSIR- NISCAIR (17), ICAR (2), ICMR and AIIMS are OA journals. No one needs to pay either to publish or read papers in these journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Bombay-based private company called MedKnow brings out more than 300 journals, most of them OA, on behalf of their publishers, mostly professional societies. This company was acquired by Wolter Kluwers and they have decided to keep the journals OA.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Current Science</i> and <i>Pramana</i>, the physics journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences, were the first to go open access among Indian journals. In all, the number of Indian OA journals is about 650.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, was the first to set up an institutional repository in India. They use the GNU EPrints software. Today the repository has about 33,000 papers, not all of them full text. IISc also leads the Million Books Digital Library project's India efforts under the leadership of Pro f. N Balakrishnan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Today there are about 60 repositories in India (as seen from ROAR and OpenDOAR) including those at National Institute of Oceanography, and the National Aerospace Laboratories, Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Central Food Technology Research Institute, CECRI and the Raman Research Institute. The National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, was the first Indian institution to have mandated OA for all faculty publications.</p>
<p>Both ICRISAT and NIO have also mandated OA.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A small team at the University of Mysore is digitizing doctoral dissertations from select Indian universities under a programme called Vidyanidhi.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Problems and the Future</b><br />Despite concerted advocacy and many individual letters addressed to policy makers, the heads of government's departments of science and research councils do not seem to have applied their minds to opening up access to research papers. The examples of the research councils in the UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NIH have had virtually no impact. Many senior scientists and directors of research laboratories and vice chancellors of universities do not have a clear appreciation of open access and its advantages and implications.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Among those who understand the issues, many would rather like to publish in high impact journals, as far as possible, and would not take the trouble to set up institutional archives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most Indian researchers have not bothered to look up the several addenda (to the copyright agreement forms) that are now available. Many scientists I spoke to are worried that a publisher may not publish their papers if they attach an addendum! Publishing firms work in subtle ways to persuade senior librarians to keep away from OA initiatives. There have been no equivalents of FreeCulture.org among Indian student bodies and no equivalent of Taxpayers‘ Alliance to influence policy at the political level.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both the National Knowledge Commission and the Indian National Science Academy have recommended OA. IASc has set up a repository for publications by all its Fellows and it has more than 90,000 papers (many of them only metadata + abstracts). The Centre for Internet and Society has brought out a status report on OA in India. The Director General of CSIR has instructed all CSIR labs to set up and populate institutional repositories as soon as possible. Director general of ICAR has come up with an OA policy. Dr Francis Jayakanth of IISc is the recipient of the EPT Award for Advancing Open Access in the Developing World in its inaugural year. That should encourage many librarians to take to promoting OA.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government should mandate by legislation self-archiving of all research output immediately upon acceptance for publication by peer-reviewed journals. The self-archiving should preferably be in the researcher's own institution's Institutional Repository.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The mandate should be by both institutions and funders.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Science journal publishers in the government and academic sectors should be mandated to make their journals OA (This can be achieved through adopting Open Journal Systems software developed at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University and already in use by more than 10,000 journals. Expertise is available in India, or some journals can join Bioline International).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We should organize a massive training programme (in partnership with IISc, ISI-DRTC, NIC, etc.) on setting up OA repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Authors should have the freedom to publish in journals of their choice; but they should be required to make their papers available through institutional repositories. In addition, they should use addenda suggested by SPARC, Science Commons, etc. while signing copyright agreements with journal publishers and not surrender copyright to (commercial) publishers. Some OA journals charge for publication. The Indian government or funders or institutions should definitely not offer to pay for journal publication charges.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Again, OA for all India's research output is covered by simply mandating OA self-archiving of all articles.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Brazil and the rest of Latin America have made great strides in open access. The excellent developments in Brazil, especially the government support (particularly in the state of Sao Paulo) and of the work of SciELO (for OA journals) and IBICT in supporting OA repository network are worthy of emulation in India and other developing countries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Argentina has enacted a law that mandates OA to all research publications. India can follow their example.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren has issued a memorandum to make all research funded by major government funding agencies in the US insist on open access to government-funded research in USA. Indian funding agencies can do the same.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While our focus should be on digitizing and throwing open the current research papers and data, we may also make available our earlier work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In particular, we may create an OA portal for the papers of great Indian scientists of the past: Ramanujan, J C Bose, S N Bose, M N Saha, K S Krishnan, Y Subba Rao, Sambhu Nath De, Mahalanobis, Maheshwari. C V Raman’s papers are already available on open access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We may proactively advance OA in international forums such as IAP, IAC, ICSU and UNESCO. Two things can hasten the adoption of OA in India:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">If the political left is convinced that research paid for by the government is not readily available to the people freely and what is worse the copyright to the research papers are gifted away to commercial publishers from the advanced countries, then they may act. The same way, the political right will come forward to support open access if we impress upon them that copyright to much of the knowledge generated in our motherland is gifted away to publishing houses in the West.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">If the students are attracted to the idea that fighting for open access is the in thing to do, then they will form Free Culture like pressure groups and fight for the adoption of open access. </li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>References</b></p>
<ol>
<li>Aristotle, “Politics”, Book2<i>, </i>Part 3,<i>Oxford: Clarendon Press</i>, 1946, 1261b.</li>
<li>G. Hardin,“The Tragedy of the Commons”, <i>Science</i>, Dec 13, 1968.</li>
<li>Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, “Public Goods and Public Choices,” in E. S. Savas (ed.), Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance, Boulder, Co: <i>Westview Press</i>, 1977, p. 7–49.</li>
<li>Elinor Ostrom, “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action”, <i>Cambridge University Press</i>, 1990.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">E. Ostrom, “The Rudiments of a Theory of the Origins, Survival, and Performance of Common Property Institutions”, in D W Bromley (ed.),Making the Commons work: Theory, practice and policy, San Francisco, <i>ICS Press</i>, 1992.</li>
<li>Charlotte Hess and <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/elinor-ostrom">Elinor Ostrom</a> (eds.), “Understanding Knowledge as a Commons<b>: </b>From Theory to Practice”, <i>MIT Press</i>, 2006, <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/charlotte-hess">http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/charlotte-hess</a>and<a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/elinor-ostrom">http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/elinor-ostrom</a>.</li>
<li>S.R. Ranganathan, “Five Laws of Library Science”,<i>Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science</i>, Bangalore,1966.</li>
<li>Peter F. Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution”, <i>The Atlantic</i>, October 1, 1999.</li>
<li>M.L.Nagar “Shri Sayajirao Gaikwad, Maharaja of Baroda: The Prime Promoter of Public Libraries”, 1917.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676#auth-1">Richard Van Noorden</a>, “Open Access: The True Cost of Science Publishing”, <i>Nature</i>, 495 (issue 7442), 27 March 2013</li>
<li>Michael Eisen, “The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing”, <i>It Is Not Junk</i>, March 28, 2013, <a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346">http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346</a></li>
<li>Kim-Mai Cutler, “Elsevier’s Research Takedown Notices Fan Out To Startups, Harvard, Individual Academics”,<i>TechCrunch</i>,December 19, 2013, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/author/kim-mai-cutler/">http://techcrunch.com/author/kim-mai-cutler/</a>, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/19/elsevier/">http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/19/elsevier/</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">S. Harnad, “A Subversive Proposal” in Ann Okerson and James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing,<i>Association of Research Libraries</i>, June 1995. <br /> <a href="http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html">http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html</a></li>
<li>A. Swan, “Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access”, <i>UNESCO</i>, Paris, 1995.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "> Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, “Open Government Data Study”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society and Transparency and Accountability Initiative</i>, 2011, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/publications/open-government.pdf">http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/publications/open-government.pdf</a></li>
</ol>
<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; ">Open (Government) Data</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Definition<br /></b>“Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share alike.”<a href="#fn33" name="fr33">[33]</a> This has become an increasingly important issue in the age of the internet when governments can gather unprecedented amount of data about citizens and store various kinds of data which can actually be made available to people in an easier fashion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Types of Government Data<br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/OpenGovtData.png" alt="Open (Govt) Data" class="image-inline" title="Open (Govt) Data" /></p>
<p><a href="#fn34" name="fr34">[34]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This does not necessarily mean that all the government’s data should open according to the definition laid out above. There have been many arguments articulated against this.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Since the government is responsible for the efficient use of tax payers money, data that is commissioned and useful only for a small subsection (eg: corporations) of society should be paid for by that subsection.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">There may be privacy concerns that limit the use of data to particular users or sub-sets of data.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Often times, the data may not be usable without further processing and analysis that requires more investment from other sources. Groups that would usually commission such projects lose their incentive to do so because everyone has access to the information. Eg: Biological, medical and environmental data.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, this kind of utilitarian calculus is not possible while deciding which data should be open and which ones should not. Some theorists make the argument that government data should be open.<a href="#fn35" name="fr35">[35]</a></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">An open democratic society requires that its citizens should know what the government is doing and that there is a high level of transparency. Free access is essential for this and in order for that information to be intelligible; the data should be reusable as well so it can be analyzed further.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">In the information age, commercial and even social activity requires data and having government data open can be a way to fuel economic and social activity within the society.</li>
<li>If public tax payer money was used to fund the government data, then the public should have access to it.</li>
</ol>
<p>The open data handbook lays out the steps required in order to start making government data more open.<a href="#fn36" name="fr36">[36] </a>The summarized gist of it is to:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. Chose the data sets that need to be made open.<br />2. Apply an open license: <br />a. Find out what kind of intellectual property rights exist on that data.<br />b. Select an appropriate open license that would incorporate all of the criteria (usability, reusability etc) discussed above.<br />3. Make the data available either in bulk or in Application Programming Interface (API) formats.<br />4. Make this open data discoverable by posting on the web or adding it to a list.<br />Application Programming Interface (API) vs. Bulk Data<a href="#fn37" name="fr37">[37] </a></p>
<ol>
<li>Bulk is the only way to ensure that the data is accessible to everyone.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Bulk access is a lot cheaper than providing API access. (API specifies how some software components should interact with each other) Therefore, it is acceptable for the provider to charge for API access as long as the data is also provided in bulk.</li>
<li>An API is not a guarantee of open access but it is good if it’s provided.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open Government Data in India</b><br />At an annual summit in London recently where an open government data report was produced, India ranked 34th among 77 countries.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/HowIndia.png" alt="Data Availability and Openness" class="image-inline" title="Data Availability and Openness" /></p>
<p><a href="#fn38" name="fr38">[38] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In India, open government data is currently about closing the loopholes and gaps in the Right to Information Act (RTI) and its promise of transparency as envisioned by the Knowledge Commission. In its 10th 5 year plan (2002-2007) the Indian Government announced its plan to become SMART (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent).<a href="#fn39" name="fr39">[39] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2012, India launched an Open Government Platform, which is a software platform that attempted to enhance the public’s access to government data. This was jointly developed by India and the US as a part of their Open Government Initiative.<a href="#fn40" name="fr40">[40] </a>Data.gov.in is a platform under this which provides a single-point access to datasets and apps published by the government’s ministries, departments and organizations and it was in compliance with the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP).<a href="#fn41" name="fr41">[41] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Right to Information Act, 2005</b><a href="#fn42" name="fr42">[42]</a><br />Around 82 countries around the world currently have laws in place that force the government to disclose information to its citizenry but this has been a rather recent phenomenon. In India, the RTI was passed in 2005 after a prolonged struggle from civil society. This act effectively replaces and overrides many state level RTI acts, the Freedom of Information Act (2002) and the Official Secrets Act, 1923. We have come to learn based on the responses of RTI requests that the government is not obliged to provide access to some pieces of information such as the minutes to a cabinet meeting.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The RTI Act defines information as:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">‘Any material in any form, including records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions, advices, press releases, circulars, orders, logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, data material held in any electronic form and information relating to any private body which can be accessed by a public authority under any other law for the time being in force.’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This capacious vision of the Act indicated a shift in the government’s philosophy from secrecy to transparency. According to the Global Integrity report, in the category ‘public access to government information’ India went from 78 points to 90 points from 2006-2011. During the same time frame, the United States has only gone from 78 points to 79 points. However, according to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 75% of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with the information provided by the public authorities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Government Copyright</b><br />The government owns the copyright to any work that is produced by the government or government employees in India as well any material produced by an Indian legislative or judicial body. This provision is laid down in the Copyright Act, 1957<a href="#fn43" name="fr43">[43]</a>(section 17(d) read with 2(k)) which gives a lifespan of 60 years for the copyright (section 28). The exceptions to the copyright are small and laid down in section 52(1)(q):</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">‘52(1) The following acts shall not constitute an infringement of copyright, namely: (q) the reproduction or publication of — (i) any matter which has been published in any Official Gazette except an Act of a Legislature; (ii) any Act of a Legislature subject to the condition that such Act is reproduced or published together with any commentary thereon or any other original matter; (iii) the report of any committee, commission, council, board or other like body appointed by the Government if such report has been laid on the Table of the Legislature, unless the reproduction or publication of such report is prohibited by the Government; (iv) any judgement or order of a court, tribunal or other judicial authority, unless the reproduction or publication of such judgment or order is prohibited by the court, the tribunal or other judicial authority, as the case may be.’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although this exception is small, in practice the government has rarely the government has rarely prosecuted to enforce copyright when data is requested by an individual or group even when the reason for request is commercial in nature.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>IP Protection for the Government</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most of data compiled by or commissioned for by the government is raw data in the form of figures and statistics. Generally, non-original literary works are not protected by copyright law and this issue was decided upon in a landmark Supreme Court case in 2007. The standard of originality was changed from the labor expended on compiling the information (also known as the ‘sweat of the brow’ doctrine)<a href="#fn44" name="fr44">[44] </a>to the creativity, skill and judgment required in the process. This meant that most of the government’s data would not qualify as creative enough to hold a copyright.</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: The Department of Agriculture, Maharashtra</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p>The Department of Agriculture (DoA) in Pune started using ICTs in 1986 itself when it used a computerized system to process census data. The DoA currently uses ICT for internal administrative word and also for processing and disseminating data to farmers across Maharashtra both online and through SMSs. The website is bilingual in both Marathi (the local language of the State) and English.</p>
<p>Some of the information available includes<a href="#fn45" name="fr45">[45] </a></p>
<ol>
<li>The participation of Maharashtra farmers in the National Agriculture Insurance Scheme</li>
<li>Annual growth rates of agriculture and animal husbandry</li>
<li>Rainfall recording and analysis</li>
<li>Soil and crop, horticultural, soil/water conservation, agricultural inputs, statistical and district-wise fertility maps.</li>
<li>Farmers can sign up for SMS’s that give information specific to the crop requested.</li>
</ol>
<p>Even though information in 2010 was available on 43 different crops which was sent to 40,000 farmers, people don’t have the technology to access all this information. Usually this is because of a lack of reliable electricity, internet and mobile phone access. The question is whether the open data responsibility ends as long as the data is made available by the government. Sometimes, the government has to make a discretionary decision to not make certain data available to the common man in the interest of public order. An example is if there is a crop that is infested with a disease or a pest, then it could cause a mass panic not only among farmers but also among the general consumers.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Case Study: Indian Water Portal</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>The Indian Water Portal<a href="#fn46" name="fr46">[46] </a> in Bangalore claims that it is an open, inclusive, webbased platform for sharing water management knowledge amongst practitioners and the general public. It aims to draw on the rich experience of watersector experts, package their knowledge and add value to it through technology and then disseminate it to a larger audience through the Internet."<a href="#fn47" name="fr47">[47] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Based the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), the IWP has established the best practices. It has been running on the open source software Drupal Software since 2007, and it is available in Hindi, Kannada and English. This portal also has an educational aspect to it as it provides reading material to students who wish to learn about water issues. Although this website was set up with the support of the national government, it hasn’t gotten much support from ministries and departments which is problematic as they produce the most amount of information on water and sanitation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is, however, a great example of a partnership between private and public that has led to accessible open government data. The only problem here is that it is only accessible to people with access to the web but that may be a problem better solved by increasing access to the web.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<hr />
<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. Read more at <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-openness">http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-openness</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. For more see GNU Operating System, “The Free Software Definition”, available at <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. Read more at <a href="http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=History">http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=History</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. For more see Millennium Development Goals, <i>United Nations</i>, available at <a href="http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml">http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. For more see “Free and Open Source Software”, Communication and Information, <i>UNESCO</i>, available at <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/">http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/free-and-open-source-software-foss/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>]. Read more at <a href="http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Organizations">http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Organizations</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr7" name="fn7">7</a>]. Read more at <a href="http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Licenses">http://freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Licenses</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr8" name="fn8">8</a>]. See citation 6 above.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr9" name="fn9">9</a>]. For more see GNU Operating System, Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source” <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr10" name="fn10">10</a>]. For more see Free Software Movement of India, available at <a href="http://www.fsmi.in/">http://www.fsmi.in/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr11" name="fn11">11</a>]. See the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India, Free and Open Source Software available at <a href="http://deity.gov.in/content/free-and-open-source-software">http://deity.gov.in/content/free-and-open-source-software</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr12" name="fn12">12</a>]. See citation above.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr13" name="fn13">13</a>]. For more see Curoverse Gets $1.5M to Develop Open Source Genomics Tool, available at <a href="http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2013/12/18/curoverse-gets-1-5m-develop-open-source-genomics-tool/2/">http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2013/12/18/curoverse-gets-1-5m-develop-open-source-genomics-tool/2/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr14" name="fn14">14</a>]. For more see The Open-Sorcerers, available at <a href="http://slate.me/18NNx4x">http://slate.me/18NNx4x</a>, last accessed on January 24, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr15" name="fn15">15</a>]. For more see “Open Standards Requirements for Software – Rationale”, Open Source Initiative, available at <a href="http://opensource.org/osr-rationale">http://opensource.org/osr-rationale</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr16" name="fn16">16</a>]. See citation above.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr17" name="fn17">17</a>]. Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr18" name="fn18">18</a>]. For more see “An emerging understanding of Open Standards”, available at <a href="http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=160">http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=160</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr19" name="fn19">19</a>]. <a href="http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html">http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr20" name="fn20">20</a>]. For more see Open Standards Requirements for Software – Rationale, available at <a href="http://opensource.org/osr">http://opensource.org/osr</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr21" name="fn21">21</a>]. See “Definition of Open Standards”, available at <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/09/dd-osd.html">http://www.w3.org/2005/09/dd-osd.html</a>, last accessed on January 27, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr22" name="fn22">22</a>]. Hari Prasad Nadig talking about Wikipedia Community building at Train the Trainer Program organised by CIS, November 29, 2013, available at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scEZewFJXUU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scEZewFJXUU</a>, last accessed on February 1, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr23" name="fn23">23</a>]. India Access to Knowledge meta page available at <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge</a> , last accessed on February 1, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr24" name="fn24">24</a>]. What is Hindi Wikipedia?, CIS-A2K, available at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Lzxglp5W4&list=PLe81zhzU9tTTuGZg41mXLXve6AMboaxzD">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Lzxglp5W4&list=PLe81zhzU9tTTuGZg41mXLXve6AMboaxzD</a>, last accessed on February 1, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr25" name="fn25">25</a>]. Interview with Netha Hussain at WikiWomenCamp in Buenos Aires 2012, available at <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWC-Netha-Hussain.ogv">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWC-Netha-Hussain.ogv</a> , last accessed on February 2, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr26" name="fn26">26</a>]. See interview of Poongothai Balasubramanian at <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You/Poongothai_Balasubramanian">http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You/Poongothai_Balasubramanian</a>, last accessed on February 1, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr27" name="fn27">27</a>]. For more see Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, available at <a href="http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration">http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration</a>, last accessed on February 1, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr28" name="fn28">28</a>]. See Social Science Research Network, available at <a href="http://www.ssrn.com/">http://www.ssrn.com/</a>, last accessed on January 27, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr29" name="fn29">29</a>]. RePEc, available at <a href="http://www.repec.org/">http://www.repec.org/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr30" name="fn30">30</a>]. Cite Seer X, available at <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/">http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr31" name="fn31">31</a>]. Registry of Open Access Repositories, available at <a href="http://roar.eprints.org/">http://roar.eprints.org/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr32" name="fn32">32</a>]. The Directory of Open Access Repositories, available at <a href="http://www.opendoar.org/">http://www.opendoar.org/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr33" name="fn33">33</a>]. For more see Why Open Data, available at <a href="http://okfn.org/opendata/">http://okfn.org/opendata/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr34" name="fn34">34</a>]. Image obtained from <a href="http://okfn.org/opendata/">http://okfn.org/opendata/</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr35" name="fn35">35</a>]. For more see Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham, Nishant Shah and Nisha Thompson, “Report on Open Government Data in India, Version 2 Draft”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society</i>, available at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/ogd-draft-v2/">http://cis-india.org/openness/publications/ogd-draft-v2/</a>, last accessed on January 25, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr36" name="fn36">36</a>]. For more see Open Data Handbook, available at <a href="http://opendatahandbook.org/en/">http://opendatahandbook.org/en/</a> , last accessed on January 29, 2014.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr37" name="fn37">37</a>]. For more see Janet Wagner, “Government Data: Web APIs vs. Bulk Data Files”, <i>programmable web</i>, available at <a href="http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/03/28/government-data-web-apis-vs-bulk-data-files/">http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/03/28/government-data-web-apis-vs-bulk-data-files/</a>, last accessed on January 31, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr38" name="fn38">38</a>]. Read more at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/blogs/blog-datadelve/article5314288.ece">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/blogs/blog-datadelve/article5314288.ece</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr39" name="fn39">39</a>]. For more see Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, “Open Government Data Study: India”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society</i>, available at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government.pdf">http://cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government.pdf</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr40" name="fn40">40</a>]. Read more at <a class="external-link" href="http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=82025">http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=82025</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr41" name="fn41">41</a>]. Read the guidelines at <a class="external-link" href="http://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/NDSAP_Implementation_Guidelines-2.1.pdf">http://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/NDSAP_Implementation_Guidelines-2.1.pdf</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr42" name="fn42">42</a>]. See the Right to Information Act, 2005, available at <a href="http://rti.gov.in/rti-act.pdf">http://rti.gov.in/rti-act.pdf</a>, last accessed on January 25, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr43" name="fn43">43</a>]. See the Copyright Act, 1957, available at <a href="http://www.indiaip.com/india/copyrights/acts/act1957/act1957.htm">http://www.indiaip.com/india/copyrights/acts/act1957/act1957.htm</a>, last accessed on January 25, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr44" name="fn44">44</a>]. See note above.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr45" name="fn45">45</a>]. See note above.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr46" name="fn46">46</a>]. For more see Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, “Open Government Data Study: India”, <i>Centre for Internet and Society</i>, available at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government.pdf">http://cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government.pdf</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr47" name="fn47">47</a>]. For more see India Water Portal, available at <a href="http://www.indiawaterportal.org/">http://www.indiawaterportal.org/</a>, last accessed on January 26, 2014.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/openness'>http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/openness</a>
</p>
No publisherSubbiah Arunachalam and Anirudh SridharOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2014-05-30T07:59:15ZPageOpen Equitable Access (PDF)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access
<b>file</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:42:17ZFileOpen Access: 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>
<hr />
<div id="stcpDiv" style="text-align: justify; ">
<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>
<hr />
<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>
</div>
<p>
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>
</p>
No publishersubbiahOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2013-09-26T06:00:48ZBlog EntryOpen Access Week Round-Up
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-otago-october-27-2015-open-access-week-round-up
<b>Here is a round-up of events held at the University of Otago over Open Access Week. Subhashish Panigrahi made a presentation for the staff members of libraries across New Zealand. The event was organised by the University of Otago.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">From 3-4pm Subhashish Panigrahi [<a href="https://twitter.com/subhapa">@subhapa</a>], based in Bangalore, described the concept of <a href="https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/openotago/2015/10/06/how-to-do-guerilla-glam/" target="_blank">How to do Guerrilla GLAM</a>. Given the emergence of Wikipedian in Residence projects overseas and at particular institutions in NZ (see a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b8X2SQO1UA&index=1&list=PLitfMzpMy7R93xPXqURuog_ahAwTq8hQO" target="_blank">recent panel at NDF 2015</a>), we were intrigued by what he had to say.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It was an interesting session which generated much discussion. For those of us in NZ where we are fortunate to have institutions where there is a relatively high rate of access to collections – I’m thinking even at the library catalogue level – the thought that guerrilla activity may be necessary to surface collection items without the intervention of institution staffers may be surprising and possibly confronting! Subhashish did stress this guerrilla activity in no way violates copyright or licencing agreements, but seeks to make cultural items in GLAMs openly available to the public, where possible by partnering with institutions. The fact that many institutions do not have the resources to digitize cultural items, he posits, leaves the door open for guerrilla activity by skilled volunteers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One participant in the session succinctly described Guerrilla GLAM as being self-authorizing activity vs institutional authorizing activity. I understand this to mean that rather than institutions engaging their own staff or volunteers, or crowd sourcing new volunteers to digitise their content, the Guerilla GLAMers come to them. There may well be communities in NZ or small GLAMs that have no digital record of their collections. Communities and institutions in this situation may well find it helpful to engage some interested Guerrilla GLAMers to help them out.</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li>The webinar links and chat are available here <a href="http://connect.otago.ac.nz/p4j21g554ny/" target="_blank">connect.otago.ac.nz/p4j21g554ny/</a></li>
<li>The slides are also available separately here <a href="http://slides.com/psubhashish/how-to-do-guerrilla-glam/fullscreen#/" target="_blank">http://slides.com/psubhashish/how-to-do-guerrilla-glam/fullscreen#/</a></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;"></ul>
<hr />
<p><a class="external-link" href="https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/openotago/2015/10/27/open-access-week-round-up/">Click to read the blog post published by the University of Otago</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-otago-october-27-2015-open-access-week-round-up'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-otago-october-27-2015-open-access-week-round-up</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCIS-A2KOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2015-12-15T08:21:01ZNews ItemOpen Access Week begins in Bangalore
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/lecture-at-nal
<b>On Monday 24 October, the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bangalore held an event to mark the beginning of Open Access Week 2011</b>
<p>During the event, <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmanabhan_Balaram">Professor Balaram</a> spoke on<strong> 'Issues of Access in Science Publishing'</strong>, and <a class="external-link" href="http://nal-ir.nal.res.in/view/creators/Venkatakrishnan=3AL=3A=3A.html">Dr. L Venkatakrishnan</a> gave a talk '<strong>Open Access: Promised Utopia or Eventual Reality?'</strong></p>
<div>Before the speakers, Shyam Chetty framed the discussion by suggesting that India currently lags behind other nations in the adoption of Open Access. He said that the Indian <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Scientific_and_Industrial_Research">Council of Scientific and Industrial Research </a>should lead an initiative to promote India's <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/pdfs/NationalOAPolicyDCs.pdf">National Open Access Policy</a> and perhaps bring it into law. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Prof. Balaram spoke next, and brought some refreshing realism and complexity to the Open Access discussion. He noted that both as a reader and as an author he supports Open Access, but there are costs involved in making research available, and these will have to be covered in some way. He shared first-hand experience of expensive subscriptions for Indian institutions, and how even the IISc has cancelled many journal purchases.
In a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/openness/professor-balaram-talks-open-access" class="external-link">later interview, Professor Balaram</a> discusses some solutions to these problems.
<div> </div>
<div>Prof. Balaram highlighted that Closed Access journals do add value to scholarship ― in terms of peer review, editing, and aggregation (the collection of related articles in useful ways). While Open Access journals may offer these services too, Prof. Balaram suggested that some of the strongest supporters of Closed Access journals are working academics who value the increased reputation and status they can offer. This lead him to expressing an opposition to institutional Open Access mandates. Instead, he encouraged an approach where academics are motivated to open their work for self-interest, rather than by obligation. </div>
<div>
<div> </div>
<div>Prof. Balaram also said that India must take an independent approach to Open Access and not expect western nations to lead the way. Increasingly India and China are seen as real competitors in the international field, and in the future may not receive concessions in journal subscriptions or other help currently offered to developing nations.
<div>
<div> </div>
<div>Dr Venkatakrishnan was more skeptical towards Open Access. He emphasized that the price to make an article freely available in a Closed Access journal could be over USD $3000. From this he suggested that the <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_journal">Gold Route</a> to Open Access lacked potential because the costs involved are prohibitive. This does leave out <a class="external-link" href="http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journal_business_models">alternative ways of financing</a> Open Access journals that do not involve the author paying for submission. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Dr. Venkatakrishnan<span class="Apple-style-span"> echoed Prof. Balaram in saying that a strong motivation to publish in top-tier Closed Access journals is the increased reputation or funding it can bring. </span>While it is true that academics can usually still upload their work to Open Access databases, <span class="Apple-style-span">Dr. </span>Venkatakrishnan<span class="Apple-style-span"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span">concluded that he did not know if Open Access was an 'open door' or a 'blind corner'. </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span">This could be taken as a strange end to an Open Access celebration, but the implication seemed to be this: in order for more Indian academics to support Open Access, they must be convinced of the real benefits it can bring to their own reputation and career success.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<ul><li>For the event flier<a class="external-link" href="http://www.icast.org.in/events/oad2011.html"> click here</a></li><li>For details of Open Access Week, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">click here</a></li></ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/lecture-at-nal'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/lecture-at-nal</a>
</p>
No publisherTom DaneOpennessOpen Access2012-08-03T23:04:06ZBlog EntryOpen Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship
<b>The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship. </b>
<p><em>Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with</em>:</p>
<p>Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy? </p>
<p><em>He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution </p>
<p>It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication. </p>
<p>There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.</p>
<p>Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.</p>
<p>The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.</p>
<p>Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?</p>
<p>Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.</p>
<p>Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.</p>
<p>From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.</p>
<blockquote>"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."<br /></blockquote>
<p>Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008</p>
<p>For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.</p>
<p>The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.</p>
<p>The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.</p>
<p>Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.</p>
<p>In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.</p>
<p>Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.</p>
<p>It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.</p>
<p>Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Country<br /></th>
<th>Percentage</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Japan</td>
<td>3.67%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sweden</td>
<td>3.60%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Finland</td>
<td>3.48%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>USA</td>
<td>2.70%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EU average<br /></td>
<td>2.16%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>China</td>
<td>1.40%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India</td>
<td>1.00%</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity. </p>
<p>India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."</p>
<p>Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.</p>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><br /></th>
<th>India</th>
<th>China</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>MathSciNet, 2006<br /></td>
<td>1,949</td>
<td>11,762</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Engineering Village, 2006<br /></td>
<td>25,954</td>
<td>199,881</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SciFinder, 2007<br /></td>
<td>41,697</td>
<td>235,309</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Web of Science, 2007<br /></td>
<td>35,450</td>
<td>98,241</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.</p>
<p>But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.</p>
<p>Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly. </p>
<p>Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.</p>
<p>India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.</p>
<p>The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.</p>
<p>There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias. </p>
<p>India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.</p>
<p>India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.</p>
<p>But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting <a class="external-link" href="http://www.osdd.net/">open source drug discovery</a> and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.</p>
<p>Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.</p>
<p>India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.</p>
<p>Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow. </p>
<p>The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.</p>
<p>The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.</p>
<p>Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research. </p>
<p>A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.</p>
<p>The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”</p>
<p>Is anyone listening?</p>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Universities</th>
<th>Scopus</th>
<th>Scholar</th>
<th>% Sco vs Sch<br /></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Univ College London<br /></td>
<td>134,950</td>
<td>8,660</td>
<td>6.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Cambridge<br /></td>
<td>114,339</td>
<td>8,320</td>
<td>7.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Oxford<br /></td>
<td>99,723</td>
<td>7,800</td>
<td>7.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Imperial College<br /></td>
<td>91,537</td>
<td>4,720</td>
<td>5.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Manchester<br /></td>
<td>83,024</td>
<td>3,840</td>
<td>4.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>King's College London<br /></td>
<td>60,407</td>
<td>1,100</td>
<td>1.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Edinburgh<br /></td>
<td>57,473</td>
<td>9,920</td>
<td>17.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Southampton<br /></td>
<td>44,013</td>
<td>14,000</td>
<td>31.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Warwick<br /></td>
<td>23,018</td>
<td>6,010</td>
<td>26.1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of York<br /></td>
<td>21,554</td>
<td>2,920</td>
<td>13.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Loughborough Univ<br /></td>
<td>18,902</td>
<td>4,030</td>
<td>21.3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.</p>
<p>UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.</p>
<p>The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.</p>
<p>Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet. </p>
<p>If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers. </p>
<p>The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA. </p>
<p>The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.</p>
<p>In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.</p>
<p>The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.</p>
<p>In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference. <br /><br />If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks. </p>
<p>The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.</p>
<p>Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.</p>
<h3>What is there already?</h3>
<ul><li>World-class Open Course Ware.</li><li>About 200 OA journals. </li><li>Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way. </li><li>A small group is promoting OJS.</li><li>There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.</li><li>National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.</li><li>There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,</li><li>Library and information science, Catalysis.</li><li>Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.</li><li>Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.</li><li>The Catalysis repository is not listed. </li><li>There are some efforts to digitize theses. </li><li>Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.</li><li>An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source. <br /></li></ul>
<p>But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches. </p>
<p>On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.</p>
<p>Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both. </p>
<p>Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.</p>
<h3>International collaboration and ways forward <br /></h3>
<p>A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access. </p>
<p>The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.</p>
<p>India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.</p>
<p>eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!</p>
<p>We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.</p>
<p>OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2011-08-23T03:13:24ZBlog EntryOpen Access to 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 Access2008-09-22T07:39:19ZFileOpen Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report: Call for Comments
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society welcomes comments on the first draft of "Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report". This report, on open access to scholarly literature, with a special focus on scientific literature, has been written by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu. The report surveys the field of scholarly and scientific publication in India and provides a detailed history of the open access movement in India.</b>
<p>It notes that Indian science has "low but increasing research productivity helped by increasing investments on R&D, and low but moderately improving visibility", and that the best way to boost visibility and impact of Indian science are by pursuing a nation-wide open access policy.</p>
<p>Thus, it recommends that all publicly funded research in India should be made open access and provides suggestions on how this could best be achieved. It points out the need to go beyond open access mandates, to practical aspects like training of repository maintainers and of researchers for self-archiving. In addition, it points out the need for more effective advocacy and for a judicious mixture of both top-down and bottom-up approaches for bringing about the realization of the benefits of open access.</p>
<p>Please do write in to Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (<a class="external-link" href="mailto: subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com">subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com</a>), Madhan Muthu (<a class="external-link" href="mailto:mu.madhan@gmail.com">mu.madhan@gmail.com</a>) and Pranesh Prakash (<a class="external-link" href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>) with your suggestions, criticisms, or general comments that you may have by Friday, August 12, 2011.</p>
<div>Please click below to access the document.</div>
<div><br />
<ul>
<li><a class="internal-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf" title="Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Status Report">Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India </a>[PDF, 1872 kb]</li>
<li><a class="internal-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx" title="Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India — A Status Report">Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India</a> [Word, 1964 kb]</li>
</ul>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>This draft report was prepared in April 2011 and the authors will update it soon.</i></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature</a>
</p>
No publisherProf. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan MuthuOpennessOpen Access2012-12-14T10:26:24ZBlog Entry