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Aaron Swartz: The First Martyr of the Free Information Movement
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement
<b>Well known American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist died on January 11, 2013. Lawrence Liang from the Alternative Law Forum discusses with Newsclick the tragic loss. The interview was conducted by Prabir Purkayastha. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">This interview was originally published by <a class="external-link" href="http://newsclick.in/international/aaron-swartz-first-martyr-free-information-movement">NewsClick</a> on January 19, 2013.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Discussing on the immediate background in which this tragic event happened, Lawrence says that all of us are collectively mourning the death of an extremely talented individual. He adds that Aaron was facing a very difficult trial ahead. A couple of years ago he had plugged his computer on to the MIT network and had downloaded approximately four million articles from JSTOR (primary database for social science and other science journals) and he had intended to make freely available. This act of his in many ways marks Aaaron's short life but one which is marked by a certain commitment and activism around the idea of free knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Lawrence further says that his anger at databases like JSTOR was the fact that they were charging extraordinary amounts of money to provide access (which meant that they were not available to most people in the world) without paying any royalty to the authors contributing to the article or to the people who do the peer review of the articles. Here is a scenario which is rent control of the worst kind essentially of knowledge which is completely privatised and enclosed (public knowledge which is enclosed in this particular way).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most researchers and academics who work and contribute towards making of journals do not get compensated for it but are paid for by public money because they happen to be employed by universities or research centres. And then all this material goes behind pay walls. And that is the context in which we need to understand Aaron's life. Click below to watch the full interview:</p>
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<h2>Video</h2>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Bg87SR0TRw4" width="320"></iframe></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement</a>
</p>
No publisherlawrenceOpennessVideoOpen Access2013-01-24T12:26:02ZBlog EntryA2K3 Panel XI: Open Access to Science and Research
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research
<b>Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam participated in the third Access to Knowledge hosted by The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School between September 8-10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference held at the Geneva International Conference Centre brought together hundreds of decision-makers and experts on global knowledge to discuss the urgent need for policy reforms.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://a2k3.org/2008/09/panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research/#more-184">Original Article on A2K3 website</a></p>
<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/../../open-access/a2k3/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science" class="internal-link" title="Why Do We Need Open Access to Science?: A Developing Country Perspective">Download Subbiah Arunachalam's Paper</a>
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<div>Audio file of Session on Open Access to Science and Research (<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/../../open-access/a2k3/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg" class="external-link">Ogg</a>, MP3)<br />
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<p>Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and
free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Made possible
by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access
to knowledge. This panel featured <a href="http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/%7Echan/">Leslie Chan</a>, of the University of Toronto; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subbiah_Arunachalam">Subbiah Arunachalam</a> of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Global Knowledge Partnership; <a href="http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/EveGray">Eve Gray</a> of the Centre for Educational Technology, UCT; and <a href="http://wikis.bellanet.org/asia-commons/index.php/D._K._Sahu">DK Sahu</a> of Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. <a href="http://wikis.bellanet.org/asia-commons/index.php/D._K._Sahu">Peter Suber</a> from the Yale Information Society Project and SPARC moderated this panel.</p>
<p><span id="more-184"></span></p>
<p> It’s a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors
are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from
publishers. But it’s growing quickly for scholarly journal articles,
where journals don’t pay for articles and authors write for impact, not
for money. The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate
research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for
researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where
access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of
fast-rising journal prices.</p>
<p>This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to
promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health
information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA
journals, OA repositories, the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to
Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National
Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their
peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.</p>
<p>The questions to be addressed will include:</p>
<ol><li> How do access barriers slow research in developing countries? How does OA remove those barriers?</li><li>What can universities do to promote OA?</li><li>What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?</li><li>What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?</li><li>What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?</li><li>Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?</li><li>How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?</li><li>How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?</li></ol>
<h3>
<strong>PETER SUBER</strong><br /></h3>
<ol><li>
OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of needless copyright</li><li>
OA is compatible with peer review, copyright, revenue and profit, print, preservation, prestige</li><li>
3622 peer-reviewed OA journals, 1220 OA repositories, 22 university
OA mandates (15 countries), 27 funding agencies OA mandates (14
countries)</li><li>
Part of the problem: journal prices have risen 4 times faser than
inflation since mid-1980s. Indian institute of science is the best
funded research library in india providing access to 10600 serials.</li><li>
Harvard has 98990</li><li>
Yale has 73900</li><li>
Average ARL library = 50,566</li><li>
U of Witwatersrand = 29,309</li><li>U of Malawi = 17000 ejournals, 95 print</li><li>
The case for OA is especially strong for publicly funded research, medical research, research from developing countries</li></ol>
<h3><strong>SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
Why do we needopen access to science?</li><li>
Science as Knowledge commons</li><li>
Created by researchers, a communal activity, science is about sharing, internet has opened new opportunities</li><li>
Primary goal of science is the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of humanity</li><li>
Emergence of open access – seeks to restore knowledge commons to creators. Movement, like everything else, is uneven</li><li>
Physicists vs. chemists</li><li>
UK, Netherlands and USA – have had many more successes</li><li>
Brazil – doing very well – but China and India are not doing so well with open access</li><li>
Restore the knowledge commons is to the community</li><li>
This movement is like any other movement which is uneven</li><li>Developments in India</li>
<ol><li>3.1% papers in chemical abstracts</li><li>30,000 papers a year indexed in SCI</li><li>Problems of Access and Visibility</li></ol>
<li>New Developments:</li>
<ol><li>Consortia – able to provide a lot of journals</li><li>open courseware</li><li>arXiv</li></ol>
<li>Problems: papers that are published are put in inaccessible journals,
and people in global South laboratories would be unable to access this
knowledge. The Government gives the money but the research then ends up
flying out</li><li>The policy front:</li>
<ol><li>Individual efforts</li><li>National Knowledge Commission has recommended OA</li><li>Number of institutional repositories</li><li>Need advocacy and training programmes</li><li>Action missing from key players</li></ol>
<li>Some individuals are doing a great job and putting all their materials online</li><li>Medical information and developing countries</li>
<ol><li>No nation can afford to be without access to S&T research capacity</li><li>Neglected diseases are not a priority for pharmaceutical companies</li><li>HINARI – any country that has per capita less than $1000 is eligible</li></ol>
</ol>
<h3><strong>DK SAHU</strong><br /></h3>
<ol><li>
Infectious diseases (chikungunya goes Italian)</li><li>
Non-infectious diseases (india becoming global hub for diabetes)</li><li>
Industry effects (how safe are clinical trials)</li><li>
Several examples (such as MedKnow, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) of free access to no-fee journals.</li><li>
A journal from India has the most visits from London</li><li>
A journal called International Journal of Shoulder Surgery but visitors are from Melbourne</li><li>
More original research articles, 40+ articles in 2005 vs. 160+
articles in 2008 in IJU, more issues per year for journals, check on
scientific misconduct, international recognition (11 journals in SCI in
2 years)</li><li>
Going online increases citations – this is an open access advantage</li><li>
Scientific output of new economies: medicine</li><li>
Open access publishing is not alone sufficient – there are
disappearing journals. Commercial publishers are taking over, there is
a lack of continuity, non-interoperability/archiving</li><li>
20-80 phenomenon (majority of journals are not OA)</li><li>
Local journals are not preferred (high IF journals)</li></ol>
<h3><strong>LESLIE CHAN</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
Role of Universities and Researchers</li><li>
You need citations in order to advance in academia – if your papers
get picked up and ripple throughout the research arena. What about
policy impact?</li><li>
“Impact factor” is evil. Open access was meant to counter the tyranny
of impact factor, so OA journals should not try to battle it out in
this arena.</li><li>
Issues involve “big science” and “lost science”, research literature
as infrastructure, integrating the gold and green roads to open access.</li><li>
Institutional repositories and open access journals</li><li>
There’s a lot of Big Science that costs a lot of money (like LHC)</li><li>
But we have another big hole – the 10-90Gap. 10% of the global health
research spending is allocated to diseases affecting 90% of the
population</li><li>
The G8 countries account for 85% of most cited articles indexed in ISI</li><li>
The other 126 countries account for 2.5%</li><li>
How much of these journals are relevant in terms of content?</li><li>
We are operating with a dominant model of knowledge dissemination from the Center to the Periphery</li><li>
We end up having “lost science” in the developing world because of that knowledge</li><li>
Perpetuate the cycle of knowledge poverty in this way</li><li>
African countries need to have in place appropriate mechanisms and
infrastructure for training and exploitation of knowledge. This will
enable them to make meaningful evidence based policy that pertains to
local needs</li><li>
Researchers in developing countries ranked access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems</li><li>
HINARI: health sciences</li>
<ol><li>108 countries, 1043 institutions, 5000 journals</li><li>Collaboration of >45 publishers: free or reduced-cost access to journals for developing countries</li><li>Others: eIFL.net, AGORA: agricultural sciences, OERE: environmental sciences, PERI</li><li>Dissemination through information philanthropy. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/1001/lcp100109.html</li></ol>
<li>Open access: the solution to the “lost science”</li><li>Two routes to Open Access (OA) – open access journals and respositories</li><li>African health sciences: two years ago there was a n article
published in this journal and authors found that over 50% of these
drugs were substandard or fake. This got the local newspaper, and then
BBC, and then other researchers started looking at it</li><li>Open Access repositories:</li><li>Institutionally-based (universities, etc) or subject-based (e.g. PubMet Central, arXiv.org)</li><li>Collect copies of articles published by the institutions researchers</li><li>Researchers themselves deposit knowledge</li><li>Benefits for authors (research output instantly accessible for all (higher impact)</li><li>Research output of international research community accessible to author</li><li>Partnerships/collaborative projects develop as a result</li><li>Career prospects advanced – publications noted by authorities</li><li>Opportunities for new research discoveries, data mining etc</li><li>Alternative impact assessment</li><li>Benefits for funding bodies: what has been discovered with our financial support? Was it a good investment?</li><li>Researchers have a moral and intellectual obligation to ensure that their research is accessible</li><li>Universities share a common goal and public mission advancement of knowledge for the betterment of human kind</li><li>Open access is key to the MDG</li></ol>
<h3><strong>EVE GRAY</strong></h3>
<ol><li>
When we talk about open access, we talk about change and change delivery.</li><li>It’s not just intellectual property and copyright issues, but values,
cultures, systems, practices, everything that underlie the process
moving towards scientific research</li><li>We faced the biggest problem in facing change – we’ve seen a massive
overhaul, of transformative reports, of leveraging the country into a
different direction. Undoing the damage of apartheid and colonialism</li><li>What is meant by international? What is meant by local?</li><li>African knowledge for Africa: we need to rejuvenate, regenerate our own knowledge</li><li>SA: first heart transplant in the world. Have their own vaccines. Operate as a leading scientific country</li><li>Growing international competitiveness – publication is perceived as a
matter of journal articles in international journals. Little or no
support for publication in nationally-based publications</li><li>Much research output in grey literature, not easily findable or accessible</li><li>The Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2001</li><li>Research has to address the burning economic issues of a country</li><li>Things are changing…slowly</li><li>Support for open access publications</li><li>What needs to be done – open access journals are necessary.</li><li>Changing values and promotion systems – we have to somehow pick up on
the vision of that vibrant African dance movement, translate this
feeling</li><li>Providing support for publication efforts</li><li>Expand the range of publication outputs</li><li>Ensuring the social impact of research</li><li>There is a huge amount of research being pumped out and being printed out by NGOs</li><li>Great literature is almost inaccessible in universities</li><li>Could not access African journals – no access from their own countries or neighboring countries</li><li>Electric Book Works has manuals for health-care workers – manuals are very high-quality, out of University of Cape Town</li><li>Often forgotten that science information is necessary to trickle
down, if everything is online, we can get things to trickle down</li><li>Harvard said: it is our duty to disseminate our research. Stanford:
Caroline Handy – when you publish research, research for community use
is part of the duty</li></ol>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research</a>
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No publishersunilOpen Access2011-08-18T05:07:56ZBlog Entry