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Helping Institutions Embrace Open Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access
<b>World over, a large number of universities and institutions are making way for open access repositories. Why have Indian researchers shied away from it?</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Manupriya was <a class="external-link" href="https://thewire.in/197872/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access/">published in the Wire</a> on November 17, 2017</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On October 28, 2017, a group of panelists in the faculty hall at <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/iisc" target="_blank" title="Indian Institute of Science (IISc),">Indian Institute of Science (IISc),</a> discussed the framework of policies that can help academic institutions embrace open access in letter, spirit and action. The discussion was a part of week-long activities organised by <span class="caps">DST </span>Centre for Policy Research (<span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span>) at IISc to increase awareness and acceptability for open access publishing in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/OA.png/@@images/3939a474-dc8c-4f7b-b3ee-20b19b8f0e18.png" alt="OA" class="image-inline" title="OA" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The panel included Jayant Modak, deputy director, IISc, Satyajit Mayor, director of <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/ncbs" target="_blank" title="National Centre for Biological Sciences">National Centre for Biological Sciences</a> and <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/instem" target="_blank" title="inStem">inStem</a>, Padmini Ray Murray, vice-chair, <a href="http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/" target="_blank" title="Global Outlook: Digital Humanities">Global Outlook: Digital Humanities</a>, <span class="caps">N.V.</span> Sathyanarayana, chairman and managing director, <a href="http://www.informaticsglobal.com/" target="_blank" title="Informatics India Ltd">Informatics India Ltd</a> and Madan Muthu, visiting faculty at <a href="https://iiscdstcpr.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" title="DST-CPR at IISc."><span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span> at IISc.</a> The discussion was anchored and moderated by Sunil Abraham, executive director, <a href="https://cis-india.org/" target="_blank" title="Centre for Internet and Society.">Centre for Internet and Society.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open access is a form of publishing that makes the fruits of research, such as journal papers and other forms of data accessible to anyone interested in it, without a cost. World over, a large number of universities and institutions are beginning to give up the library subscription model of publishing to make way for open access, owing to the latter’s lower cost and higher visibility.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In India too, funding agencies like <span class="caps">DBT</span> and <span class="caps">DST</span> have laid out guidelines that require researchers to submit their research output in open access repositories. Ironically though, most researchers have shied away from submitting their work in the repositories. Which raises the question, why?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In fact, this was one of the first questions that the panelists debated upon. Abraham initiated the discussion by asking the panelists – What are the weaknesses of <span class="caps">DBT</span>–<span class="caps">DST</span> policy on open access? Why have a large number of scientists not followed the guidelines laid by the policy? Is it because the policy document does not talk about any punitive measures for scientists in the event of not depositing their work in the institutional repositories (IRs)? And, how can the policy be improved?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Modak opened the argument by saying that we as a nation are good at making provisions but bad with implementation. He agreed that scientists are yet to warm up to the idea of open access but was disinclined on using punitive measures to force scientists into submitting their work in IRs. Mayor, in agreement with Modak, said that the policy document is advisory in nature and sort of lacks ‘teeth’. However, he too was against the use of punitive measures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Murray, the third academician on the panel said that though the policy talks about staying away from publisher-based metrics like impact factor to assess a scientist’s work, it does not provide any information about what alternative metrics can be used to measure it. She suggested that the accessibility of a scientist’s work and how much effort she has put in to make it easily available to non-scientists could be used as a metrics for measurement. She also drew attention to the fact that the policy completely bypasses the requirements of independent scholars and those working in languages other than English. “Which institutional repository should they deposit their work in?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sathyanarayana, the fourth panelist and a strong advocate of open access said, the policy document “lacks an aggressive strategy” to drive a disruptive and “fundamentally voluntary model” of adopting open access. He asked the other panelists and the audience, “why have repositories like ResearchGate become so successful and attractive for researchers? Why can’t open access IRs be modelled along the lines of such repositories? His argument was that the IRs can be fashioned in a way to make them a ‘convenient step in the process of research’”. One suggestion that he offered was that IRs can be structured as a paper submission platform. So that anybody who is interested in publishing their work first puts it up in the <span class="caps">IR</span> and only after that the process of going to a journal begins.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Muthu, the fourth panelist and a long-time crusader for open access in India said that scientists in India have stayed away from the open access publishing because they don’t fully realise that in traditional models of publishing, you surrender all copyrights of your work to the publisher. He added that more scientists can be encouraged to adopt the open access model of publishing by making IRs institute-managed, easier to use and as a mandatory step in the process of publishing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mayor added to this argument by saying that the idea of submitting (unpublished) work in an <span class="caps">IR</span> is quite similar to the concept of pre-print archives which are fast becoming a powerful way of sharing work. Almost all top journals accept work that has been published in a pre-print archive. In fact, in the physical sciences, people have been using pre-print archives for a long time and now slowly, even the biology community is warming up to it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Murray emphasised on the need to talk to students about open access and making them aware of the ways to design their metadata so that it is amenable to open access repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the discussion inched closer to its final moments, it veered off towards the costs of open access publishing. Modak said that in the last year alone, the amount of money IISc has spent for publishing papers has doubled. If all researchers start opting for open access (<span class="caps">OA</span>) journals/hybrid-<span class="caps">OA</span> journals that charge the authors nearly double of what traditional journals do, then publishing papers will become unsustainable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To this, Sathyanarayana said, it may appear that the cost of publishing in <span class="caps">OA</span> journals is high, but on a macro-level, when you consider the cost of publishing and accessing all the papers published in a year, then the <span class="caps">OA</span> model costs much lesser. He added that scientific publishing is the only business in the world where authors (creators of proprietary material) give away all their rights to publishers.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Backing up the points made by Sathyanarayana, Murray said that in traditional models of publishing the publishers make close to 400% profits. We need to think about, “how much labour we as academics put in for publishers’ profits?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is authors’ inertia that is stopping open access from becoming the obvious model of publishing, said, Muthu.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In conclusion, Abraham summed up the arguments and acknowledged that there are many dimensions to open access and an institutional policy on <span class="caps">OA</span> cannot be framed in a vacuum. Common people need to participate in the debate to shape the direction the policy takes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Apart from the panel discussion a poster competition and a quiz competition were organised as part of the <span class="caps">OA</span>-week activities. <span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span> was joined by the student’s council at IISc, Centre for Contemporary Studies, <span class="caps">JRD</span> Tata Library and IndiaBioscience in organising the activities.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>This article was originally published on </i><a href="https://indiabioscience.org/" target="_blank" title="IndiaBioscience">IndiaBioscience</a><i>. Read the original <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/news/2017/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access" target="_blank" title="here">here</a>. <br /></i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2017-11-27T15:11:34ZNews ItemIndo - French Perspectives on Digital Studies
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies
<b>Anubha Sinha was a speaker at the Indo-French workshop on Open Access at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on March 15, 2017. The event was organized by the Digital Studies Group. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anubha Sinha broadly spoke on the state of open access in India, the features of the DBT-DST policy, ICAR policy, how to shape the future of open access movement in India and what are the obstacles in the same.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/files/talk-by-anubha-sinha-on-open-access-in-jnu">See the workshop schedule here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2017-03-29T05:17:33ZNews ItemShould Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published
<b>We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Subbiah Arunachalam was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/1/Post-print_APC_paper.pdf">Indian Institute of Science Repository</a> on October 29, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journals and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">More than two decades ago Harnad posted his subversive proposal to a mailing list in which he called on researchers “to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the internet.”<sup>1,2</sup> Many researchers now make their papers freely available either by publishing them in open access (OA) journals or by placing them in repositories or websites. Indeed, a 2013 report asserted that by 2011 “free availability of a majority of papers has been reached in general science and technology, in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics, and statistics,” and that the number of open access papers has been growing by about 2% a year.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Journals make papers open access in two ways: OA journals make all papers open access immediately on publication, and hybrid OA journals make selected papers open access. Most OA journals listed in the <i>Directory of Open Access Journals</i> (<i>DOAJ</i>) do not charge to make a paper open access<i>. Current Science </i>is such a journal. Many OA journals – about 26% according to Solomon and Björk<sup>4</sup> – and all hybrid OA journals levy an article processing charge (APC) to provide OA to a paper. However, according to Crotty,<sup>5 </sup>the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC. The APC levied by journals used by Indian researchers is in the range INR 500 (~US$8) - US$5,000.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">OA journal publishing, particularly by commercial publishers and in the field of biomedicine, is growing rapidly. According to <i>DOAJ</i> there are 9,192 OA journals as of 2 September 2016 published from 130 countries and one can access more than 2.27 million articles. Currently, <i>DOAJ </i>is growing at the net rate of 6 titles per day.<sup>6</sup> The <i>Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources</i> (<i>ROAD</i>) lists 14,031 OA journals published from some 140 countries.<sup>7</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Repositories, where full texts of research publications are deposited and made available online, are of two kinds: central repositories, such as <i>arXiv</i>, and distributed (or institutional) repositories, such as the University of Southampton institutional research repository, <eprints.soton.ac.uk>, the first of its kind. <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Here we are concerned only with the open access journals which make all content open access immediately on publication. Further, our interest is in papers from India that are published in journals levying APC. The question we are particularly interested in is, ‘is paid open access affordable for India?’ And, even if it is affordable, should we go for it?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We assessed the current status of the use of OA journals by Indian researchers using bibliometric analysis of data gathered from <i>Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded</i> (<i>SCIE</i>). We used this analysis to find out the number of papers Indian researchers have published in OA journals charging APC, leading to an estimate of the amount the country as a whole would potentially have spent on APC costs, and to see if publishing in paid OA journals led to higher levels of citations.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Methodology</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We searched for articles, letters, proceedings papers and reviews from India in OA journals</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">indexed in <i>SCIE</i> in the five years 2010-2014. The search made on 11 January 2016 resulted in</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">37,122 papers. Of these, 44 papers resulting from five international collaborations (CMS,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ATLAS, ALICE, STAR and FAITH), and appearing in journals such as <i>Physics Letters B</i>, <i>New Journal of Physics</i>, <i>Nuclear Physics B</i> and <i>BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders</i>, had a very large number of authors (running to several hundreds). We removed them from the data set as they hindered processing the data. Thus we considered 37,078 papers. We downloaded full bibliographic data for all these and analysed the data using Visual FoxPro and found that Indian researchers have used 881 OA journals in which to publish these papers. We visited the web site of each of these journals during January- February 2016 to find out information on APCs levied by them. Also we classified the journals into 22 major field categories following the <i>Essential Science Indicators </i>(ESI) classification. This classification does not allocate journals to multiple fields. We identified papers in which at least one author was from a country other than India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Using the same strategy as used for Indian publications, we recorded the number of papers published by 12 other countries and the proportion of OA papers (data gathered on 29 January 2016).</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Results</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We present here the key findings. Details of our bibliometric analysis are available from the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">authors and will soon be presented in a report.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of OA journals by researchers</i><b> – </b>In the five years considered, SCIE had indexed 6,460,105 papers, of which 748,127 (or 11.58%) were in OA journals. In Fig. 1<b>,</b> we present the share of proportion of journal publications which have appeared in OA journals in 13 countries in the 5year period 2010-2014. Brazil has the highest proportion (close to one in three papers), with</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India coming a distant second (one in seven papers). That Brazil leads is not surprising. Long before the OA movement began, the funding community led by the São Paulo Science</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Center on Health Sciences Information recognized the need for strengthening the visibility of the Brazilian journals, and initiated the SciELO movement in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1997, which later spread to Chile and the rest of Ibero-America and South Africa.<sup>8</sup> As Vessuri et al.<sup>9</sup> have pointed out, a strong sense of public mission among Latin American universities, coupled with the realization that OA improves the presence and impact of Latin American research publications led Latin America to develop its own knowledge exchange mechanisms on its own terms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Estimates of the proportion of open access papers vary widely depending on the source used and when the estimate was made. For example, by analysing journals indexed in <i>Scopus</i> we found that 4,231 of the 22,460 active titles (as of 6 February 2016) were OA (as seen from <i>DOAJ</i> on September 2015) and were listed in either or both of <i>DOAJ</i> and <i>ROAD</i>.<sup>10</sup> Of the more than</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12,000 journals covered by <i>Web of Science,</i> 1,313 journals are OA as of October 2015 as listed</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">by <i>DOAJ</i>.<sup>11</sup> Analyzing data from <i>Google Scholar</i>, Jamali and Nabavi showed that more than 61% of papers were accessible in full text.<sup>12</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of journals charging APC</i> - In 2010, Indian researchers had published their work in 479 OA journals, of which 237 did not charge APC. The number of OA journals used by Indian researchers to publish their work is increasing (Table 1). It has risen from 445 in 2009<sup>13</sup> to 611 in 2014. More than half of the 611 journals levy APC.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not all journals charging APC have a fixed APC. There are many models. Of the 881 <i>SCIE</i>indexed OA journals which Indian researchers have used, 488 charge a fee: 437 charge a fixed APC, 49 levy page charges, and two charge a non-refundable submission fee. Contrary to</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Crotty’s observation that the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC,<sup>5</sup> Indian authors publish a larger number of papers in non-APC journals. However, papers published in journals levying APC are cited a larger number of times on average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The APC OA journal used most often by Indian researchers in the five-year period is <i>PLoS One</i> with a total publication count of 2,404 and average cites per paper (CPP) of 7.32. Starting with 78 papers in 2009,<sup>13</sup> the number increased to 724 papers from India in 2014. Indeed, <i>Current Science</i>, which comes next in the list with 2,334 papers with a CPP of 1.74, was the leader until 2011.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Overseas collaboration </i>- All authors are from India in 30,152 of the 37,078 papers published by Indian researchers in the 881 OA journals; this includes papers in which all authors are from the same institution as well as papers with authors from more than one Indian institution. These papers have been cited 78,722 times for a CPP of 2.61. There are 6,926 papers with at least one author from an address outside India, and these have been cited 39,031 times for a CPP of 5.63.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers have collaborated with authors from some 115 countries. Collaborators are mainly from USA (2,191 papers), UK (815 papers) and Germany (708 papers).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Country of journal publication </i>- Indian authors have published in OA journals from 61 countries. More than half (18,781) were published in 48 Indian journals, six of which charge APC. As one would expect, US and UK journals followed Indian journals in the number of papers published: 7,647 papers were published in 149 US journals of which 107 charge APC, and 2,834 papers were published in 172 UK journals of which 162 charge APC. Indian researchers have published</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">675 papers in 54 Brazilian OA journals of which nine levy APC, 229 papers in 9 Chilean OA journals of which two levy APC, 231 papers in 14 journals published from China of which five charge APC in the five yeras. In these five years Indian authors have published 652 papers in seven Nigerian APC journals. Of these, all but one were delisted from <i>Web of Science</i> after a few years of coverage. Such delisting is all too common. Of the 881 journals studied here, only 263 have been used by Indian researchers in all five years.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i> </i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Citations to papers published in journals levying APC</i> – Number of papers by Indian researchers in 57 journals charging APC and publishing at least 10 papers from India and has a CPP of not less than 10 are listed in Table 2. Table 3 lists the 10 journals that do not levy APC and have been cited at least 10 times on average in the five years. Three journals, viz. <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i>, <i>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</i>, and <i>BMC Genomics</i>, all of which charge an APC of well over US$2,000, have published more than 100 papers from India. In all three journals, CPP of Indian papers are less than CPP of the journal as a whole, and there is a big difference between the CPP of papers written solely by Indian authors and that of those written in collaboration with foreign authors. For example, <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i> has published 138 papers from India (CPP 14.09) out of a total of 6,614. The journal’s average CPP for the 5-year period is 25.29 as against India’s CPP of 14.09. The 80 papers entirely written by Indian researchers has a CPP of less than 10, and the CPP of the 58 papers with foreign collaborators is more than 22.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As many as 92 papers have appeared in 10 OA journals which do not charge APC, none of which are from India, and these have been cited more than 15 times on average. Of the 92 papers, 41 were published in the <i>Bulletin of the World Health Organization</i> at a CPP of about 12.5. In contrast, the CPP of the 478 papers published in the journal during the five years is above 15.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of mega journals- </i>Indian authors have published 3,100 papers in nine mega journals where the papers are accepted without applying the usual standards of strict peer review if they are perceived to be technically sound (Table 4).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Papers classified by field - </i>It is in Clinical Medicine that Indian researchers have published in the largest number of OA journals (208) as well as contributing the largest number of papers (10,036). They have published in 88 journals in the field of Plant and Animal Science, but have published a much larger number of papers in both Chemistry and Biology & Biochemistry in a smaller number of journals.<i> </i></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Discussion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 14.4% of the 37,122 papers from India as seen from <i>SCIE</i> have been published in OA journals. The actual number of OA papers from India will be much larger since, for example,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Scopus</i> is likely to have indexed a larger number of such papers. Additionally, there are papers published in hybrid OA journals and papers published in non-OA journals that are made open access by placing them in institutional or central repositories or freely available through author websites, which indicates that there is a welcome growing awareness of the need for making one’s work OA. Our earlier study<sup>13</sup> has revealed that some 16% of Indian papers were pulished in OA journals indexed in SCIE 2009, but in that study we had considered all categories of papers from OA journals collected comprehensively from various sources.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Potential spend on APC seen in perspective </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We estimated the total APC for all 14,293 papers published by Indian authors in OA journals charging a fixed APC (leaving out 7% of all OA papers charging variable APC). We found there is an average cost of ~ US$1,173 per paper. We compared this figure with the costs on APCs incurred by institutions elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From a survey of a large sample of journals listed in DOAJ carried out in 2014, Morrison <i>et al</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">reported an average APC of US$964.<sup>14</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wellcome Trust, which supports payment of charges incurred by their grantees, reported a total spend of about £4.7 million paid for 2,556 papers, published in OA or hybrid journals, in 2013-14 at an average APC of £1,837. Close to 60% of these papers were published in the journals of the five leading publishers, and of these 68% were in hybrid journals. In 2014-15, the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Charity Open Access Fund, comprising the Trust and five other funders, had paid more than £5.6 million towards APCs for 2,942 papers at an average cost of £1,914.<sup>15</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In its report dated March 2015, RCUK indicated an average APC of £1,600, based on APC paid for 6,504 papers from 55 universities during the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15. The average APC paid varies from university to university, from £778 for the School of Oriental & African</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Studies to £2,248 for Durham University.<sup>16</sup> Over the 15-month period April 2013 – July 2014,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Leeds University alone had paid publishers a little over £270,000, of which about £10,000 was for colour and page charges. For the 166 RCUK funded papers for which APCs were paid during the review period, the average cost of APC was £1,626.74.<sup>17 </sup>University of Cambridge spent</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">£936,000 towards APC in 2014. For the 495 RCUK funded papers the average cost was £1,891.<sup>18</sup> Besides this, the university has also supported payment of page and colour charges and has paid for researchers to join memberships that offer a discount for APCs out of the RCUK fund. There is a growing concern in the university if they should be spending so much money on</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APCs.<sup>18</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Björk and Solomon, in their report submitted to a consortium of European funding agencies in March 2014, had estimated the average APC from a study of journals indexed in <i>Scopus</i> for at least two years to be US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Gerritsma reported that in 2013, the Netherlands had spent €4 million towards 3,314 papers published in OA journals charging APC and in hybrid journals, and indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, at an average APC of €1,220.<sup>20 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2015, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) spent over €418,000 on APCs for 288 papers in Gold OA journals (average €2,376) and €2.38 million on APCs for 913 papers (average €1,453). In addition FWF incurred an expenditure of €273,600 on other costs.<sup>21</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The variation is to be expected, as the sampled journals vary and in the case of India a substantial number of low-APC journals would have been used. Wang et al. have found that the level of APCs varies with the region. European and North American APC OA journals have average</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of more than US$2000, while Asian, African and South American APC OA journals have average APC of less than US$1000.<sup>22</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If we assume that APC was paid in full for all the 14,297 papers (4,775 with foreign collaborators and 9,522 by exclusively Indian authors) published by Indian authors in OA journals charging APC, the total expenditure would be around US$16.75 million. This figure does not include the APC for the other 7% of papers published in journals charging APC on the basis of number of pages, submission fee, and so on. Nor does it include the expenditure on OA papers published in hybrid journals. These journals usually charge much more than journals with fixed APC. According to Björk and Solomon (2014), the average APC for publication charged by hybrid journals published by subscription publishers (such as Elsevier and Wiley) is US$</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2,727, almost double that chaged by fully OA journals published by non-subscription publishers (such as PLoS), US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup> It is possible that APCs for many papers jointly authored with foreign collaborators might have been paid by the other party. Also, in some cases authors might have been granted either a fee waiver or a discount. Allowing for these possibilities, we may assume that the sum spent would still be very high, more than<b> ~</b>US$12 million, or an average of US$2.4 million a year. This amount is in addition to the national expenditure on its academic and research library budget. Data releaesed early this year as part of the Natioanl Institutional Ranking Framework (https://www.nirfindia.org/Ranking) exercise reveal that the academic and library budget is by no means small.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Author pays model has failed </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the initial years of the ‘author pays’ OA journals, the hope was that OA publishing would be cheaper than subscription publishing. Eisen claimed that APC would go down “and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero.”<sup>23</sup> What we see in reality, however, is that the APC charged by <i>PLoS One</i> has gone up from US$1,250 when it was founded in December 2006 to US$1,450 now. The APC charged by <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> has increased from</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">US$1,500 at launch in 2003 to US$2,900 in 2012, a rise of 93% in nine years.<sup>23</sup> The situation at</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">BioMed Central is no different. Comparing the APC levied by the 165 BMC titles between 2010 and 2016, Wheatly has shown that for many titles there has been a substantial rise.<sup>24</sup> Neylon, a former employee of PLoS had recently conceded that “no functional market is emerging and it</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(APC model) might be the wrong economic model.”<sup>25</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the high energy physics community and librarians from more than 20 countries negotiated with publishers to make key journals OA, it resulted in a contract with 11 publishers that would ensure they could make 10 journals OA immediately on publication and, in return, continue to make the profits they were making earlier with the subscription model. From its inception in</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">January 2014, SCOAP<sup>3</sup> is making papers available on an OA basis and it charges an average</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of US$1,165.<sup>26</sup> According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">“</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/">SCOAP</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/"><sup>3</sup></a> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">n</a>early doubled in size this past year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents,” and “the <a href="http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en">Electronic Journals Library</a> added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">7% growth rate.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 1999, Rosenzweig<sup>27</sup> pointed out that the world of knowledge was being “kidnapped and held for ransom” by commercial publishers who have “turned renegade, exiling themselves from the academic enterprise, and focusing entirely on making the most money for their stockholders” and in the process “restricting the flow of knowledge.” Laakso and Björk have pointed out that today commercial publishers are the most common publisher of OA papers and the number of papers published by them jumped from 13,400 in 2005 to 119,900 in 2011.<sup>28</sup> Björk and Solomon<sup>19</sup> have shown that “among the established OA publishers with journals listed in <i>Scopus</i>, the average APC grew by about 5% a year over the two years 2012 – 2013.” Taking such increases into account, India’s APC bill is bound to grow far beyond the US$2.4 million in the future. These cost increases are unpredictable, making it difficult for organizations willing to pay APC to make appropriate provisions in their budgets.</p>
<h3><sub>Affordable OA publishing</sub></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Concerned about the high subscription costs and audience-limiting access rules of many traditional journals and the high levels of APCs charged by OA journals, many editorial boards broke away from publishers of such journals ‘in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher or less-restrictive access policy.’<sup> 29</sup> The most recent example is the <i>en masse</i> resignation of Rooryck and the other members of the editorial board of <i>Lingua</i> to start <i>Glossa</i>.<sup>30</sup> An early example was the resignation of the editor of <i>Evolutionary Ecology</i> along with many members of the editorial board to start <i>Evolutionary Ecology Research</i> in 1998.<sup>29 </sup>Suber maintains a list of such ‘Journal declarations of independence.’<sup>29</sup> Gowers, a strong opponent of publishers making tall claims about the value they add to publications and the huge subscription prices they charge, has launched an <i>arXiv</i> overlay journal called <i>Discreet Analysis</i>, owned by a group of researchers, in which the overall cost per article will be well below $30.<sup>31</sup> His idea is to demonstrate that “in the internet age, and in particular in an age when it is becoming routine for mathematicians to deposit their articles on the <i>arXiv</i> before they submit them to journals, the only important function left for journals is organizing peer review.”<sup> 31</sup> How will these journals survive? Initially, the Association of Dutch Universities and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund <i>Glossa </i>so it can be completely free for both authors and readers, and the Open Libraries of the Humanities will take over the funding after five years.<sup>32 </sup>Seed money from the University of Cambridge will see through <i>Discreet Analysis in</i> the first five years.<sup>31 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It’s important [that these alternative models] acquire a reputation and prestige that people can feel it’s okay to submit to them — rather than the more established traditional journals — without damaging their careers," Gowers says.<sup>32</sup> "We need an alternative, cheap system sitting there — at which point the commercial publishers will become redundant."<sup>33</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Should Indian researchers spend a large sum on APCs?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why do authors choose to publish in certain journals? Scientists want their work not only to be seen and read but also to be appreciated and cited. For them publications are the culmination of their research and a means of achieving prestige and visibility. Moreover, the journals in which authors publish play an important role in the way the global community of scientists and funding agencies evaluate a scientist. Authors choose journals that would bring them maximum visibility, prestige and citations. Although there have been many discssions in recent times about the place of citations in scholarly communication and the undue importance paid to journal impact factors,<sup>34</sup> scientists of all age groups look forward to their papers being cited repeatedly and quickly, and journals proudly advertise their impact factors on their cover pages. Scientists do not really care if a journal is OA or if it charges APC (as long as their institution or funder is ready to cover the costs), nor surprisingly are they chary of surrendering all rights to their paper to the publisher. Many journals charging APC satisfy authors’expectations to a lesser or greater extent and authors are able to find the ones that would accept their papers. In addition, many of the journals run by major commercial publishers are run professionally and their unified graphical appearance gives them an identity. As scholarly communication moves from print to online, these publishers take advantage of emerging technological tools and standards to offer the research community ever better ways of presenting their content and they also energetically market their journals. PLoS, which was started with a view to fighting the commercial publishers, has spent US$3 million on software development in 2013-14 and more than US$413,000 on marketing and advertising in addition to expenses on promotion.<sup>35</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question, from the point ofview of authors, is, “is it all right to spend huge sums for getting papers published in OA journals?” No, says Balaram, former director of Indian Institute of Science. He believes that Indian researchers should not use government funds – money given for research - to subsidize non-Indian journals, and that the money spent on APCs could be better spent on research per se or on libraries.<sup>36</sup> Williams-Jones and colleagues belive that “for many sectors of academe, ‘paying to publish’ is ethically suspicious.<sup>37 </sup>Such an ethical concern has also been raised by Wilson and Golonka.<sup>38</sup> There are other voices from the global South opposed to OA through APC. Babini of the Latin American Social Science Council asserts that paying huge sums as APC could increase the overall costs of research and financially undermine a nation’s research and scientific publishing ecosystem.<sup>39</sup> Nilsen says paying to publish represents a new apartheid system, and that “we need to move away from a system where someone decides who should have access to what.”<sup>40 </sup>For the sake of the global public good, Nilsen recommends that we should abandon the discriminative APC-based publishing practice and adopt open access through repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The APC model of OA is not serving the true purpose of OA, which aims to create a level playing field for access to research. The APC levied by <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> is roughly equal to half of a month’s salary for an assistant professor in the United States, but more than two months of salary for an assistant professor in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, at a time when science is facing a funding crunch, it would be prudent for Indian researchers and research institutions to refrain from paying APCs to journals. A few months ago, both Rao and Swaminathan lamented the shortage of funds for research,<sup>41,42</sup> and more recently the Ministry of Human Resource Development announced some budgetary cuts for Indian Institutes of Technology<sup>43</sup> and the Ministry of Science & Technlogy has told the CSIR laboratories to fund reseach by themselves and to convert ongoing projects into for-profit ventures.<sup>44</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is the alternative model for making research OA?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What is the alternative to publishing in paid OA journals? Balaram suggests that the authors could publish their papers without paying APC and still make them open through interoperable institutional repositories.<sup>36,45</sup> Joshi has explained the advantages of depositing one’s papers in such repositories.<sup>46</sup> Authors may wonder if making a paper available through such a repository is equivalent to publishing in an OA or hybrid OA journal. The answer is yes, very nearly. Journals may insist on an embargo and they may let the author deposit only the author postprint (the refereed version). Experts such as Harnad would recommend the adoption of OA through repositories worldwide so that institutions could cancel subscriptions and use the savings to pay for the much lower-priced, affordable, sustainable OA journals.<sup>47</sup> Use of repositories is picking up around the world. According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> “Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (<i>BASE</i>) repositories collectively added more than 4.7 million documents this quarter for a total of just under 89 million documents,” and “the number of journals actively participating in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>PubMed</i></a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>Central</i></a><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/">,</a> making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow.” <a href="https://arxiv.org/"><i>arXiv</i></a> <a href="https://arxiv.org/">g</a>rew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the last year.<sup>6</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is happening in India? </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are many OA journals in India, and 337 have been listed in <i>DOAJ </i>(as on 3 September 2016). These include journals published by leading Academies, societies and government organizations such as CSIR-NISCAIR, DESIDOC, ICMR, and ICAR, and these are free to authors and readers. MedKnow, although part of a private publishing group, publishes a large number of OA titles, most of which again are free to both authors and readers. But not all Indian OA journals are on a single platform like SciELO. Apart from a few exceptions like MedKnow journals, others do not offer all the web features and metrics that leading publishers offer, which is surprising considering the wealth of technological skills available in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another platform specifically designed to provide open access to journals published in developing countries is Bioline International, a not-for-profit partnership committed to providing open access to quality research journals and reducing the South to North knowledge gap. Bioline currently supports 36 journals from 16 countries<b>.</b> The download statistics of Bioline journals (http://www.bioline.org.br/stats) are very impressive. Kirsop, a founding member of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Bioline International, told us “Within a single month in 2016, some 1.5 million full text articles were downloaded – equivalent to approximately 18 million per annum – showing the value attached to publications resulting from research carried out in regions of the global south, often referred to as ‘the missing science’, but nevertheless essential to achieve a global understanding in such areas as health and the environment.” (Personal communication, 13 April 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Organizations such as CSIR, DBT and DST have already adopted a policy of making research produced in their own laboratories, as well as research they support in other institutions, open access through placing the accepted papers in institutional open access repositories.<sup>48,49 </sup>CSIR-</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">URDIP, Pune, has set up a central platform for OA repositories and harvesting from all three organizations and these could be accessed at http://www.csircentral.net/ and http://sciencecentral.in/. Unfortunately, many laboratories under these apex bodies have not taken the OA policy seriously, nor there seems to be any will on the part of the apex bodies to implement the policy forcefully.These repositories are interoperable and have adopted the best international practices. ICAR also has an open access policy, but it does not seem to have much traction.<sup>50</sup> There are also many institutional repositories (listed in http://roar.eprints.org/), some of them well populated, but others are languishing, largely due to the indifference of scientists.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">By contrast, China seems to have made considerable progress. It was only in 2014 that the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(NSFC) issued open access policies.<sup>51</sup> By mid-March 2016 , the Open Repository of the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">NSFC included 135,000 research papers published between 1998 and 2015 by authors from 1,305 institutions. These research papers have already been downloaded more than 669,000 times. CAS now has two OA portals, namely the Institutional Repository Grid of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with content from 102 repositories, and the China Open Access Journal Portal, with content from hundreds of journals.<sup>52</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Latin America has witnessed the emergence of strong cooperative scholarly publishing ventures, such as SciELO (www.scielo.org) which hosts about 1,250 journals, and Redalyc</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(www.redalyc.org) which hosts, 1,095 journals. Of these more than 2,300 journals, 1,300 do not charge APC and others charge only a modest fee.<sup>53</sup> A SPARC report says, “SciELO and Redalyc do raise the visibility and accessibility of the journals they host, particularly with their local communities. These types of networked meta-publishers allow for central governance of policies, procedures and controls, but are intentionally decentralized to support the development of local capacity and infrastructure ensuring greater sustainability and alignment with local policies and priorities.”<sup>54 </sup>With these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Even so, researchers in Latin America continue to publish a very large proportion of their papers in non-OA journals. For example, as shown in Table 1, in the five years 2010-14, more than 65% of papers from Brazil were published in non-OA journals. The simplest way to make the large volume of non-OA papers freely available is to set up many institutional repositories and populate them quickly. Efforts are already under way in several countries and indeed a network of repositories from nine countries is coordinated by <i>La Referencia</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/), and there are legislations in place in Argentina, Mexico and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Peru to make publicly funded research freely available through repositories.<sup>55</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What needs to be done?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Compared with developments in Latin America and China, India is clearly lagging behind in making her research freely accessible. How can this be changed? We believe that making all research freely accessible through interoperable OA repositories is the ideal solution. According to Houghton and Swan,<sup> 56</sup> till the time we reach an all Gold OA (OA through journals) world, Green OA (OA through repositories) may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy. We suggest the following actions.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Populate OA repositories that are already there, as empty and sparsely populated repositories will not reflect well on the research community.</li>
<li>Set up repositories in institutions where one does not exist. Academic and research librarians can play an important role in setting up and populating repositories.</li>
<li>Academic and research organizations (at the state and central levels, as well as apex bodies), which do not have an OA policy, should adopt a policy similar to those of DBT, DST and CSIR and implement the same.</li>
<li>As part of the implementation, funding agencies and heads of organizations should have a compliance monitoring mechanism that would reward those who deposit their papers, and persuade those who do not.</li>
<li>If the policies of all agencies are aligned, it would bring about many advantages such as ease of compliance, optimization of workflow, and sharing of data and best practices.<sup>57</sup></li>
<li>All organizations may join the CSIR-URDIP effort so that a nation wide platform could emerge for OA repositories. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also, as demonstrated by HAL, France, facilitate “coherent meta-data description, connection to national authority files, quicker take up of new technologies (e.g. visualisation and data mining) and better connection with international initiatives.”<sup>58</sup></li>
<li>Funding agencies and research organizations that are so far unconcerned about their funds being used to meet APCs should stop supporting this practice. </li>
<li>A cadre of scholarly communication workforce should be developed for building institutional repositories and persuading researchers to upload materials.</li>
</ol>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If India and China follow the Latin American model of hosting all or most of their journals on a single decentralized platform and make as many journals as possible OA, and if India, China and Latin America vigorously promote a culture of OA repositories and encourage researchers to self-archive their publications, that would have a great impact on making science and scholarship open, not only in these regions but around the world. All of this can happen only with the willing participation of the scientific community. As Harnad would say, ‘Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you’.<sup>59</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If, instead, researchers continue to pay publishers exorbitant APCs, as Poynder points out, there will soon be a crisis over the cost of APCs, which would hit research the world over, but research in the developing world will be hit harder.<sup>60</sup> As long as we continue to use APC based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Acknowledgement</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are grateful to Peter Suber and Ms Barbara Kirsop for their valuable comments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Fig1.jpg" alt="Fig 1" class="image-inline" title="Fig 1" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Figure 1.</b> Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 1.</b> Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2">
<p>Year</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (non-APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>All OA journals</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2010</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>242</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2557</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17550</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>237</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4131</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16301</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>479</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6688</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33851</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2011</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>263</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3067</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17367</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>244</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4280</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>507</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7347</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>30012</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2012</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>308</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2800</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15715</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>251</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4157</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9276</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>559</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6957</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24991</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2013</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>326</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3335</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12635</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>268</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4457</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6257</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>594</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7792</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18892</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2014</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>328</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3634</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6950</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>283</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4660</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3057</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>611</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>8294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10007</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15393</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>70217</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21685</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47536</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>37078</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117753</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 2.</b> OA journals charging APC in which Indian authors have published at least 10 papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Nucleic Acids Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>138</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1945</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.09</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,770</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>126</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1409</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.18</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Genomics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>123</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1330</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Nanomedicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>NZ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>94</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1555</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€1,843</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1116</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17.17</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Plant Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>44</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>579</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.16</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Pathogens</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>42</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>781</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.60</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecular Cancer</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>540</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>298</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecules</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>300</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.71</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Computational Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>342</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.68</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>721</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28.84</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,900</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>DNA Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>542</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22.58</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$750</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>354</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.75</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biogeosciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.78</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>278</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Translational Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>238</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.87</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Marine Drugs</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>256</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Neuroinflammation</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>179</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.92</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$450</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Science and Technology of Advanced Materials</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.08</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>374</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,785</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Remote Sensing</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>125</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.36</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Cryosphere</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>112</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>128</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.80</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$200</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1930</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.50</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1077</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15907</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>#</sup>Page charges</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 3.</b> Non-APC journals in which Indian authors have published their papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Bulletin of The World Health Organization</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>515</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.56</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CA</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>173</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.36</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Environmental Health Perspectives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>188</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Machine Learning Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>118</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Materials Today</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20.25</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Earth System Science Data</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>29.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>60.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.67</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Folia Neuropathologica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>PL</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.50</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 4</b>. Mega journals used by Indian researchers</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS One</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2404</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17587</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7.32</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Scientific Reports</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>222</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1523</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£990</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>AIP Advances</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>196</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Springer Plus</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>170</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>235</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.38</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,290</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMJ Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>148</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>FEBS Open Bio</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4.10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PeerJ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$695</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biology Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>83</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9.22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,950</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3100</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20349</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published</a>
</p>
No publisherMuthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ScienceOpen ContentOpen Access2016-10-29T14:47:52ZBlog EntryAdopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication
<b>ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan was published on the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54925/">eprints@IISc repository</a> on October 28, 2016. The article was originally published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54925/1/NatlMedJIndia000-103373_025217.pdf">National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. Funding agencies in Austria, Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden and the UK, and the world’s leading scholarly publishers and associations have integrated their systems with ORCID registry. Among the BRICS countries, China and South Africa are adopting ORCID avidly. India is yet to make a beginning. If research councils and funding agencies in India require researchers to adopt ORCID and link ORCID iDs to funding as well as tracking performance, it will help them keep track of the workflow. Journal editors can also keep track of contributions made by different authors and work assigned to different reviewers through their ORCID iDs.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">INTRODUCTION</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Names in scholarly publishing are not all that simple. Names here mean both names of authors of papers and names of researchers referred to in those papers. They can cause much confusion to researchers, editors of journals, database producers, librarians and bibliometricists, but if we handle them correctly we can overcome most of the problems.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SCHOLARLY LITERATURE: DISAMBIGUATION OF NAMES AND AGGREGATING ONE’S WORKS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 1969, Eugene Garfield had expressed his dismay at the ‘needless ambiguity and confusion’ caused by authors who omit parts of their names and initials in their published works, and recommended that ‘scientists who are just now embarking on their careers would be well advised to measure the information content on their names as they appear in indexes such as Index Medicus, Physics Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and Science Citation Index.<a href="#ftn1">[1]</a> Some 12 years later, he wrote a detailed paper on the problems the scholarly world faces on account of mere names of people.<a href="#ftn2">[2]</a> He had reasons to worry more than anyone else; as the publisher of Science Citation Index, Current Contents and several other search and indexing tools for the world’s scientists and scholars, he had the unenviable task of processing millions of papers and author names not only in the byline of these papers but also in the references cited in them and rendering these author names accurately and attributing research papers to the right authors and institutions within a few weeks of publication.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">People hail from all parts of the world and from different cultures, each having its own peculiarities in naming their people so much so people from one culture may find names of another strange. Added to that are the ways names from different cultures and languages are transliterated into the Roman script. The names in most parts of the western world have three parts, viz. the first name (or given name), middle name and last name (also called the family name or surname). Often the last name may have more than one word, e.g. Duncan Smith, von Braun, van der Waals, de Solla Price. The prefix ‘van’ in some names may be spelt with a capital V, albeit rarely, e.g. Van de Graaff (of generator fame). In some cultures there are a very large number of people having the same surname. For example, close to 85% of China’s population have one of only 129 surnames, and three names in particular, viz. Wang, Li and Chen, are predominant among authors publishing currently. Also there are two Chinese surnames that can be spelt as Wang when publishing in English language, says Jane Qiu.<a href="#ftn3">[3]</a> Eight Chinese names transliterate in Roman script into Wei Wang and to avoid ambiguity in such cases journals may allow authors the option to include their names in their own language in parentheses after the transliterated name.<a href="#ftn4">[4]</a> Among Korean authors, Kim and Park account for a large percentage. In India there are many Agarwals, Guptas, Mukherjees, Raos, Sharmas and Singhs among publishing authors. While some Indians have two-part surnames, e.g. Ghosh Dastidar, Guha Thakurta and Sen Sharma, a few drop their initials altogether, e.g. Karmeshu.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some have hyphenated names, e.g. Noel-Baker, Szent-Györgyi, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, all three Nobel laureates. Curiously, Noel-Baker was born Philip Baker, but took Noel as his second surname on marriage to Irene Noel and subsequently started hyphenating his surname. But in the majority of cases hyphenated names are those of women who add their husband’s family name to their own, e.g. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Rita Levi-Montalcini, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for medicine, and Irene JoliotCurie, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. In a variation, Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, used her husband’s name ahead of her maiden name: Marie Curie, née Sklodowska. Some examples from among Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy: mathematician Rajinder Jeet HansGill, photochemist Krishna Kamini Rohatgi-Mukherjee, plant physiologist Renu Khanna-Chopra, condensed matter physicist Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta, development biologist Professor Priyambada Mohanty-Hejmadi, conservation biologist Professor Asha Chandola-Saklani, and neurophysiologist Professor Sushil Dua-Sharma. Many of these women scientists have published papers both under their maiden names and under their hyphenated family names.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Japan, married couples are required by a 1898 law, which is valid till date, to have the same surname, even though giving up one’s maiden name does disadvantage women in certain ways, including professionally.<a href="#ftn5">[5]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both retaining one’s maiden name and adopting the husband’s surname have their advantages. If one achieves a lot as a young person, one would be better off retaining the name that brought her the reputation in the first place. If one achieves much after taking her husband’s name, she will have much to lose if she ever gets a divorce. Better to hold on to one’s maiden name, says Kalpana Sharma.<a href="#ftn6">[6]</a> Some professionals, e.g. Bhatnagar award winner and fluid flows expert Professor Rama Govindarajan, has chosen this option. The situation is changing in India albeit slowly. A woman in Maharashtra can now use either her father’s or husband’s names in all official documents.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are also rare instances of people changing their names midway in their career, e.g. a woman electrical engineer of Indian origin working in the University of Waterloo has over the years published under three different names, viz. K.H. Sheshakamal, Shesha Jayaram, Shesha H. Jayaram (personal communication, Muthanna J, 23 Dec 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Missing middle name in the byline, spelling mistakes and problems faced in printing (or processing by computers) texts with diacritical marks can all lead to ambiguity. But with all these vagaries, it is important that contributions such as papers, patents, datasets and software are attributed to the right contributors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many researchers have recognized the problem of author name disambiguation. A Scopus search (on 28 June 2015) using the key words ‘author name’ and ‘disambiguation’ led to 86 papers in the 13-year period 2003–2015. Of these, 46 had the keywords in the title. Some of these papers were related to the problems faced by biomedical databases, e.g.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Author Name Disambiguation for PubMed, http://online library.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23063/pdf</li>
<li>Author Name Disambiguation in MEDLINE, http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805000</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From 2012 onwards PubMed uses a ranking algorithm for author searches to show more relevant results by disambiguating common author names.<a href="#ftn7">[7]</a> This helps pooling papers by the real A.K. Sen when there are papers by others with the same name and initials.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The name ambiguity problem can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), UK, says that our inability to associate valuable research outputs with their right authors ‘has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced. Ineffective reporting and sharing of research impact on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.’ According to her, ‘wider adoption and use of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)’ is the solution to this problem.<a href="#ftn8">[8]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">WHAT IS ORCID?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A person’s ORCID iD takes the form of a unique 16-digit number, e.g. 0000-0000-0000-0000. ORCID also gives each person a web page profile based on the iD, e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-00024398-4658, listing their iD number, name(s), institution(s) and publications. (Generally ORCID is used for the organization and the registry, and ORCID iD to denote the identifier itself.) Publications here go beyond research publications such as journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, reports, research techniques, software and inventions to include books, lectures/ speeches, websites, etc.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These profiles or records together comprise the ORCID registry. This registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers (http://orcid.org/node/47) is created and maintained by an open, non-profit, community-driven effort. ORCID iDs help distinguish individuals with common names, and they are not affected by changes in name or name order or alphabet in which the name is rendered. ORCID is researcher-controlled; the researcher decides what information is included in her ORCID record.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID iDs can be embedded in research workflows. If included by the publisher or funding agency, they are part of the metadata associated with scholarly works and grants. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as DOIs and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But ORCID is not the first such attempt to associate unambiguously research papers (and other output such as datasets and software) with the right authors. Fenner has listed a number of them.<a href="#ftn9">[9]</a> Some of these cover only specific fields. Some are country specific. Some are proprietary. Some are linked to specific databases while others want to cover a wide area of science and scholarship. Fenner’s list includes RePEc Author (set up by Thomas Krichel in 1999), LATTES (an information platform mandatory for researchers in Brazil, set up by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development or CNPq, in 1999), VIAF (set up by OCLC in 2003), NARCIS (set up in 2004 by the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands and mandatory for all researchers in the Netherlands), arXiv Author ID (set up in 2005 by Cornell University for researchers in physics and related disciplines), Scopus Author ID (set up in 2006 by Elsevier), Names Project Mimas (set up in 2007 by the British Library for authors and institutions in all academic disciplines), Researcher ID (set up in 2008 by Thomson Reuters) and Author Claim (set up by Thomas Krichel in 2008).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If there are many author identity services already available, why add ORCID, one may ask. The other services are not truly interoperable, whereas ORCID allows linkage to other identifiers such as Scopus ID and Researcher ID. ORCID is the only service trying to associate its identifier with other existing author identifiers, with more than publications, and to collaborate across the community to embed it at the time that a work is ‘released’ by a researcher. Also, most other services are linked to a single bibliographic database (e.g. Researcher ID is linked to Web of Science).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">‘Thus, since none of the available author identifier services looked like the solution to the name ambiguity problem, the ORCID initiative was started in late 2009 and formed as a nonprofit organization in August 2010.’<a href="#ftn10">[10]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why should a researcher have an ORCID iD?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This section draws on information mainly from private communication with the Executive Director and other staff of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID and the Library Guide of the University of Southampton.<a href="#ftn11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It is for life, irrespective of where one chooses to live and work. Connections between the ORCID registry and other databases help one to keep one’s research profile updated and to make it visible worldwide. Authors with an ORCID iD can have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record.<a href="#ftn12">[12]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Often researchers waste much time in filling forms that require address, employment history, collaborator names, affiliation, etc. when applying for jobs, awards, academy fellowships or grants or submitting manuscripts to journals. One can have all such information in one’s ORCID profile and draw upon it at short notice. Researchers can save much of their productive time by linking their ORCID iDs to the grants or manuscript processing systems.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the Caltech Library Guide points out, as one collaborates across disciplines, institutions and borders, one ‘must interact with an increasing number and diversity of research information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming, and often frustrating’ (http://libguides.caltech.edu/orcid).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To obtain the list of publications of a researcher from a database such as Web of Science, one would need to give the name (with all variants), research domains and names of organizations (with all their variants) associated with the author. With all that, one may not get the full list. But if one uses the researcher’s ORCID iD in the identifier field, the search will give the correct list instantaneously.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anstey, editor of the 125-year-old British Journal of Dermatology, has explained lucidly why researchers, editors and funders should embrace ORCID and how through ORCID iDs one could connect to websites such as Web of Science, figshare, Impact story and others.<a href="#ftn13">[13]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">How do researchers get an ORCID iD?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists, researchers, teachers, students, clinicians, scholars, authors and anyone at all, contributing to scholarly outputs from anywhere in the world can sign up for a free ORCID iD through the ORCID website (https://orcid.org/register). It is also possible to create an ID at other websites that are integrated with ORCID, for example manuscript submission websites of journals. About 5000 journals, including those published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press, use ScholarOne developed by Thomson Reuters and whenever one submits a paper to these journals one is asked to provide an ORCID iD. And if you do not have one you can create it through the publisher’s Application Program Interface (API). Claiming an ORCID iD is not at all difficult. After claiming, researchers can associate the ORCID iDs with their education and employment details and details related to collaborators, publications and outputs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Including one’s publications is simple. One can import bibliographic details of one’s publications having unique identifiers (e.g. DOI, ISBN) from the list of databases integrated with ORCID registry. The list includes Scopus, Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, Crossref Metadata Search, Redalyc, etc.<a href="#ftn14">[14]</a>One can just log in to ORCID and choose the database from which one wants to import bibliographic data. For publications that are not indexed by the databases integrated with ORCID, one can use the template provided by ORCID to manually add details. Also ORCID has created a tool by which one can import bibliographic data from BibTeX (.bib) files into one’s ORCID record, including files exported from Google Scholar and other popular reference management tools.<a href="#ftn15">[15]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Is one’s ORCID private information?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, one can choose which information to be assigned as public or private in one’s record except the actual iDs assigned by ORCID that are designed to be publicly available. Once researchers have claimed their ORCID iD, the settings are in their sole control. ORCID has a privacy selector option that lets one set the privacy level of all new works, education, employment and funding items. Usually, everyone makes the list of publications public.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID features</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID offers its essential features for free to individual researchers and organizations across the world. Researchers would be able to automatically update their ORCID record with links to published manuscripts in which they have included their ORCID iD. However, ORCID charges membership fees from organizations such as publishers, funders, and academic and research institutions, in order to sustain the registry and the mission to achieve name disambiguation, and in return offers them premium API services and personalized technical support. Also, when many organizations join as a consortium, they benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization.<a href="#ftn16">[16]</a> Indeed, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Director John Willinsky considers ORCID ‘an important emerging technology with opportunities to help shape and improve the open access publishing landscape worldwide’.<a href="#ftn17">[17]</a>Organizations can integrate ORCID iDs into research management systems and workflows using the free public API. ORCID releases a public data file annually under Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication) to support broad access to data that are made public by individual researchers through their ORCID records. The file contains the public information associated with each user’s ORCID record. Each record is included as a separate file in both JSON and XML formats (http://orcid.org/content/ orcid-public-data-file-2014).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID helps institutions track one’s work, compile information for university-level reporting (including total funding received by its scholars), and more efficiently manage information on faculty profiles. By eliminating redundancies and automating some reporting functions, ORCID will be especially helpful in reducing time and monies spent on other assessment activities such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.<a href="#ftn18">[18]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Feedback from a pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organizations that have adopted ORCID were likely to see ‘measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation—especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders— with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.’<a href="#ftn19">[19]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jan Jan Jan Jan</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2013 2014 2015 2016</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Year</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 1. Growth of ORCID iDs (http://support.orcid.org/ knowledgebase/articles/150557-number-of-orcid-ids)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Funders, 5%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Associations, 7%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Repositories,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">10%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Publishers,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">13%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Research institutes,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">65%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 2. Sectoral distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Middle East and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Africa, 2% South America, 1%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Australasia, 6%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Asia, 8%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">North Europe, 53%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">America,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">30%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 3. Geographical distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Uptake of ORCID</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The number of live ORCID iDs grew rapidly from late 2012 (Fig. 1) and as of 29 July 2016, it exceeded 2.43 million. These are currently used by more than 200 research and workflow platforms at academic and other research institutions, at funding agencies and at publishers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As of mid-December 2015, more than 350 organizations have opted for ORCID’s member services and are at different stages of integrating ORCID iDs into their systems and workflows (Miyairi N, personal communication, 18 Dec 2015). As of 30 September 2015, 65% of ORCID members were universities (Fig. 2) spread all over the globe (Fig. 3). A representative list of different categories of members is provided in Box 1. The large European contingent is a result of three national consortia. These proportions are expected to be fluid over the next couple of years as more consortia are formed and join ORCID (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recognizing that publishers can promote systems that would provide support to researchers and to science, commencing January 2016, eight publishers will be requiring the use of ORCID iDs by corresponding authors during the publication process. These include the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS; publishers of Science), American Geophysical Union</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(AGU), eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, the Public Library of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Box 1. Uptake of ORCID </b>Among the long list of members of ORCID are:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Publishers: </b>AIP Publishing, Elsevier, National Academy of Sciences (USA), Oxford University Press, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Science Open, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Associations: </b>American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Astronomical Society, American Chemical Society, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, American Society of Microbiology, American Society of Civil Engineers, Association of Computing Machinery, Electrochemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), IOP, Modern Language Association, Royal Society of Chemistry</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Universities: </b>Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Cornell University, Lund University, Stockholm University, City University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, CINECA, Italy’s consortium of 70 universities and four research institutes</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Academies: </b>African Academy of Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Royal Society</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Funding agencies: </b>National Institutes of Health (USA), Department of Energy (USA), Wellcome Trust (UK), National Institute for Health Research (UK), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Intergovernmental bodies: </b>CABI, CERN, International Food Policy Research Institute, International Water Management Institute</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Libraries: </b>British Library, Royal Library – Denmark</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Repositories: </b>Social Science Research Network (SSRN) For the full list of members, see http://orcid.org/about/ community/members</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Science (PLoS), and the Royal Society. More than 3000 journals are already collecting ORCID iDs from corresponding authors. Currently about 75% of all registrations are through journal accounts.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Similarly, six consortia too will require the use of ORCID iDs. These are: Jisc (50 universities and research councils, UK), Italy/ ANVUR (70+ universities and research institutes), Australia, via the Australian Access Federation (40 universities, research institutes, and Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council funders), and three library consortia in the US: Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) consisting of 15 universities in the US midwest, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), a consortium of 35 research libraries located in the central and western US, and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) comprising 29 core member academic research libraries and approximately 90 affiliate member academic and/or research libraries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jisc negotiated an ORCID consortium through which universities would benefit from premium ORCID membership at significantly reduced costs. The official launch event for the consortium took place at Imperial College in late September 2015 with the participation of more than 50 UK universities, ORCID, Jisc, GuildHE, RCUK and Current Research Information System (CRIS) vendors.<a href="#ftn20">[20]</a>Since August 2015, the Wellcome Trust has required all lead applicants for grants to provide an ORCID iD.<a href="#ftn21">[21]</a>From 23 September 2015, an ORCID iD has become mandatory for all new National Institute of Health Research (NIHR, UK) personal award applications.<a href="#ftn22">[22]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Italy has implemented ORCID on a national scale, and has signed a three-year consortium membership agreement with ORCID. Under the auspices of ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems) and CRUI (the Conference of Italian University Rectors), 70 universities and four research centres initially participate in the consortium (Cineca). ANVUR made ORCID mandatory in order to participate in the National Assessment from November 2015.<a href="#ftn23">[23]</a>The Italians expect that at least 80% of Italian researchers will have an ORCID iD, with links to their research output by the end of 2016.<a href="#ftn23">[23]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is now included in the Danish National Open Access Strategy and the National Research Data Strategy. The Danish Council for Independent Research recommends, and the Novo Nordisk foundation requires an ORCID iD in funding applications. Currently DEFF, a library collaboration funded by several ministries, is sponsoring a national ORCID implementation project with project partners including seven of the eight Danish universities, a consortium of all Danish university colleges and a consortium of research institutions under the Ministry of Culture.<a href="#ftn24">[24]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Australia, according to Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania, ‘there is an active ORCID activity, and it has been adopted (or recommended) for universal application, but this has not yet reached the status of a mandate by government’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The Australian ORCID Consortium was launched on 1 January 2016 with 38 organizations (http:// aaf.edu.au/orcid/). The Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales, and Queensland, Macquarie University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, La Trobe University and Charles Darwin University and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are all members of ORCID. ORCID Working Group of Australia comprising research councils and associations has developed a consortium model for implementing ORCID iDs across the Australian research sector.<a href="#ftn25">[25]</a>Funding agencies are also keen to partner with ORCID. Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) mandated the use of ORCID in 2013. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) asks that grantees use ORCID iDs to manage information in their ScienCV system.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many other funding agencies across the world have also adopted ORCID:<a href="#ftn26">[26]</a></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The Swedish Research Council (SRC) mandated the use of ORCID in Spring 2015.</li>
<li>Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has mandated the use of ORCID starting in 2016.</li>
<li>European Commission H2020 Grantee Guidelines recommend that contributors be uniquely identifiable through identifiers which are persistent, non-proprietary, open and interoperable (e.g. through leveraging existing sustainable initiatives such as ORCID).<a href="#ftn27">[27]</a></li>
<li>Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) will mandate the use of ORCID in the next funding cycle.</li>
<li>Autism Speaks, a US-based awareness, advocacy and funding body, requires all investigators and mentors to register with ORCID to obtain a unique iD. This enables Autism Speaks to update one’s funding record and to monitor one’s research progress. Autism Speaks will not consider applications without ORCID accounts for the key personnel.<a href="#ftn28">[28]</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Publishing platforms such as Aries Editorial Manager, eJournal Press, and ScholarOne have already built-in ORCID support so authors publishing in those journals can create their ORCID iDs through them. PKP is working on developing modules for the Open Journal Systems used by more than 8600 journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Research information systems such as Elements, Plum Analytics, PURE, SmartSimple, InfoEd, University Office and Research Master, and the open access repository platforms DSpace, Dryad, EPrints, and VIVO have also built-in ORCID support.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Towards the end of 2015, Altmetrics integrated ORCID with its Explorer apps, and now one can search for Altmetric attention data for all the research outputs associated with one’s ORCID profile and thus scholars can get credit for all their research contributions, including journal articles and participation in social media.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SUPPORT TO ORCID</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Right from the beginning, ORCID’s aim was to become completely self-sustaining based on member fees. However, they did have some sponsors and they did take some loans from their own members/stakeholders (http://orcid.org/about/community/ sponsors).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In September 2011, ORCID received an NSF Eager grant of US$ 200 000 via the University of Chicago.<a href="#ftn29">[29]</a> The APIs developed with this funding and released in November 2011 could be used by third parties to integrate grant, manuscript or personnel tracking systems with ORCID. This project led to the formal launch of ORCID and its website (http://orcid.org). The philosophy and evolution of ORCID were disseminated through journals such as Nature and EduCAUSE, outreach meetings and social media channels such as twitter.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Seeing its value, a few philanthropic foundations came forward to support ORCID. An award by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to ORCID funded the pilot integration of ORCID identifiers by a group of universities and science and social science professional associations, such as Purdue University and the Society of Neurosciences. This programme supported the collaborative elicitation and documentation of ‘use cases’ and open source code, and established a collaborative venue for disseminating best practices. All projects were completed in December 2014. Partnering institutions have shared integration source code and lessons learnt with the ORCID community through ORCID’s GitHub open source repository and online ‘use cases’, and now serve as reference sites for organizations planning similar integrations.<a href="#ftn30">[30]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April 2015, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded US$ 3 million to ORCID to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support international adoption and technical integration.<a href="#ftn31">[31]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID IN EMERGING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The National Science Library (NSL) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has taken the lead in China and is taking steps to adopt ORCID nationwide.<a href="#ftn32">[32]</a> China fully recognizes the importance of the unique author identifiers, especially so for Chinese authors and the NSL sees the value in an international, open, and researcherdriven person identifier. Scientists in China are willing to work with ORCID to promote it in CAS and in the country. To this purpose, the NSL is enlisting cooperation from Web of Science, the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), CAS Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) Journal Association, University STM Journal Association, and a number of major research and academic libraries. NSL has developed the iAuthor platform, as an easy Chinese front gate to register for an ORCID identifier and to interoperate with Chinese journals, CSCD and others. The NSL iAuthor service was launched in October 2014.<a href="#ftn32">[32]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is yet to pick up in India. As of 15 September 2015, more than 1.5 million ORCID iDs have been assigned. Of these, 14 439 have been registered with an email address that ends in ‘.in’ and 17 048 records where the country is set to India (email communication from ORCID, 29 Jun 2015). That comes to <1.14%. Many authors may be using web mail addresses and we will not be able to identify them as Indian researchers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is just starting in Latin America, according to Dominique Babini, Open Access Program Coordinator at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) (personal communication, 1 Jan 2016). According to Abel Packer, Director of SciELO, ‘ORCID is not yet widely adopted in LA. There is an increasing awareness of it and its role and importance. But, only a few institutions adopted it as an obligatory policy to their affiliates’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). Less than 10% of the authors fill the ORCID field in the submission form in the online manuscript submission/processing services used by SciELO Brazil. But, it will be adopted if funding agencies and journals make it mandatory on their submission systems. A barrier to its wide adoption is that researchers have many options to manage their profiles (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The first to join ORCID were:<a href="#ftn33">[33]</a> Redalyc, the University of the State of Mexico’s open access platform; CONCYTEC – National Council of Science and Technology in Peru; and UNESP (Sao Paulo State University) in Brazil.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Interest in ORCID has been growing in Africa for some time. In South Africa alone over 3500 researchers have registered and three universities, viz. University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science are ORCID members, as is the National Research Foundation. In all of Africa, there are >7000 registered researchers mostly from South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunis, Ghana, Kenya and Botswana. The cities in Africa that lead in ORCID use are Cairo, Tunis, Lagos, Algiers, Giza, Cape Town, Pretoria and Alexandria.<a href="#ftn34">[34]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the Asia–Pacific region there were 37 members of ORCID<a href="#ftn35">[35]</a>as of August 2015, including 13 in Australia, 3 in New Zealand, 6 in Hong Kong, 5 in Taiwan and 4 in Japan. There is one in India—a multinational company providing editing and publishing services—with offices in many countries and does not really qualify to be known exclusively as an Indian entity.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SOME CONCERNS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some are critical of ORCID. One criticism is that ORCID is not open access and it appears to be a complicated, expensive, proprietary and monopolistic system, and the participation of several commercial publishers makes it a Trojan horse which could eventually lead to strengthening the stranglehold of the publishing industry over scholarly communication. We were alerted to this concern by Thomas Krichel (personal communication, 6 Jul 2015). Krichel ignores the fact that without the participation of large bibliographic databases, ORCID cannot provide the service effectively. Bringing on board Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), etc. is not only a clever move but is an absolute necessity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many others do not agree with this view. Bilder et al.<a href="#ftn16">[16]</a> believe that ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization. Also, as Paglione<a href="#ftn36">[36]</a> has put it: ‘One of the core principles of ORCID is that all software we develop will be publicly released under an open source software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. In addition to transparency, releasing our code will improve interoperability and integration with external services, lead to more robust code because more individuals are auditing and testing it, and, with an extended developer community, enable faster code iteration and evolution.’ Haak has also listed the open features of ORCID, viz. it provides free, barrier-free access, it is democratic and transparent, and it is open access.<a href="#ftn37">[37]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another concern is: what if unscrupulous individuals claim authorship on papers that are not theirs, if the ORCID authorship has not been previously claimed by the true author? Is there any safeguard to prevent such a possibility? Can ORCID help prevent fraudulent reviewing?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the early days, it is possible for someone to claim authorship of papers written by others. But, according to Laure Haak (personal communication, 10 Dec 2015), ‘ORCID is a public resource, and if someone claims erroneously this can be monitored by the community and reported and addressed using ORCID’s dispute procedures (see http://orcid.org/orcid-dispute-procedures). As universities and other employers of researchers are using ORCID to assert affiliation (and funders are asserting awardees also using ORCID), there becomes built a web of trusted data about an individual’s research activities, all with researcher consent.’ Also, as more and more publishers receive ORCID iDs of authors as part of the metadata when authors submit papers, and as Crossref updates the ORCID records, it will reduce unethical claims.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As far as peer-review fraud is concerned, there are attempts to counter it using ORCID.<a href="#ftn38">[38]</a> But, these are social problems and technical solutions are not the answer. The fight between good and evil is often a see-saw. However, as the uptake of ORCID gains momentum it will become difficult for such fraudsters to lay claim on others’ works.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are some reservations though about the costs involved in becoming a member of ORCID. Here is what J.K. Vijayakumar of King Abdullah University, Saudi Arabia, told us: ‘if an institution wants to use ORCID to integrate with their repository, research management systems, etc., the institution needs to become a member (the fees are high and one has to pay even more if ORCID integration is required for more than one system). This needs to be debated and ORCID should bring down the membership fee according to income of the country, so that developing nations can also take part’ (personal communication, 11 Jul 2015). This seems to be a good suggestion. In fact, a member can use one member API credential in many systems. ORCID also provides a substantial discount for small organizations (<US$ 200 000). In addition, affordability is partly why the consortium member model was launched. Haak says: ‘We continue to evaluate membership fees and are starting an initiative for adoption in developing countries in 2016’ (personal communication, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What we are concerned more is the fact that although the number of live ORCID iDs exceed 2.43 million (as of 29 July 2016), only about 337 000 of them have at least one work (https://orcid.org/statistics). Only about one in five iDs is actually being used.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">DISCUSSION</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The value of ORCID is evident even in its first 5 years. As Jonathon Kram of the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit at Wellcome Trust says, ‘the ability to uniquely identify contributors is a deceptively simple concept which, if realized, could enable forms of real-time understanding of scientific research that up to now have been extremely costly (if not impossible).’<a href="#ftn39">[39]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the Modern Language Association (MLA) enabled in June 2015 retroactive assigning of ORCID iDs to the nearly two million records in its International Bibliography, which holds the key to language and literary scholarship for more than 90 years, it met an especially critical need in the humanities and arts, where publication types and venues are so diverse, needing more work to be done to create clarity and connect the parts than in the sciences. It would also bring increased recognition and validation of humanities scholarship.<a href="#ftn40">[40]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 2012, concerned by the lack of quality, comprehensive data about biomedical researchers, the US NIH recommended the development of a simple, comprehensive tracking system for trainees, and implemented a researcher profile system called the Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae (SciENcv), and encouraged the adoption of unique, persistent ORCID identifiers for researchers.<a href="#ftn41">[41]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID, along with open access and open educational resources, is integral to the open knowledge movement. It supports ‘the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature’.<a href="#ftn42">[42]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Such benefits of ORCID adoption will be fully realized only if ORCID iDs are adopted widely across the research community, and if ORCID iDs are integrated within systems of higher educational institutions, funders and publishers.<a href="#ftn43">[43]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If research councils such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and funding agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) mandate ORCID iDs for all researchers in all their laboratories and for all applicants for grants, India can make quick progress. Vice chancellors of universities, directors of research institutions, and the governing boards of academies and professional associations and societies could insist on all researchers in their respective institutions registering for an ORCID iD. Scholarly journals published by the science academies, CSIR-NISCAIR, ICAR, ICMR, professional associations, etc. could mandate inclusion of ORCID iDs by all authors at the time of submitting manuscripts. It would help immensely if India were to adopt a manpower tracking system based on ORCID in all areas of science, technology and innovation, similar to that used by NIH.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India has done reasonably well in the area of open educational resources (OER). In particular, the National Programme of Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL) executed by a consortium of IITs and Indian Institute of Science is highly regarded and is used well. But it took several years of voluntary effort before green open access became acceptable to a small percent of Indian researchers and research institutions, long after it became standard practice in many countries. We hope this time around things will move quickly and many researchers and institutions will adopt ORCID soon.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are grateful to Dr L.L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Nobuko Miyairi and Alainna Wrigley of ORCID, Rachel Bruce of Jisc, Thomas Krichel of GESIS and RePEc, Peter Suber of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Martin Fenner of DataCite, Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dominique Babini of CLACSO, Abel Packer of SciELO, for answering our questions and providing some valuable information. We are indebted to Subbiah Gunasekaran of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, for valuable discussion and for alerting us to some important developments. The comments of two referees were very helpful in rewriting and improving the original text.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn21">[21] </a>Wellcome Trust. Who are you? Recognising researchers with ORCID identifiers, 30 Jun 2015. Available at http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/06/30/who-are-yourecognising-researchers-with-orcid-identifiers/ (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn22">[22] </a>National Institute for Health Research. NIHR begins roll out of mandatory ORCID iD requirement, 23 September 2015. Available at nihr.ac.uk/newsroom/featurednews/nihr-begins-roll-out-of-mandatory-orcid-id-requirement/3024 (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn23">[23] </a>Meadows A. Italy launches national ORCID implementation, 22 June 2015. Available at http://orcid.org/blog/2015/06/19/italy-launches-national-orcid-implementation (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn24">[24] </a>Ferguson N. Research identifiers: National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation, July 2015. Available at https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6181/1/KEreport-national-approaches-to-ORCID-and-ISNI.pdf (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn25">[25] </a>Meadows A. Australian ORCID consortium officially launched. 16 February 2016. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2016/02/19/australian-orcid-consortiumofficially-launched (accessed on 20 Feb 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn26">[26] </a>Haak L. Adoption and use by the research community: Focus on funders. Available at http://slideshare.net/ORCIDslides/orcid_adoption_and_use (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn27">[27] </a>European Commission. Directorate General for Research & Innovation. Guidelines on open access to scientific publications and research data in Horizon 2020: Version 1.0. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/ h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn28">[28] </a>Autism Speaks. Policy on ORCID integration with Autism Speaks science grants system, Available at autismspeaks.org/science/policy-statements/policyORCID-integration-autism-speaks-science-grants-system (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn29">[29] </a>Ratner H. ORCID: Getting to launch. 2012. Available at slideshare.net/ ORCIDSlides/2-ratner-orcid-getting-to-launch-v5 (slide No. 22) (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn30">[30] </a>Adoption and integration program. Available at http://orcid.org/content/ adoption-and-integration-program (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn31">[31] </a>ORCID receives $3 million grant to build international engagement. Available at http://helmsleytrust.org/news/orcid-receives-3-million-grant-build-internationalengagement (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn32">[32] </a>Haak L. ORCID Blog. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2014/12/03/iauthor-andorcid-supporting-international-identifiers-chinese-researchers-national (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn33">[33] </a>Pessoa L. ORCID Blog. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2015/08/20/orcidgrowing-latin-america (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn34">[34] </a>Buys M. ORCID in Southern Africa. 2015. Available at http://orcid.org/blog/2015/ 05/14/orcid-research-management-south-africa (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn35">[35] </a>Miyairi N. ORCID: Building academic trust. Panel discussion on reputation management and research integrity, STM Publishing and China Industry Day, Beijing, 25 August 2015. Available at stm-assoc.org/ 2015_08_25_STM_CAST_Miyairi_ORCID_Industry_Day.pdf (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn36">[36] </a>Paglione L. ORCID Blog. Available at http://orcid.org/blog/2013/02/21/orcidopen-source (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn37">[37] </a>Haak L. ORCID Blog. Available at http://orcid.org/content/o-orcid (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn38">[38] </a>Ferguson C, Marcus A, Oransky I. Publishing: The peer-review scam. Nature 2014;515:480–2.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn39">[39] </a>Kram J. ORCID Blog. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2015/06/26/host-reasonswhy-funders-should-be-investing-orcid-%E2%80%A6 (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn40">[40] </a>Taylor LN. MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography launches ORCID App. 2015 Available at http://laurientaylor.org/2015/06/19/news-mlamodern-language-association-international-bibliography-launches-orcid-app/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn41">[41] </a>Schaffer W. The adoption of ORCID identifiers by funding organizations. Available at slideshare.net/ORCIDSlides/20140423-webinar-schaffer (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn42">[42] </a>Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Metrics cannot replace peer review in the next REF. Available at hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2015/ Name,104464,en.html (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a name="ftn43">[43] </a>Research Councils UK (RCUK) Administrator. We’re now a member of ORCID. Available at http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2015/12/03/were-now-a-member-of-orcid/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication</a>
</p>
No publisherSubbiah Arunachalam and Muthu MadhanOpen Educational ResourcesOpennessOpen ResearchOpen Access2016-10-28T16:28:49ZBlog EntryHow Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias
<b>Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.
</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was published by <a class="external-link" href="https://opensource.com/life/16/10/open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias">Opensource.com</a> on October 24, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Indian-language Wikipedias and open access</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most commonly spoken Indian languages have had Wikipedia projects for almost a decade. Languages like <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/" target="_blank">Konkani</a> and <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/08/24/digest-tulu-wikipedia/" target="_blank">Tulu</a> are new entrants in the Wikipedia family, and currently there are <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/List_of_Indian_language_wiki_projects" target="_blank">23 Indian language Wikipedias</a>. One example of high-quality open access content is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Open_Textbook_of_Medicine" target="_blank">Open Textbook of Medicine</a>, an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, which was created by a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Members" target="_blank">group of dedicated volunteer</a> medical professionals that happen to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high-quality, open content like this.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To help fuel the growth of Wikipedia and its various projects, such as the Indian-language Wikipedias, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_community" target="_blank">Wikipedia community</a> has created an ecosystem with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedia_chapters" target="_blank">Wikimedia chapters</a> and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates" target="_blank">other affiliates</a>, which are run by both volunteers and paid staff from the <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/" target="_blank">Wikimedia Foundation</a>, an organization responsible for fundraising, technical, and community support. In India, <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/" target="_blank">Wikimedia India</a>, the Centre for Internet and Society’s <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K" target="_blank">Access to Knowledge program</a> (CIS-A2K), and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Wikimedians" target="_blank">Punjabi Wikimedians</a> are three such official affiliates working on catalyzing the growth of the content and the communities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Whereas Wikimedia India focuses on expanding all the Indian-languages content, Punjabi Wikimedians focus on Punjabi language content (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), and CIS-A2K focuses on five languages: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian-language Wikipedia projects can only grow with the help of volunteers editing their own language Wikipedias and adding missing information from a reliable sources, which is where open access content can help.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Open in action</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The 2016 International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30, 2016. The theme this year is <a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2016-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-in-action" target="_blank">Open in Action</a>. The announcement explains, "International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year's theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting preprints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian contributors show the spirit of Open in Action as they help add content to the various Indian-languages Wikipedias. They depend on open access to research and other publications to help millions of people, including those living in rural areas, who are joining us online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license"> </a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpen Access2016-10-25T01:39:42ZBlog EntryWhat Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india
<b>The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.</b>
<p>This was published by <a class="external-link" href="https://yourstory.com/2016/10/indian-language-wikipedia/">Your Story</a> on October 20, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<h3>State of Indian languages on the internet</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind <a href="https://blog.smc.org.in/policy-brief-mobile-indian-lang/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mentioned</a> that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/price-war-idea-vodafone-and-bharti-airtel-to-slash-tariffs-to-compete-with-reliance-jio/articleshow/53971250.cms" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">declining data charges</a> because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in <a href="http://qz.com/56259/language-is-the-key-to-winning-indias-mobile-market/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rural India</a> is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over <a href="https://yourstory.com/2015/11/news-aggregators-vernacular/" target="_blank">90 percent of the users</a> being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Why open access is important for Indian languages?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open access</a>, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-access-publishing-science-paywall-immoral" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paywalled</a>, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Creative Commons licenses</a> and <a href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">several other licenses</a> that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/List_of_Indian_language_wiki_projects" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">23 Indian language Wikipedias</a>, including newest entrants like <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Konkani</a> and <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/08/24/digest-tulu-wikipedia/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tulu</a>. That said, these projects are growing with more and more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_encyclopedia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">encyclopedic content</a> written with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">neutral point of view</a>, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Open_Textbook_of_Medicine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">people’s encyclopedia</a> and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Open_Textbook_of_Medicine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Textbook of Medicine</a> ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Members" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">group of dedicated volunteer</a> medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.in/subhashish-panigrahi-/8-challenges-in-growing-indian-language-wikipedias/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">list of challenges</a> to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_community" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikipedia community</a> has created an ecosystem by having several <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedia_chapters" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia chapters</a> and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">other affiliates</a> that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia Foundation</a>, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia India</a>, Centre for Internet and Society’s <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Access to Knowledge program</a> (CIS-A2K) and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Wikimedians" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Punjabi Wikimedians</a> are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the <a href="http://openaccessweek.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Access Week</a>—a week dedicated for promoting <a href="https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-access" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Access</a> globally—around the corner with “<a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2016-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-in-action" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open in Action</a>” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpen Access2016-10-22T04:12:40ZBlog EntryWhy Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up
<b>In an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://thewire.in/72286/open-access-academic-publishing/">published in the Wire</a> on October 12, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p><span>“…</span><i><span>if you are a member of the knowledge elite, then there is free access, but for the rest of the world, not so much … Publisher restrictions do not achieve the objective of enlightenment, but rather the reality of ‘elite-nment.” </span></i><span>Lawrence Lessig</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In 2011, </span><span>speaking impassionately</span> <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/1345337" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="to an audience at CERN"><span>to an audience at CERN</span></a><span> – one of the world’s largest institutions for nuclear physics research, headquartered in Geneva – Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a political activist, highlighted the crisis of access to scientific scholarship. Indeed, over the last six decades, public access to scholarly works has diminished. Works that can be freely searched and read represent only a sliver of the entire wealth of human knowledge. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>With the emergence of academic journals in the seventeenth century, the practice of exchanging manuscripts for review and comments became popular, leading to the establishment of the peer-review system. In fact, until the eighteenth century, there existed a strong belief in the intellectual commons and traditions of sharing knowledge between scholars. These traditions dated back to scholarship flourishing in ancient Greece. Open access was the default, and not the exception to the norm.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, by the nineteenth century, there occurred a game-changing shift in the approach to knowledge production. It was theorised that the commons approach was inefficient and that knowledge needed to be exclusively owned to spur further production. This was in line with the incentive theory of copyright law, which was an added justification to the commoditisation of knowledge. In such circumstances, all scholarly works increasingly came to be fortified within the expensive walls of academic journals. Journals left no stone unturned to capitalise on scholars vying to get published in prestigious titles (<i>Nature</i>, <i>Lancet</i>, <i>Cell</i>, etc.).</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The business model rarely rewarded authors or peer reviewers. On the contrary, some journals required authors to pay a considerable fee to publish their work. Subscription charges to such research, a large part of which was funded by the government (i.e. taxpayers), hit the roof and could be afforded only by elite institutions. And with the advent of the digital age, the fortresses moved online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, before the internet arrived, there had been efforts to counter the entrenchment of scholarly works. They were mostly in the nature of social movements, located broadly within the philosophical umbrella of openness. The nineties marked a significant increase in the modes of access, through devices connected to the internet. Previously a fringe movement, openness was now entering the realms of publishing, software, standards development, education and data. It manifested in Linux, Wikipedia, open web standards, open educational resources, open government data, Creative Commons and, particularly, open access publishing. Just last month, a UN report called for open access to research to improve public health. </span></span></p>
<p><span>Open access publishing was a breakaway from the traditional scholarly publishing model. It offered a different model of </span><i><span>online</span></i><span> research publication informed by the principles of transparency, free access and unrestricted access. </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="Three key definitions"><span>Three key definitions</span></a><span> exist, and the </span><span>Budapest Open Access Initiative</span><span> (2002) provides <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="a good overview">a good overview</a> of it:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; "><span><span>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.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, open access is </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/writing/jbiol.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="compatible"><span>compatible</span></a><span> with </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#copyright" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="copyright"><span>copyright</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#peerreview" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="peer review"><span>peer review</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#journals" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="revenue"><span>revenue</span></a><span> (even profit), print, preservation, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322577" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="prestige"><span>prestige</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4552042" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="quality"><span>quality</span></a><span>, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature</span><span> (as Peter Suber </span><span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="wrote">wrote</a> in</span><span> 2004). The model broadly offers two routes: gold and green. Gold open access involves publication in an open access journal. The journal provides for peer-review, retention of copyright by the author and in most cases requires author-side fees. Green open access involves publishing a work in an online repository, with/without peer-review. The models have several variations, and adoption often depends on their suitability for a particular discipline. Many </span><span>institutions <a href="http://sparcopen.org/coapi/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="now have">now have</a> an</span> <span>Open Access Mandate policy</span><span>. </span></p>
<h3><span>Latest challenges to open access publishing</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>For a 15-year-old movement (formally), open access publishing is making a serious dent in the market for scholarly publications. It has emerged as a formidable competitor to the traditional model. How else do you explain the </span><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="unfortunate acquisition"><span>unfortunate acquisition</span></a><span> of SSRN –</span><span> one of the largest online open access repositories – by the largest publisher of academic journals, Elsevier, earlier this year? Where, within a few days of Elsevier gaining control, </span><span>users began to notice</span> <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="problematic takedowns"><span>problematic takedowns</span></a><span> of articles on SSRN.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The acquisition was a severe blow to open access publishing. To be fair, there remain certain issues intrinsic to open access publishing models that need urgent resolution. For instance, while some open access journals provide high quality services at levels comparable to that of paywalled journals, a large majority has been unable to reach reasonable standards of publication.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, as it has emerged lately, many are yet to crack the business model while a few are driven by malicious attempts to con authors. Most commercial open access publishers have resorted to a system of levying from the authors an article-processing charge (APC). These publishers include large players such as the <i>Public Library of Science</i> journals and BioMed Central. APCs are justified as necessary costs for publication. Thus, sometimes they are reasonably applied only to peer-reviewed submissions. However, sometimes they are blatantly misused by publishers who quote exorbitant APCs. As a result, APCs have become a serious concern for the academic community, with the reentry of an undesirable price barrier which has shifted the burden from the reader to the author.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In one noteworthy development, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint against the OMICS group for deceiving authors and misrepresenting its editorial quality. The OMICS group has its roots in Hyderabad and runs a multitude of open access journals. It carried a notorious reputation for soliciting articles profusely, and then holding the articles hostage unless the authors paid hefty fees for their publication. It apparently charged the fees for conducting peer-review, which as this </span><span>harrowing</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="account"><span>account</span></a><span> of an author</span><span> reveals, was an utter sham. It also seems that the group targeted unsuspecting scholars from developing countries, where there was a higher concentration of early-career researchers eager to get their works published.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Holding articles hostage and releasing unchecked versions must have already caused irreparable damage to several researchers’ reputations. In this day of web-caching and -indexing facilities, one wonders if the researchers will ever be able to obliterate linkages to their unchecked manuscripts. Further, in the long run, this phenomenon will ruin or suppress promising careers – especially from developing countries. As a result, the present </span><span>lack of diversity in top-rung academia</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="may not be eliminated"><span>may not be eliminated</span></a><span> for a long time.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Such harmful, predatory practices have not escaped the FTC’s notice, and it has stated that it will pursue cases of similar nature to protect authors and consumers. This is the first time in the world when a governmental authority has taken cognisance of predatory practices in OA publishing. This will hopefully lead to an appropriate cleansing effect of the players in this field, and enhance the credibility of open access journals.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Thus, self-regulation and standard-setting remains an area for improvisation in the open access publishing community. At the cusp of the movement, proposed structures were mired in legal and economic arguments. It is yet to overcome the challenge of economic sustainability and mature into a stable as well as replicable business model. The movement will be celebrating the Open Access Week for the ninth year later this month. It has gifted scholars immeasurably and lent itself to the progress of science and arts. Here’s hoping the community will iron out the remaining challenges to further strengthen the movement soon. <br /></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpennessOpen Access2016-10-12T16:22:10ZBlog EntryThe Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma
<b>Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.</b>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-pad-ma-10-lessons-learned-from-running-open-access-online-video-archives-in-india-and-beyond/leadImage" alt="The Zen of Pad.ma - Lecture by Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Feb 03, 6 pm" />
<p> </p>
<h2>The Zen of Pad.ma</h2>
<p>Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Biographies</h2>
<p><strong>Sebastian Lütgert</strong>, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.</p>
<p><strong>Jan Gerber</strong>, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppPracticeDigital HumanitiesDigital MediaOpen AccessResearchers at WorkEventArchives2016-01-28T08:25:18ZEventSeminar on Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research
<b>The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, is organising a seminar on open access in research on Tuesday, December 22, 2015. The seminar will focus on: 1) wider access to scientific publications and research data, 2) access to scientific information, and 3) challenges and opportunities of research data. The Centre for Internet and Society is supporting the event as a Knowledge Partner.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>Open Access has become central importance to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, business, and the public as well as librarians. Increasingly, research institutions require researchers to publish articles that report research findings openly accessible in open domain.</p>
<p>Open Access pursues to yield scholarly publishing to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not stop researchers from getting access to research data. Open Access, and the open availability and search ability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the research practice in various fields.</p>
<p>To explore why Open Access is so important to a number of groups, TERI Library along with The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as Knowledge Partner is organizing a half day seminar on <em>Open Access in Research Areas: a Strategic Approach</em> on December 22, 2015 at TERI Seminar Hall, IHC, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.</p>
<p>The Seminar will focus on:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>wider access to scientific publications and research data</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>access to scientific information, and</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>challenges and opportunities of research data.</p>
</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Schedule</h2>
<p>No registration is required to attend the seminar. Seats are limited, and will be provided on first-come-first-served basis.</p>
<p> </p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>13:45 - 14:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Registration and Networking</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:00 - 14:10</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Welcome Address - <strong>Mr. Prabir Sengupta</strong>, Distinguished Fellow and Director, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:10 - 14:20</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Special Address - <strong>Sumandro Chattapadhyay</strong>, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:20 - 14:35</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Keynote Address - <strong>Dr. K.R. Murali Mohan</strong>, Advisor, Big Data Initiatives Division, Department of Science and Technology</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:35 - 14:50</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Inaugural Address - <strong>Dr. Chandrima Shaha</strong>, Director, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:50 - 15:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Setting the Theme and Vote of Thanks - <strong>Dr. P.K. Bhattacharya</strong>, Fellow and Area Convenor, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:00 - 15:30</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Tea and Refreshments</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:30 - 17:15</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Plenary Session</strong><br />
Chair: <strong>Dr. Ramesh Sharma</strong>, Director, CEMCA<br />
<ul>
<li><strong>Puneet Kishor</strong>, Researcher and Independent Consultant - "Science, Data, and Creative Commons"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Beth Sandore Namachchivaya</strong>, Associate Dean of Libraries and Professor University of Illinois - "Developing Services, Infrastructure, and Best Practices to Conserve and Provide Access to Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi</strong>, Librarian, Indian institute of Public Administration</li></ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataFeaturedOpen ResearchOpen AccessOpennessEvent2015-12-22T05:37:44ZEventComments on the Draft Outcome Document of the UN General Assembly’s Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (WSIS+10)
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-draft-outcome-document-of-the-un-general-assembly2019s-overall-review-of-the-implementation-of-wsis-outcomes-wsis-10
<b>Following the comment-period on the Zero Draft, the Draft Outcome Document of the UN General Assembly's Overall Review of implementation of WSIS Outcomes was released on 4 November 2015. Comments were sought on the Draft Outcome Document from diverse stakeholders. The Centre for Internet & Society's response to the call for comments is below.</b>
<p class="Normal1" style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p class="Normal1" style="text-align: justify; ">The WSIS+10 Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes, scheduled for December 2015, comes as a review of the WSIS process initiated in 2003-05. At the December summit of the UN General Assembly, the WSIS vision and mandate of the IGF are to be discussed. The Draft Outcome Document, released on 4 November 2015, is towards an outcome document for the summit. Comments were sought on the Draft Outcome Document. Our comments are below.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The Draft Outcome Document of the UN General Assembly’s Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (“<i>the current Draft</i>”) stands considerably altered from the Zero Draft. With references to development-related challenges, the Zero Draft covered areas of growth and challenges of the WSIS. It noted the persisting digital divide, the importance of innovation and investment, and of conducive legal and regulatory environments, and the inadequacy of financial mechanisms. Issues crucial to Internet governance such as net neutrality, privacy and the mandate of the IGF found mention in the Zero Draft.</li>
<li>The current Draft retains these, and adds to them. Some previously-omitted issues such as surveillance, the centrality of human rights and the intricate relationship of ICTs to the Sustainable Development Goals, now stand incorporated in the current Draft. This is most commendable. However, the current Draft still lacks teeth with regard to some of these issues, and fails to address several others. </li>
<li>In our comments to the Zero Draft, CIS had called for these issues to be addressed. We reiterate our call in the following paragraphs.</li>
</ol>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><strong>(1) </strong><strong>ICT for Development</strong></h2>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>In the current Draft, paragraphs 14-36 deal with ICTs for development. While the draft contains rubrics like ‘Bridging the digital divide’, ‘Enabling environment’, and ‘Financial mechanisms’, the following issues are unaddressed:</li>
<li>Equitable development for all;</li>
<li>Accessibility to ICTs for persons with disabilities;</li>
<li>Access to knowledge and open data.</li>
</ol>
<h3><i><span>Equitable development</span></i></h3>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>In the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html">Geneva Declaration of Principles</a> (2003), two goals are set forth as the Declaration’s “ambitious goal”: (a) the bridging of the digital divide; and (b) equitable development for all (¶ 17). The current Draft speaks in detail about the bridging of the digital divide, but the goal of equitable development is conspicuously absent. At WSIS+10, when the WSIS vision evolves to the creation of inclusive ‘knowledge societies’, equitable development should be both a key principle and a goal to stand by.</li>
<li>Indeed, inequitable development underscores the persistence of the digital divide. The current Draft itself refers to several instances of inequitable development; for ex., the uneven production capabilities and deployment of ICT infrastructure and technology in developing countries, landlocked countries, small island developing states, countries under occupation or suffering natural disasters, and other vulnerable states; lack of adequate financial mechanisms in vulnerable parts of the world; variably affordable (or in many cases, unaffordable) spread of ICT devices, technology and connectivity, etc. </li>
<li>What underscores these challenges is the inequitable and uneven spread of ICTs across states and communities, including in their production, capacity-building, technology transfers, gender-concentrated adoption of technology, and inclusiveness. </li>
<li>As such, it is essential that the WSIS+10 Draft Outcome Document reaffirm our commitment to equitable development for all peoples, communities and states.</li>
<li>We suggest the following inclusion to <strong>paragraph 5 of the current Draft</strong>:</li>
</ol>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span><span style="text-align: justify; ">“5. We reaffirm our common desire and commitment to the WSIS vision to build </span><i style="text-align: justify; "><span>an equitable,</span></i><span style="text-align: justify; "> people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society…”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3><i><span>Accessibility for persons with disabilities</span></i></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">10. Paragraph 13 of the Geneva Declaration of Principles (2003) pledges to “pay particular attention to the special needs of marginalized and vulnerable groups of society” in the forging of an Information Society. Particularly, ¶ 13 recognises the special needs of older persons and persons with disabilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">11. Moreover, ¶ 31 of the Geneva Declaration of Principles calls for the special needs of persons with disabilities, and also of disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, to be taken into account while promoting the use of ICTs for capacity-building. Accessibility for persons with disabilities is thus core to bridging the digital divide – as important as bridging the gender divide in access to ICTs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12. Not only this, but the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/net/wsis/implementation/2014/forum/inc/doc/outcome/362828V2E.pdf">WSIS+10 Statement on the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes</a> (June 2014) also reaffirms the commitment to “provide equitable access to information and knowledge for all… including… people with disabilities”, recognizing that it is “crucial to increase the participation of vulnerable people in the building process of Information Society…” (¶8).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">13. In our previous submission, CIS had suggested language drawing attention to this. Now, the current Draft only acknowledges that “particular attention should be paid to the specific ICT challenges facing… persons with disabilities…” (paragraph 11). It acknowledges also that now, accessibility for persons with disabilities constitutes one of the core elements of quality (paragraph 22). However, there is a glaring omission of a call to action, or a reaffirmation of our commitment to bridging the divide experienced by persons with disabilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">14. We suggest, therefore, the addition of the following language the addition of <strong>paragraph 24A to the current Draft</strong>. Sections of this suggestion are drawn from ¶8, WSIS+10 Statement on the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span>"24A. <span style="text-align: justify; ">Recalling the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities, the Geneva principles paragraph 11, 13, 14 and 15, Tunis Commitment paras 20, 22 and 24, and reaffirming the commitment to providing equitable access to information and knowledge for all, building ICT capacity for all and confidence in the use of ICTs by all, including youth, older persons, women, indigenous and nomadic peoples, people with disabilities, the unemployed, the poor, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people and remote and rural communities, it is crucial to increase the participation of vulnerable people in the building process of information Society and to make their voice heard by stakeholders and policy-makers at different levels. It can allow the most fragile groups of citizens worldwide to become an integrated part of their economies and also raise awareness of the target actors on the existing ICTs solution (such as tolls as e- participation, e-government, e-learning applications, etc.) designed to make their everyday life better. We recognise need for continued extension of access for people with disabilities and vulnerable people to ICTs, especially in developing countries and among marginalized communities, and reaffirm our commitment to promoting and ensuring accessibility for persons with disabilities. In particular, we call upon all stakeholders to honour and meet the targets set out in Target 2.5.B of the Connect 2020 Agenda that enabling environments ensuring accessible telecommunication/ICT for persons with disabilities should be established in all countries by 2020.”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3><i><span>Access to knowledge and open data</span></i></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">15. The Geneva Declaration of Principles dedicates a section to access to information and knowledge (B.3). It notes, in ¶26, that a “rich public domain” is essential to the growth of Information Society. It urges that public institutions be strengthened to ensure free and equitable access to information (¶26), and also that assistive technologies and universal design can remove barriers to access to information and knowledge (¶25). Particularly, the Geneva Declaration advocates the use of free and open source software, in addition to proprietary software, to meet these ends (¶27).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">16. It was also recognized in the WSIS+10 Statement on the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (‘Challenges-during implementation of Action Lines and new challenges that have emerged’) that there is a need to promote access to all information and knowledge, and to encourage open access to publications and information (C, ¶¶9 and 12).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">17. In our previous submission, CIS had highlighted the importance of open access to knowledge thus: “…the implications of open access to data and knowledge (including open government data), and responsible collection and dissemination of data are much larger in light of the importance of ICTs in today’s world. As Para 7 of the Zero Draft indicates, ICTs are now becoming an indicator of development itself, as well as being a key facilitator for achieving other developmental goals. As Para 56 of the Zero Draft recognizes, in order to measure the impact of ICTs on the ground – undoubtedly within the mandate of WSIS – it is necessary that there be an enabling environment to collect and analyse reliable data. Efforts towards the same have already been undertaken by the United Nations in the form of ‘Data Revolution for Sustainable Development’. In this light, the Zero Draft rightly calls for enhancement of regional, national and local capacity to collect and conduct analyses of development and ICT statistics (Para 56). Achieving the central goals of the WSIS process requires that such data is collected and disseminated under open standards and open licenses, leading to creation of global open data on the ICT indicators concerned.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">18. This crucial element is missing from the current Draft of the WSIS+10 Outcome Document. Of course, the current Draft notes the importance of access to information and free flow of data. But it stops short of endorsing and advocating the importance of access to knowledge and free and open source software, which are essential to fostering competition and innovation, diversity of consumer/ user choice and ensuring universal access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">19. We suggest the following addition – of <strong>paragraph 23A to the current Draft</strong>:</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span>"23A. <span style="text-align: justify; ">We recognize the need to promote access for all to information and knowledge, open data, and open, affordable, and reliable technologies and services, while respecting individual privacy, and to encourage open access to publications and information, including scientific information and in the research sector, and particularly in developing and least developed countries.”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><strong>(2) </strong><strong>Human Rights in Information Society</strong></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">20. The current Draft recognizes that human rights have been central to the WSIS vision, and reaffirms that rights offline must be protected online as well. However, the current Draft omits to recognise the role played by corporations and intermediaries in facilitating access to and use of the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">21. In our previous submission, CIS had noted that “the Internet is led largely by the private sector in the development and distribution of devices, protocols and content-platforms, corporations play a major role in facilitating – and sometimes, in restricting – human rights online”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">22. We reiterate our suggestion for the inclusion of <strong>paragraph 43A to the current Draft</strong>:</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span>"43A. <span style="text-align: justify; ">We recognize the critical role played by corporations and the private sector in facilitating human rights online. We affirm, in this regard, the responsibilities of the private sector set out in the Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, A/HRC/17/31 (21 March 2011), and encourage policies and commitments towards respect and remedies for human rights.”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><strong>(3) </strong><strong>Internet</strong> <strong>Governance</strong></h2>
<h3><i><span>The support for multilateral governance of the Internet</span></i></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">23. While the section on Internet governance is not considerably altered from the zero draft, there is a large substantive change in the current Draft. The current Draft states that the governance of the Internet should be “multilateral, transparent and democratic, with full involvement of all stakeholders” (¶50). Previously, the zero draft recognized the “the general agreement that the governance of the Internet should be open, inclusive, and transparent”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">24. A return to purely ‘multilateral’ Internet governance would be regressive. Governments are, without doubt, crucial in Internet governance. As scholarship and experience have both shown, governments have played a substantial role in shaping the Internet as it is today: whether this concerns the availability of content, spread of infrastructure, licensing and regulation, etc. However, these were and continue to remain contentious spaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">25. As such, it is essential to recognize that a plurality of governance models serve the Internet, in which the private sector, civil society, the technical community and academia play important roles. <strong>We recommend returning to the language of the zero draft in ¶32: “open, inclusive and transparent governance of the Internet”.</strong></p>
<h3><i><span>Governance of Critical Internet Resources</span></i></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">26. It is curious that the section on Internet governance<strong> </strong>in both the zero and the current Draft makes no reference to ICANN, and in particular, to the ongoing transition of IANA stewardship and the discussions surrounding the accountability of ICANN and the IANA operator. The stewardship of critical Internet resources, such as the root, is crucial to the evolution and functioning of the Internet. Today, ICANN and a few other institutions have a monopoly over the management and policy-formulation of several critical Internet resources.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">27. While the WSIS in 2003-05 considered this a troubling issue, this focus seems to have shifted entirely. Open, inclusive, transparent and <i>global</i> Internet are misnomer-principles when ICANN – and in effect, the United States – continues to have monopoly over critical Internet resources. The allocation and administration of these resources should be decentralized and distributed, and should not be within the disproportionate control of any one jurisdiction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">28. Therefore, we reiterate our suggestion to add <strong><span>paragraph 53A</span></strong> after Para 53:</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span>"53A. <span style="text-align: justify; ">We affirm that the allocation, administration and policy involving critical Internet resources must be inclusive and decentralized, and call upon all stakeholders and in particular, states and organizations responsible for essential tasks associated with the Internet, to take immediate measures to create an environment that facilitates this development.”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3><i><span>Inclusiveness and Diversity in Internet Governance</span></i></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">29. The current Draft, in ¶52, recognizes that there is a need to “promote greater participation and engagement in Internet governance of all stakeholders…”, and calls for “stable, transparent and voluntary funding mechanisms to this end.” This is most commendable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">30. The issue of inclusiveness and diversity in Internet governance is crucial: today, Internet governance organisations and platforms suffer from a lack of inclusiveness and diversity, extending across representation, participation and operations of these organisations. As CIS submitted previously, the mention of inclusiveness and diversity becomes tokenism or formal (but not operational) principle in many cases.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">31. As we submitted before, the developing world is pitifully represented in standards organisations and in ICANN, and policy discussions in organisations like ISOC occur largely in cities like Geneva and New York. For ex., 307 out of 672 registries listed in ICANN’s registry directory are based in the United States, while 624 of the 1010 ICANN-accredited registrars are US-based.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">32. Not only this, but 80% of the responses received by ICANN during the ICG’s call for proposals were male. A truly global and open, inclusive and transparent governance of the Internet must not be so skewed. Representation must include not only those from developing countries, but must also extend across gender and communities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">33. We propose, therefore, the addition of a <strong><span>paragraph 51A</span></strong> after Para 51:</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: justify; "><span>"51A. <span style="text-align: justify; ">We draw attention to the challenges surrounding diversity and inclusiveness in organisations involved in Internet governance, including in their representation, participation and operations. We note with concern that the representation of developing countries, of women, persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups, is far from equitable and adequate. We call upon organisations involved in Internet governance to take immediate measures to ensure diversity and inclusiveness in a substantive manner.”</span></span></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<hr size="1" style="text-align: justify; " width="33%" />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prepared by Geetha Hariharan, with inputs from Sunil Abraham and Japreet Grewal. All comments submitted towards the Draft Outcome Document may be found <a class="external-link" href="http://unpan3.un.org/wsis10/Preparatory-Process-Roadmap/Comments-on-Draft-Outcome-Document">at this link</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-draft-outcome-document-of-the-un-general-assembly2019s-overall-review-of-the-implementation-of-wsis-outcomes-wsis-10'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-draft-outcome-document-of-the-un-general-assembly2019s-overall-review-of-the-implementation-of-wsis-outcomes-wsis-10</a>
</p>
No publishergeethaICT4DCall for CommentsWSIS+10Access to KnowledgeAccessibilityHuman Rights OnlineInternet GovernanceICANNIANA TransitionOpen SourceOpen Access2015-11-18T06:33:13ZBlog EntryOdia Language Classics could Now be Read from Phones, Tablets and of course from Computers!
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/orissadiary-october-25-2015-odia-language-classics-could-now-be-read-from-phones-tablets-and-computers
<b>Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library is celebrating its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar tomorrow. Available online at or.wikisource.org, the project finally went live in last year on October 20 after being incubated over two years. In a nutshell, it not just provides free and open access to readers to access text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The article <a class="external-link" href="http://www.orissadiary.com/CurrentNews.asp?id=62374">published by Orissadairy</a> on October 25, 2015 quotes Subhashish Panigrahi.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">All the contributors to the project are volunteers and are fondly called “uikiali” in Odia. These volunteers follow certain guidelines to check through the content digitized by others to make sure there is no copyrighted text posing copyright violation, correct typos and other grammatical mistakes and incorrect attribution.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Authors and copyright holders are also encouraged to provide permission in re-licensing their work under free licenses like CC-BY/CC-by-SA licenses so that some of their content becomes available online and fill the large gap of the Odia books online to some extent. “Last year, the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 141 books from multiple authors relicensed under the above mentioned licenses” said the Centre for Internet and Society's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi. “Where we, as an institution, could play a role in reaching out to many authors and convincing them for a small contribution to the society” added Panigrahi.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active contributor to the project elaborated saying, there is a great dearth of Odia books online. I try to buy some time from personal and office time to continue my contribution. Afterall, I started from an all time Odia classic “Cha'mana Athaguntha” by Fakir Mohan Senapati”. Many important books that are out of copyright are making their appearance on the Odia Wikisource. “Wikisource is different than Wikipedia as the former is published writing reublished online where on Wikipedia it is more of aggregating information published elsewhere in an encyclopaedic manner”, says Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, a long time Wikimedian.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Odia Wikisource's administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar welcomes everyone taking interest in Odia library movement in particular and Odia language in general to join this event that is being held at the Institute on Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE), Siripura, Bhubaneswar at 5 pm tomorrow.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/orissadiary-october-25-2015-odia-language-classics-could-now-be-read-from-phones-tablets-and-computers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/orissadiary-october-25-2015-odia-language-classics-could-now-be-read-from-phones-tablets-and-computers</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCIS-A2KOdia WikisourceAccess to KnowledgeOpen Access2015-12-15T08:12:54ZNews ItemOpen 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 ItemCIS brings Nadustunna Charithra magazine under by CC BY SA licence
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-brings-nadustunna-charithra-magazine-under-by-cc-by-sa-licence
<b>As a part of its content donation initiative, the Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) has brought all issues of Nadustunna Charithra magazine under Creative Common Licence. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">CIS-A2K has received 74 issues as of now from the Telugu Jaati foundation. These issues shall be published by A2K on a blog site under CC BY SA licence to make it a reliable reference resource and adhere Wikipedia guidelines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Nadustunna Charithra magazine has dealt extensively with Telugu semantics and Telugu Cultural history and we hope to upload all the issues to Telugu Wikisource. These magazines will also serve as handy reference guides for Telugu Wikipedians and shall act as a major referencing and citation resource.<br /><br />CIS-A2K has also been successful in acquiring 250 song books (booklets that have the lyrics of songs featured in a film) of Telugu movies for content donation. These song books serve as introduction to the film itself. They contain lyrics of the songs, poster of the movie, details of the cast and crew, a short synopsis both in Telugu and English along with photographs of the lead actors. As of now CIS-A2K has been able to locate song books for most of the films produced between 1930-1954.<br /><br />These resources shall also help the Telugu community in coming up with new/improved articles related to Telugu cinema. With most of the basic information regarding a film available in the song book, we expect that the Telugu community along with active cooperation from A2K shall create GA quality articles and this content donation will also help in improving stubs that were created earlier.<br /><br />CIS-A2K is extremely grateful for the support received by the Telugu community during this content donation initiative and would like to thank in person Mr. Bhaskarnaidu, Mr. Gullapalli Nageshwara Rao who have been part of these conversations and helped us identify the resources to be re-licensed.<br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-brings-nadustunna-charithra-magazine-under-by-cc-by-sa-licence'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-brings-nadustunna-charithra-magazine-under-by-cc-by-sa-licence</a>
</p>
No publisherhasanTelugu WikipediaCreative CommonsAccess to KnowledgeOpen Access2016-06-18T18:07:46ZBlog EntryHeads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose
<b>A few commercial publishers dominate provision of access to scientific and technical information sought after by researchers around the world. Increasing subscription prices of journals at rates higher than general inflation caused librarians to think of forming consortia, but publishers started selling online journals as bundles, and libraries ended up with many journals their researchers have very little use for. Scientists and librarians adopted open access, but publishers came up with hybrid journals and article processing charges to beat any adverse effect on their profits caused by the fast-spreading open access movement. We compare the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India. We end with a few suggestions. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/PINSA/Vol80_2014_5_Art04.pdf">published in the Indian National Science Academy Journals</a>, <i>Proc Indian Natn SciAcad</i> 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929.</p>
<hr />
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Introduction</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists in India, as elsewhere, will be happy if their libraries provide them access to thousands of journals. Librarians, even in the most affluent institutions, have only limited budgets and they have to balance between journals on the one hand and books, monographs and reference material on the other, and can subscribe to only a limited number of journals. In the past decade and a half, thanks to generous funding by several government agencies (e.g., UGC, CSIR), librarians formed consortia so they could access online journals at more attractive prices and in large numbers. Also, during the same period, many open access (OA) journals became available and some subscription journals came forward to make articles OA if the authors paid a fee. There also came up a large number of repositories, both institutional (such as the ones at Indian Institute of Science and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute) and subject-based central repositories (such as PubMed Central). As a result, scientists now have much easier access to a much larger volume of current literature. But, it appears that publishers seem to profit far more than scientists. They keep increasing the subscription prices at a rate higher than general inflation. Even affluent institutions like Harvard University are forced to cut down the number of journals they subscribe. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a group of about 125 research libraries in North America, is concerned about this crisis in scholarly communication (or ‘serials crisis’ as they call it) and is working to promote open access as one way to counter it. The publishers continue to make their unusually large profits unmindful of the hardship researchers are put to. In business circles, publishing scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals is considered to be one of the most profitable businesses. Efforts made by groups of researchers to make scholarly communication more cost effective have not met with expected success levels. For example, entire editorial boards of a few commercial journals resigned and started new journals in the same field. But this happened only in a handful of cases and not all of them succeeded. In this paper, we look at what is happening currently in India in the context of the unusually large influence wielded by journal publishers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose-the-intransigence-of-stm-publishers/" class="external-link">Click to download</a> the full text article.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose</a>
</p>
No publishersubbiahOpennessOpen Access2015-02-12T00:28:14ZBlog 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>
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<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>
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<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 Entry