Centre for Internet and Society

Open Government Data India

praskrishna — 2013-03-26T12:11:09Z

Open Govt Data India

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/OpenGovDataIndia.png

Open Government Data

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:43:15Z

pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government.pdf

Open Government Data

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:42:46Z

pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-government-data.pdf

Open Forum - DINL, Digital Infrastructure Association

praskrishna — 2015-11-07T14:45:58Z

Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2015 will be held at Jao Pessoa in Brazil from November 10 to 13, 2015. The theme of IGF 2015 is Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development. Digital Infrastructure Netherlands Foundation is organizing this workshop at IGF on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Jyoti Panday will be speaking at this workshop.

In this open forum we wish to discuss the increase in government engagement with “the internet” to protect their citizens against crime and abuse and to protect economic interests and critical infrastructures. The fact that the traditional benign neglect of states towards the internet is increasingly replaced with political interest has positive and negative effects. We are particularly concerned with those state interventions – often for reasons of national security or economic interest - that impact on the technical and logical ‘core’ of the internet ecosystem – such as interventions in the DNS - and in the impact on organizations and businesses that are traditionally thought of as ‘technical’ and whose roles are in danger of being politicized, such as ISPs, CERTs and hard- and software developers. There is a growing need to separate out the legitimate interests of states from political overreach into the technical and logical core of the internet. A cooperative or constructive approach towards interaction, founded in firm principles, may strengthen the balance and lead to a sustainable protection of Internet values. In this open forum we will present ideas about an agenda for the international protection of ‘the public core of the internet’ and seek to collect and discuss ideas for the formulation of norms and principles and for the identification of practical steps towards that goal. More specifically we aim to discuss: A definition of a public core of the internet: this would comprise the core protocols and infrastructure of the internet which all governments should consider as a global public good, governed by the Internet community and protected from direct activities and involvement by any government Definitions of proper interfaces: outlining norms and mutual expectations that should govern the relations between governments and various central actors in the technical and economic internet ecosystem, such as ISPs, CERTs and hard- and software developers when it comes to fighting cybercrime, retrieve information, mandate takedowns, request information and more.

Speakers
In this IGF open forum DINL wants to explore these ideas and discuss them with thought leaders from other countries. Speakers include:

Bastiaan Goslings (AMS-IX, NL)
Jyoti Panday (CIS, India)
Marilia Maciel (FGV, Brasil)
Dennis Broeders (NL Scientific Council for Government Policy) and will be chaired by Michiel Steltman (DINL), but aims to broaden the debate on this issue with those present.

More information on IGF website here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/open-forum-dinl-digital-infrastructure-association

Open Equitable Access (PDF)

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:42:17Z

file

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access

Open DataCamp — 2012

praskrishna — 2012-03-30T14:49:14Z

A one-day unconference for people working with data from various sectors to come together and share their projects and ideas was organised in Bangalore on March 24, 2012. It was organised by the DataMeet group. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event.

Sessions

9:00am - 10:00am	Registration
10:00am - 10:10am	Introduction to OpenDataCamp Team DataMeet
10:15am - 10.55am	Panel Discussion: State of Open Data in India Data in India in general is in a state for much improvement. What does that mean for open data? How can open data help improve the data situation? What are the drawbacks of opening up data? Anand S (Gramener), Zainab Bawa (HasGeek), Nithya Raman (Transparent Chennai), Moderator Nisha Thompson
11:00am - 11.25am	Pictures through numbers Anand, Chief Data Scientist, Gramener
11.25am - 11.40pm	Tea
11:45pm - 12.10pm	Karnataka Guarantee of Services to Citizens Sridhar Pabbisetty, COO, Centre for Public Policy
12:15pm - 12.40pm	Open Data & Free Maps Shekhar Krishnan
12.45am - 1.10pm	Introduction Aadhaar(UID) Data Pramod Varma & Sanjay Jain
1.10am - 2.15pm	Lunch

	Main Hall	Meeting Room (small)	Food Court
2:15pm - 2:40pm	Drawing By Numbers by Tactical Technology Collective Kaustubh Srikanth	Why Big data and why should you bother? Mohan S,CEO, TrendWise Analytics	Karnataka Learning Partnership Data Practices and a Call for collaboration. Megha Vishwanath
2:45pm - 3:10pm	ISB's visualisation of migration in India. ISB & Gramener	The State of Climate Data in India - Open and Closed. Pavan Srinath	Anatomy of NSSO Data sumandro
3.15pm - 3:40pm	Water Data Nisha Thompson, India Water Portal	Mobile as a Data Collection Device Thejesh GN	Open data API and the challenges Karthik B. R

3.40pm - 4.15pm

Tea

4.15pm - 4.40pm

Modelling car insurance pricing
Gaurav Vohra, Jigsaw Academy

Free slot

What is Data?
Mrinal Wadhwa

4.45pm - 6.00pm

Feedback, etc

The sponsors included Google, India Water Portal, Gramener, Microsoft Research, Akshara Foundation, DataMeet, HasGeek and the Centre for Internet & Society.

Venue:Google, 3rd, 4th and 5th floors,RMZ infinity, Tower ENo.3, Old Madras Road, Bennigana Halli, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560 016

For more info, click here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-data-camp

Open DataCamp - 2013

praskrishna — 2013-02-28T11:08:14Z

A two day unconference for people working with data from various sectors to come together and share their projects and idea is being organized by Open Data Camp on March 2 and 3, 2013 at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle in Bangalore.

Read the original published by Open Data Camp. Sunil Abraham is a panelist.

Sessions

Day 1

9:00am - 10:00am	Registration
10:00am - 10:15am	Introduction to OpenDataCamp Team DataMeet
10:15am - 11.00am	Visualizing Politics By S Anand
11.00pm - 11.15pm	Tea
11:15am - 12.15am	Why Open Data is Good for Gov and Citizens alike Panel: Alka Mishra (NIC Data.Gov.In), Meera K (CitizenMatters) and Shekhar Krishan, PhD Student, (STS at MIT) Moderated by - Nisha Thompson
12:15pm - 01.00pm	Ignite talks. 6 of them 5 minutes each. OpenBangalore by Thejesh GN The School of Data is open for admissions By Maya Indira Ganesh Open Mapping for the Development of a Maoist-affected district in Orissa By Kuldip Gyaneswar Aggregate and Visualize your data with Ushahidi in 15 minutes By Praveen Selvasekaran DIY Weather Station By Samuel Rajkumar
01:00pm - 02.00pm	Lunch Break

	Room 034	Room 032	Room 117	Room 118	Room 119
2:00pm - 2:40pm	Public Problem Solving using Data: Lessons from the Daksh Survey. By Meera K and Rajesh Kasturirangan	SSLC data Infographics - Experiences By Sajjad Anwar	Examining Data Practices: the case of Cyberabad's Publicly Accesseble Crime Map By Siddharth Hande, Fellow, Hyderabad Urban Lab Anant Maringanti, Executive Director, Hyderabad Urban Lab	Leveraging UIDAI data for public benefit Tulika Khunger	Analyzing Voice Data of Community Based Organizations By Piyush Aggarwal
2:40pm - 3:20pm	Cont: Public Problem Solving using Data: Lessons from the Daksh Survey. By Meera K and Rajesh Kasturirangan	From Data to Evidence: How Activists Use Data in their Campaigns By Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective	Quality of Gov Data By Amrtha Kasturi Rangan	Open Financial Data: Following the World Bank's money By Ankur Nagar	OpenData for Non-Profits! By Adethya Sudarsanan
3:20pm - 4:00pm	Telling Stories with Data By Amit Kapoor	Know Your Climate: Going Open with Climate Data - Part 2 Pavan Srinath	Adopt Open Governance By Sridhar Pabbisetty	Big Data and Hadoop in Indian Context By Mohan Kumar	Participatory community mapping as a tool for cumulative impact assessments By Shashank Srinivasan
4.00pm - 4.30pm	Tea
4:30pm - 5:30pm	Panel Discussion: What has Open Data got to with UIDAI? Panelists - Sunil Abraham, Anivar Aravind and Anant Maringanti. Moderated by - Sumandro Chattapadhyay.
5:30pm - 6:00pm	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks

Day 2

9:00am - 10:00am	Registration
10:00am - 10:15am	Welcome Team DataMeet
	Room 034	Room 032	Room 117	Hall
10:15am - 11:15am	Data and Maps Kaustubh Srikanth and Sajjad Anwar. Details	A gentle introduction to data cleaning from Tactical Tech's course on the School of Data By Allan Stanley and Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective.	An Introduction to Apache Hadoop By Mrinal Wadhwa	Blocked for Hackathon
11:15am - 11:30am	Tea
11:30pm - 01:00pm	Cont: Data and Maps Kaustubh Srikanth and Sajjad Anwar Details	Cont: A gentle introduction to data cleaning from Tactical Tech's course on the School of Data By Allan Stanley and Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective.	Cont: An Introduction to Apache Hadoop By Mrinal Wadhwa	Blocked for Hackathon
01:00pm - 02.00pm	Lunch Break
2:00pm - 4:00pm	Workshop-1	Designing a Story. How To: Look At Data and Tell A Story By Tejas Pande	Workshop-3	Blocked for Hackathon
4.00pm - 4.30pm	Feedback and Tea
4:30pm - 6:00pm	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks	Unscheduled talks	Blocked for Hackathon

Contact Nisha Thompson (nisha.thompson@gmail.com)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-camp-2013

Open Data Workshop

praskrishna — 2015-06-18T01:07:29Z

Open Data Workshop

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Phandeeyar_Sumandro_OpenData_13.05.20151.png

Open Data in Cultural Heritage – OpenGLAM in Germany

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T09:49:50Z

Subhashish Panigrahi took part in this event as a member of the OpenGLAM Working Group.

Read the details on the OpenGLAM website here. Images from the event can be seen at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OpenGLAM_2014

Are you working in a cultural heritage institution, or interested in opening up cultural heritage data for wider reuse? On the morning prior to the start of the Open Knowledge Festival, the OpenGLAM initiative, DM2E project, Open Knowledge Germany and Wikimedia Deutschland are organising a half day workshop on open cultural data, with a special focus on German cultural heritage institutions.

During the OpenGLAM workshop, we will investigate and discuss the possibilities and obstacles of opening up your cultural data as an institution. After a round of inspiring presentation from initiatives like Europeana, Wikidata, the German Digital Library and Coding da Vinci we will continue the discussion how to overcome the barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector.

Finally, we will hear from the successful local OpenGLAM groups currently active in Switzerland and Finland, and kickstart a local OpenGLAM network for German memory institutions interested in open cultural content and open access. We invite everyone to join and help think about the focus points for such a German OpenGLAM group for the future, and look forward to start up a fruitful collaboration!

Programme

9.30: Welcome & introduction to OpenGLAM – Lieke Ploeger, Open Knowledge

9.40: Lightning talks on the value of open data for cultural heritage institutions

We opened up – now what? An analysis of the open data policy of the Rijksmuseum – Joris Pekel, Europeana
1 year in digital cultural heritage – what were the walls I ran into most often & how to tear them down – Stephan Bartholmei, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
Wikidata – Making your data available and useful for everyone – Lydia Pintscher, Wikimedia Deutschland
How to use cultural heritage data: Coding Da Vinci results – Helene Hahn, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
Experiences from German GLAM projects / GLAM-Wiki-Kollaborationen in der Wissenschaft - Daniel Mietchen, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

10.30: Coffee Break

10.45: Debate on the current situation around openness in Germany

11.30: Forming a local German OpenGLAM group

With inspiring presentations of the OpenGLAM local groups from Switzerland & Finland

13.00: End

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-in-cultural-heritage

Open Data Charter Lead Stewards In-Person Meeting

praskrishna — 2016-08-04T02:21:14Z

Sunil Abraham participated remotely in this meeting which was held in Mexico on July 4 and 5, 2016. The event was organized by Open Data Charter.

The Open Data Charter and Open Data for Development Network

The Open Data Charter (ODC) and the Open Data for Development Network (OD4D) are two highly complementary assets for the open data field. The Charter has developed a sound and widely acceptable set of principles, and is building on its momentum to scale adoption and support implementation. The OD4D Network has brought together a broad range of programming from across the field, providing funding and networking activities, and enabling research and on-the-ground work to take place.

The following were the list of attendees for the meeting in Mexico:

Ania
Enrique
Fabrizio
Fernando
Josema
Martin
Richard S.
Randall
Sanjeev
Canada, UK, Pavel, Sunil.
Pablo

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-data-charter-lead-stewards-in-person-meeting

Open Access: Students help revive and digitize rare books for Malayalam Wiki Library

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T08:50:07Z

The blog post that quotes Centre for Internet and Society was published in SPICY IP on July 15, 2014.

The New Indian Express reports that in a terrific effort, more than 1000 school students and 234 members of the public across the state of Kerala digitized, proof-read and uploaded more than 150 rare and out-of-copyright Malayalam books as part of a digitization contest organized to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Wiki Source project by the Centre for Internet and Society, the state government run IT@School project, Swanthanthra Malayalam Computing and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi online library.

While these rare books were already in the public domain, the importance of preserving them in an accessible format cannot be emphasised enough. Books published as early as 1772 are now available on Wiki Grandhasala, the Malayalam wiki library to which these digitized copies have been uploaded. As they have been digitized rather than simply scanned, one can also search through them for keywords/phrases. If I’m not mistaken, OCR solutions for Indian languages either do not exist or are not of reliable quality. This would mean that much of the over 13,000 pages were typed out! I understand that these articles will also be used to cross reference wikipedia articles as well.

A big round of applause to all the involved parties for organizing and participating in this great effort at preserving as well as making accessible local literature and culture, that could otherwise be at a risk of getting lost amongst unhelpful copyright laws and/or tarnished or lost physical copies amongst other risks.

(I’m not sure if these overlap but as we reported here, there also seems to be the Kerala State Central Library that makes rare books available as well).

Can this effort be replicated in other states? I know the Panjab Digital Library is another resource that looks to do something similar. Their mission statement includes: to locate, digitize, preserve, collect and make accessible the accumulated wisdom of the Panjab region, without distinction as to script, language, religion, nationality, or other physical condition. There is also the Digital Library of India, hosted by IISC Bangalore, which states that they are trying to digitize all the significant works of mankind! If our readers know of other such databases, please do let us know in the comments.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/spicy-ip-swaraj-paul-barooah-july-15-2014-open-access-students-help-revive-and-digitize-rare-books-for-malayalam-wiki-library

Open Access Week Round-Up

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:21:01Z

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.

From 3-4pm Subhashish Panigrahi [@subhapa], based in Bangalore, described the concept of How to do Guerrilla GLAM. Given the emergence of Wikipedian in Residence projects overseas and at particular institutions in NZ (see a recent panel at NDF 2015), we were intrigued by what he had to say.

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.

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.

The webinar links and chat are available here connect.otago.ac.nz/p4j21g554ny/
The slides are also available separately here http://slides.com/psubhashish/how-to-do-guerrilla-glam/fullscreen#/

Click to read the blog post published by the University of Otago.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-otago-october-27-2015-open-access-week-round-up

Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T03:13:24Z

The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.

Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with:

Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy?

He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:

"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."

Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution

It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication.

There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.

Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.

The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.

Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?

Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.

Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:

“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”

The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.

From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.

"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."

Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)

ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …

Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008

For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.

The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.

The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.

Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.

Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.

In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.

Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.

It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.

Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP

Country	Percentage
Japan	3.67%
Sweden	3.60%
Finland	3.48%
USA	2.70%
EU average	2.16%
China	1.40%
India	1.00%

In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity.

India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.

	India	China
MathSciNet, 2006	1,949	11,762
Engineering Village, 2006	25,954	199,881
SciFinder, 2007	41,697	235,309
Web of Science, 2007	35,450	98,241

Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.

But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.

Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly.

Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.

India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.

The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.

There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias.

India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.

India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.

But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting open source drug discovery and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.

Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.

India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.

Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow.

The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.

The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.

Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research.

A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.

The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”

Is anyone listening?

Universities	Scopus	Scholar	% Sco vs Sch
Univ College London	134,950	8,660	6.4
Univ of Cambridge	114,339	8,320	7.3
Univ of Oxford	99,723	7,800	7.8
Imperial College	91,537	4,720	5.2
Univ of Manchester	83,024	3,840	4.6
King's College London	60,407	1,100	1.8
Univ of Edinburgh	57,473	9,920	17.3
Univ of Southampton	44,013	14,000	31.8
Univ of Warwick	23,018	6,010	26.1
Univ of York	21,554	2,920	13.6
Loughborough Univ	18,902	4,030	21.3

This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.

UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.

The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.

Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet.

If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers.

The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA.

The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.

In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.

The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.

In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference.

If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks.

The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.

Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.

What is there already?

World-class Open Course Ware.
About 200 OA journals.
Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way.
A small group is promoting OJS.
There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.
There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,
Library and information science, Catalysis.
Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.
Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.
The Catalysis repository is not listed.
There are some efforts to digitize theses.
Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.
An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source.

But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches.

On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.

Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both.

Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.

International collaboration and ways forward

A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access.

The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.

India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.

eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!

We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.

OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship

Open Access to Scholarly Literature Poster

praskrishna — 2013-09-24T08:18:47Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.pdf

Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India — A Status Report

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T02:47:07Z

This report was prepared by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madan Muthu on 9 April 2011.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx