Centre for Internet and Society

Availability and Accessibility of Government Information in Public Domain

sunil — 2014-12-30T01:25:12Z

The information provided on most Government websites such as Acts, notifications, rules, orders, minutes of meetings and consultations, etc. is usually in the form of electronic documents. However, these lack authenticity and accessibility and cannot be (text) searched., This policy brief identifies the problem areas with the current work flow being used to publish documents and proposes suitable modifications to make them easy to locate, authentic and accessible.

Prepared by Sunil Abraham, Nirmita Narasimhan, Beliappa, and Anandhi Viswanathan and with inputs from Dipendra Manocha, Saksham, and Deepak Maheshwari, Symantec. Download the text as PDF here. (96 Kb)

Problem Statement: The information published on most government websites exist in the form of document files [including but not limited to the Acts, Rules and Regulations, Government Orders and Notifications, Consultation Papers, Reports etc.] which, even when published, more often than not lack authenticity and accessibility and cannot be (text) searched.

Analysis: The current workflow towards publishing documents on government websites is broadly as follows:

The document is born digital – that means it is created on a computer.
The document is printed.
The document is stamped with the official seal and signed in ink by the authorized person(s).
The paper document is scanned.
The scanned image is converted into a PDF file.
The document is uploaded on the website and thereby published in the public domain.

In fact, at times, even gazette notifications and other printed documents are also scanned as images.

This approach has numerous problems, including the following:

First and foremost, such a practice is against the letter and spirit of Section 4 (1) (a) of the Right to Information Act, 2005.[1] that inter alia, mandates every public authority to “maintain all its records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and form which facilitates the right to information under this Act and ensure that all records that are appropriate to be computerised are, within a reasonable time and subject to availability of resources, computerised and connected through a network all over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated”.
This does not realize the enabling provision of the Information Technology Act, 2000[2] which gives legal sanctity to digital signatures. The digital image of a physical signature is not a digital signature in the eye of the law, though at times it is mistakenly believed to be so.
This does not address the problem of repudiation. That means a government official can say “I didn't sign that document” and there is no way to tell whether what he or she is saying is true. One of the key features of digital signatures is non-repudiability.
Scanned images of printed text cannot be searched for specific text (character, word or phrase) even by people without disabilities but for people with disabilities, the documents become totally inaccessible since the accessibility software cannot parse such scanned images – against the underlying tenets and objectives of the National Universal Electronic Accessibility Policy 2013.[3]
As an extension, content of such documents cannot be indexed by search engines (such as Google, Bing and Raftaar, etc.) and hence, unlikely to be located even if technically the same are in the public domain.

Proposed Solution: The following work flow is proposed for publishing documents electronically on government websites:

The document is born digital by preparing it in or through a computer system. Documents in Indian languages should be produced using Unicode based fonts.
The government official authorized to sign the same, must sign it digitally.
The document is uploaded in an open standard based format such as EPUB using a content management system and made available on the website such that it is available, accessible, indexable and searchable.

This will ensure democratization of information in its truest sense – making available information to the public at large and ensuring that it can be easily located and remains accessible to one and all.

The process of formatting should be standardized in such a way that semantics (such as heading styles, lists and tables) can be added to the text of the document. The Web Style Guide provides information on good practices for creating well-structured documents:

Standardizing the formatting process by creating different templates for different types of documents will ensure uniform accessibility of the documents as well as provide a standard look and feel across government documents.

India became a global pioneer by making the legal provision for computerised, indexed and duly catalogued public records. It is high time that India takes the lead by living up to the legislative intent under the Right to Information Act, Information Technology Act and the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, and thereby establishes a global best practice.

Admittedly, legacy documents should also be converted electronically to accessible formats though before such a rendering, due editorial oversight may be necessary along with use of technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

[1]. Government of India. The Right to Information Act, 2005. No. 22 of 2005. Retrieved on November 30, 2014 from http://rti.gov.in/webactrti.htm.

[2]. Government of India. The Information Technology Act, 2000. No. 21 of 2000. Retrieved on November 30, 2014 from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/itbill2000.pdf

[3]. Government of India. National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility. 2013. Retrieved on November 30, 2014 from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National Policy on Universal Electronics(1).pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/availability-and-accessibility-of-government-information-in-public-domain

Artificial Intelligence: a Full-Spectrum Regulatory Challenge [Working Draft]

sunil — 2020-08-04T06:10:13Z

Today, there are certain misconceptions regarding the regulation of AI. Some corporations would like us to believe that AI is being developed and used in a regulatory vacuum. Others in civil society organisations believe that AI is a regulatory circumvention strategy deployed by corporations. As a result, these organisations call for onerous regulations targeting corporations. However, some uses of AI by corporations can be completely benign and some uses AI by the state can result in the most egregious human rights violations. Therefore policy makers need to throw every regulatory tool from their arsenal to unlock the benefits of AI and mitigate its harms.

This policy brief proposes a granular, full spectrum approach to the regulation of AI depending on who is using AI, who is impacted by that use and what human rights are impacted. Everything from deregulation, to forbearance, to updated regulations, to absolute and blanket prohibitions needs to be considered depending on the specifics. This approach stands in contrast to approaches of ethics, omnibus law, homogeneous principles, and human rights, which will result in inappropriate under-regulation or over-regulation of the sector.

Find a copy of the working draft here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/artificial-intelligence-a-full-spectrum-regulatory-challenge-working-draft

April 2016 Newsletter

sunil — 2016-05-10T06:26:09Z

Welcome to the CIS newsletter for April 2016. The key issues we worked on this month included the Aadhaar Act 2016, Standard Essential Patents, cyber security of smart grids, and involvement of international agencies in the smart cities project in India.

Early last year, thanks to the fund raising efforts of a friend of CIS - Suhail Kazi, we received Rs. 1.9 lakhs as donations from 19 individuals. In January this year, we set up an online giving feature on our website which would ease the donation process, but we haven’t got a single donation so far! This could be because many of you may be under a false impression that CIS is very wealthy and does not need more support. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. Today, we are unable to find a single donor who is interested in our Accessibility, Telecom, or RAW programmes. In other words, we need your support. Would you to consider making a small donation to CIS? Click here to donate.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights
CIS prepared an FAQ on the Aadhaar / UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. Further, two infographics were produced to highlight on the questions of "Can the Aadhaar Act 2016 be Classified as a Money Bill?" and "Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill?". NVDA team prepared a report on the progress of the project for the month of April 2016. CIS submitted its comments to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion's Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on FRAND Terms. CIS has offered its assistance on other matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards the sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India. A summary of the comments can be accessed here. Responses to the Discussion Paper is available here. Rohini Lakshané's paper titled Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey has been accepted for publication by the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. Kiran A.B. in a blog post has documented the availability and openness of data sets in India that are relevant for monitoring the targets under the SDGs. Low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments wrote Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly.

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CIS in the News
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CIS gave inputs to the following media coverage:

India's biometric database crosses billion-member mark (AFP and Daily Mail, UK; April 4, 2016).
The Panama Papers and the question of privacy (Big News Network; April 6, 2016). This was originally published by Privacyinternational.org.
Daunting task ahead for investigative agencies with WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption (Neha Alawadhi; Economic Times; April 8, 2016).
PMO’s no to smart cards, insists on Aadhaar (Somesh Jha; Hindu; April 10, 2016).
2014 showed the power of Twitter, now every Indian politician wants a handle (T.V. Jayan, Smitha Verma,Sonia Sarkar and V. Kumara Swamy; Telegraph; April 10, 2016).
Why is the UIDAI cracking down on individuals that hoard Aadhaar data? (Alnoor Peermohamed; Business Standard; April 13, 2016).
You will need a license to create a WhatsApp group in Kashmir (Governance Now; April 19, 2016).
Will Facebook, Twitter relocate servers to India? (Taru Bhatia; Governance Now; April 23, 2016).
Government keeps experts out of cyber security discussions (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; April 23, 2016).
CCTV plays Sherlock (Raj Shekhar, Arun Dev, V Narayan & A Selvaraj with inputs from Sindhu Kannan and Somreet Bhattacharya; The Times of India; April 24, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following pieces:

Sunil Abraham wrote an article in the July 15 edition of Frontline arguing that the Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.
Amber Sinha wrote an article in The Wire arguing that the Aaddhaar Act is not a money bill, and the Supreme Court may very well question the decision by the Lok Sabha speaker to classify it as such.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay also wrote on The Wire arguing that "the last chance for a welfare state doesn’t rest in the Aadhaar system."
Subhashish Panigrahi's article on the 8 challenges that Indian language Wikipedias have to overcome was published by Global Voices. The article had earlier been published in the Wire.
Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh co-authored an article on Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India that was published by Dataquest.
Shyam Ponappa in his monthly column published in the Business Standard tell us that it's time the government accepts that current policies are not enough to bring about Digital India.

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

Comments

Comments on Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on Frand Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Responses to the DIPP's Discussion Paper on SEPs and their Availability on FRAND Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Summary of CIS Comments to DIPP’s Discussion Paper on SEPs and their availability on FRAND terms (Anubha Sinha; April 26, 2016).

Blog Entries

Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources (Pervasive Technologies Team; April 1, 2016).
Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 15, 2016).
Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone Patent Litigation (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 29, 2016).
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Information Received from Tezpur University (Karan Tripathi; April 26, 2016).
National IPR Policy Series : Sectoral Innovation Councils on Intellectual Property Rights – RTI Requests + DIPP Responses (Nehaa Chaudhari and Saahil Dama; April 30, 2016). Nisha S. Kumar assisted in compilation of the document.

Participation in Events

Fifth Annual IP Teaching Workshop (Organised by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition at National Law University Delhi in association with National Academy of Law Teaching, NLU-D; Delhi; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker.
First Round-table on Innovation, IP and Competition (Organized by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property & Competition (CIIPC) at the National Law University, Delhi; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 1-2, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha attended the round-table.
Brainstorming Workshop on PG Programme on Media Studies for UGC E-Pathshala Programme (Organized by Jamia Milla Islamia; New Delhi; April 5, 2016).
Sensitization Seminar on IPR for Electronics & ICT Sectors (Organized by Andhra Pradesh Technology Development & Promotion Centre (APTDC) of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in association with Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY); Vishakhapatnam; April 21, 2016).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Work Plan

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017 (CIS-A2K Team; April 2, 2016): We have revised the work plan template taking into account the changed proposal plan sent out by WMF and in light of the feedback that we have received from FDC assessment during last proposal application. The FDC feedback is taken into account at the level of design, RoI and ensuring quality for all our activities.

Article

Eight Challenges Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; April 21, 2016). A version of this post was previously published on The Wire.

Media Coverage

Odia gets more space in e-world (Anwesha Ambaly; The Telegraph; April 7, 2016).
Exercise to Correct articles in Tulu Wikipedia begins (Raviprasad Kamila; The Hindu; April 28, 2016).

Event Organized

Tulu Wikipedia Editathon to Improve Quality of Articles in Tulu Wikipedia (Shri Ramakrishna PU College; Mangaluru; April 26 - 30, 2016).

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Openness
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Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Monitoring Sustainable Development Goals in India: Availability and Openness of Data (Part II) (Kiran A.B.; April 12, 2016).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Cyber Security

Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India (Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh; April 25, 2016).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

RTI regarding Smart Cities Mission in India (Paul Thottan; April 21, 2016).

►Privacy

Blog Entries

FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill (Elonnai Hickok, Vanya Rakesh, and Vipul Kharbanda; April 13, 2016).
Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India (Vanya Rakesh; April 14, 2016).
Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill? (Pooja Saxena; April 24, 2016).

Articles

Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law? (Nehaa Chaudhari; Quint; March 31, 2016).
The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 19, 2016).
The Aadhaar Act is Not a Money Bill (Amber Sinha; April 25, 2016).

Participation in Events

RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016 (Organized by RightsCon; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Elonnai Hickok attended the event.
Panel Discussion on UID/ Aadhar act 2016 and its impact on Social, Security (Organized by Students Christian Movement of India at SCM House; Bangalore; April 25, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), organised a roundtable discussion on Tuesday, April 26, to discuss the Aadhaar project and Act. Along with Prasanna S, Apar Gupta, and Dr. Chirashree Dasgupta, Sumandro Chattapadhyay was one of the discussants.
Aadhaar by Numbers (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; New Delhi; April 29, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Breakthroughs Needed For Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 6, 2016 and Organizing India BlogSpot; April 7, 2016).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Article

Buying into the Aakash Dream - A Tablet’s Tale of Mass Education (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey; Economic & Political Weekly; April 23, 2016).

Announcement

Call for Proposal: Big Data for Development – Initial Field Studies (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 29, 2016).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2016-newsletter

Anonymity in Cyberspace

sunil — 2015-09-09T01:31:03Z

While security threats require one to be identified in the Cyberspace, on the other hand, the need for privacy and freedom of speech without being targeted, calls for providing means for anonymous browsing and ability to express without being identified. Where do we draw the line , and how do we balance it? The group will dwell on need for anonymity in various sectors such as government, commercial, employers etc. Apart from security & privacy, the presentation will also cover social and technological perspectives.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/anonymity-in-cyberspace

Anonymity and Privacy

sunil — 2009-01-26T09:42:08Z

Context

The first two waves of cyberculture celebrated the anonymous conditions within which the different actors in interaction were introjected in different practices online. There was a significant attention given to the nature of presence, absence, being, and the schism between the corporeal and the digital bodies and reality.

However, with an increased amount of State regulation, governance and attention to the nature of life on the screen, the condition of anonymity has quickly been replaced by a condition of pseudonymity. The pseudonymous structures within cyberspace offer a world of role-playing, fantasising and narrativisation that, while still effective, are no longer merely in the domains of the aesthetic or the performative but enter serious domains of legislation, regulation, control, and politics.

New modes of sanitising the behaviour of users online and the construction of the ethical techno-social subject have led on one hand to some very disturbing behaviour on the part of powerful agencies, and to strong political mobilisation and the advent of the public sphere on the other. As the market, the State and the public all inflect users to reiterate their physical boundaries and geo-political status, it becomes interesting to see what role anonymity still has to play online and what is the political investment in being pseudonymous online.

Research Agenda

With the increasing regulation of cyberspaces, are anonymous spaces being lost, and with them, the voices and the people that belonged to these spaces?
How do we sustain the paradox of safety in recognition on one hand and the safety in being invisible on the other?
Is the question of anonymity universal across different kinds of cyberspaces? With occurrences like the ‘Orkut Deaths’ and the ‘National Emblems Defamation’ cases on the one hand and the construction of cyber-terrorism on the other, do we need to delve deeper into what it means to be anonymous online and the negotiations that one enters into when role-playing online?
The debates around anonymity often create an artificial distinction between the physical and the digital worlds, treating one as more authentic than the other. This aesthetic paradigm further enters debates around piracy, copying and the digital media. How do questions of authenticity and the construction of an ethical subject intersect with the debates around anonymity?
How does anonymity enable the demonisation of various cyberspatial practices? What are the kind of public education systems which should be in place so that we can find safety and freedom (often antithetical to each other) in cyberspaces without excessive control and regulation?
If anonymity is an inescapable condition of being online, how does it affect new forms of behaviour and community formations that we see in the contemporary urban?

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/new-pedagogies/anonymity-and-privacy

Agenda

sunil — 2008-10-13T12:25:59Z

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, jointly organise the first Open Access Day on the 14th of October 2008 at Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

Time	Session
1400 – 1415	Welcome and Introduction: Prof. Biswajit Das, Director, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia
1415 – 1535	Chair: Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia Panelists: Mr. Zakir Thomas, Project Director - Open Source Drug Discovery, and Dr. Anshu Bhardwaj, Scientist, CSIR, New Delhi. Dr. Andrew Lynn, Professor, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society
1535 – 1600	Question and Answer Session Open Discussion
1600 - 1615	Vote of thanks and closure by Sunil Abraham, Director – Policy, Centre for Internet and Society.
	End with Tea/Coffee

Contact Details

New Delhi	Bangalore
Vibodh Parthasarathi Reader/Associate Professor Centre for Culture, Media and Governance Nelson Mandela House, Mujib Bagh Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110 025 P.: +91 11 26933810/26933842 M: +91 9873458688 E: ccmgjmi AT gmail.com W: http://jmi.nic.in/ccm	Sunil Abraham Director - Policy Centre for Internet and Society No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560 052 P: +91 80 4092 6283 F: +91 80 4114 8130 M: +91 9611100817 E: sunil AT cis-india.org W: www.cis-india.org

Map

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

About Open Access Day

sunil — 2008-09-21T14:43:16Z

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

Open Access^¹ is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.

The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Today, the OAIster search engine provides access to 17,799,314 Open Access records from 1015 contributors. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals. Both INSA and IASc have made their journals open access journals. Indian Institute of Science has an EPrints repository and it has over 11,000 papers and this year, the Institute's centenary year, the number is expected to cross 23,000. NIT, Rourkela, has mandated open access to all faculty research papers. There are about thirty OA institutional repositories in India today. The IITs and IISc have formed a consortium and are making their class lectures open access under a project called NPTEL. These lectures are available in web, video and YouTube formats.

About CCMG-JMI

The Centre seeks to enhance the integration and development of interdisciplinary research into the media in India and South Asia. To this end, various programmes envisaged at CCMG will contribute in the following manner:

Methodologically, work at the Centre will examine and seek to develop new approaches both, quantitative and qualitative. This being a recurrent motif across all thematic rubrics pursued.
Archiving the measurement and analysis of media production, content and reception takes place in many organisations, but very little of such data is available to researchers, or is analysed comparatively. To address this void, the Centre aims to create an archive of media research data of value to researchers across South Asia.
Comparative perspectives across disciplines, mediascapes and regions are of utmost importance to the centre’s body of objectives. Comparative analyses will require reconciling data based on differing calibration approaches rooted in, often, contesting intellectual traditions and policy foundations.
Networking will be structured to aid the regular association of media scholars and policy analysts from varied, contiguous disciplines. Equally, the Centre will act as a focal point for dialogues between social scientists, civil society actors and media professionals who rarely are able to share a platform.

1This section and the next is adapted from the content available at http://www.openaccessday.org

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

A2K3 Panel XI: Open Access to Science and Research

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:07:56Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam participated in the third Access to Knowledge hosted by The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School between September 8-10, 2008, in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference held at the Geneva International Conference Centre brought together hundreds of decision-makers and experts on global knowledge to discuss the urgent need for policy reforms.

Original Article on A2K3 website

Download Subbiah Arunachalam's Paper

Audio file of Session on Open Access to Science and Research (Ogg, MP3)

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Made possible by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access to knowledge. This panel featured Leslie Chan, of the University of Toronto; Subbiah Arunachalam of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and Global Knowledge Partnership; Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology, UCT; and DK Sahu of Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. Peter Suber from the Yale Information Society Project and SPARC moderated this panel.

It’s a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from publishers. But it’s growing quickly for scholarly journal articles, where journals don’t pay for articles and authors write for impact, not for money. The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of fast-rising journal prices.

This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA journals, OA repositories, the WHO’s Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.

The questions to be addressed will include:

How do access barriers slow research in developing countries? How does OA remove those barriers?
What can universities do to promote OA?
What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?
What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?
What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?
Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?
How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?
How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?

PETER SUBER

OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of needless copyright
OA is compatible with peer review, copyright, revenue and profit, print, preservation, prestige
3622 peer-reviewed OA journals, 1220 OA repositories, 22 university OA mandates (15 countries), 27 funding agencies OA mandates (14 countries)
Part of the problem: journal prices have risen 4 times faser than inflation since mid-1980s. Indian institute of science is the best funded research library in india providing access to 10600 serials.
Harvard has 98990
Yale has 73900
Average ARL library = 50,566
U of Witwatersrand = 29,309
U of Malawi = 17000 ejournals, 95 print
The case for OA is especially strong for publicly funded research, medical research, research from developing countries

SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM

Why do we needopen access to science?
Science as Knowledge commons
Created by researchers, a communal activity, science is about sharing, internet has opened new opportunities
Primary goal of science is the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of humanity
Emergence of open access – seeks to restore knowledge commons to creators. Movement, like everything else, is uneven
Physicists vs. chemists
UK, Netherlands and USA – have had many more successes
Brazil – doing very well – but China and India are not doing so well with open access
Restore the knowledge commons is to the community
This movement is like any other movement which is uneven
Developments in India

3.1% papers in chemical abstracts
30,000 papers a year indexed in SCI
Problems of Access and Visibility

New Developments:

Consortia – able to provide a lot of journals
open courseware
arXiv

Problems: papers that are published are put in inaccessible journals, and people in global South laboratories would be unable to access this knowledge. The Government gives the money but the research then ends up flying out
The policy front:

Individual efforts
National Knowledge Commission has recommended OA
Number of institutional repositories
Need advocacy and training programmes
Action missing from key players

Some individuals are doing a great job and putting all their materials online
Medical information and developing countries

No nation can afford to be without access to S&T research capacity
Neglected diseases are not a priority for pharmaceutical companies
HINARI – any country that has per capita less than $1000 is eligible

DK SAHU

Infectious diseases (chikungunya goes Italian)
Non-infectious diseases (india becoming global hub for diabetes)
Industry effects (how safe are clinical trials)
Several examples (such as MedKnow, Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) of free access to no-fee journals.
A journal from India has the most visits from London
A journal called International Journal of Shoulder Surgery but visitors are from Melbourne
More original research articles, 40+ articles in 2005 vs. 160+ articles in 2008 in IJU, more issues per year for journals, check on scientific misconduct, international recognition (11 journals in SCI in 2 years)
Going online increases citations – this is an open access advantage
Scientific output of new economies: medicine
Open access publishing is not alone sufficient – there are disappearing journals. Commercial publishers are taking over, there is a lack of continuity, non-interoperability/archiving
20-80 phenomenon (majority of journals are not OA)
Local journals are not preferred (high IF journals)

LESLIE CHAN

Role of Universities and Researchers
You need citations in order to advance in academia – if your papers get picked up and ripple throughout the research arena. What about policy impact?
“Impact factor” is evil. Open access was meant to counter the tyranny of impact factor, so OA journals should not try to battle it out in this arena.
Issues involve “big science” and “lost science”, research literature as infrastructure, integrating the gold and green roads to open access.
Institutional repositories and open access journals
There’s a lot of Big Science that costs a lot of money (like LHC)
But we have another big hole – the 10-90Gap. 10% of the global health research spending is allocated to diseases affecting 90% of the population
The G8 countries account for 85% of most cited articles indexed in ISI
The other 126 countries account for 2.5%
How much of these journals are relevant in terms of content?
We are operating with a dominant model of knowledge dissemination from the Center to the Periphery
We end up having “lost science” in the developing world because of that knowledge
Perpetuate the cycle of knowledge poverty in this way
African countries need to have in place appropriate mechanisms and infrastructure for training and exploitation of knowledge. This will enable them to make meaningful evidence based policy that pertains to local needs
Researchers in developing countries ranked access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems
HINARI: health sciences

108 countries, 1043 institutions, 5000 journals
Collaboration of >45 publishers: free or reduced-cost access to journals for developing countries
Others: eIFL.net, AGORA: agricultural sciences, OERE: environmental sciences, PERI
Dissemination through information philanthropy. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/1001/lcp100109.html

Open access: the solution to the “lost science”
Two routes to Open Access (OA) – open access journals and respositories
African health sciences: two years ago there was a n article published in this journal and authors found that over 50% of these drugs were substandard or fake. This got the local newspaper, and then BBC, and then other researchers started looking at it
Open Access repositories:
Institutionally-based (universities, etc) or subject-based (e.g. PubMet Central, arXiv.org)
Collect copies of articles published by the institutions researchers
Researchers themselves deposit knowledge
Benefits for authors (research output instantly accessible for all (higher impact)
Research output of international research community accessible to author
Partnerships/collaborative projects develop as a result
Career prospects advanced – publications noted by authorities
Opportunities for new research discoveries, data mining etc
Alternative impact assessment
Benefits for funding bodies: what has been discovered with our financial support? Was it a good investment?
Researchers have a moral and intellectual obligation to ensure that their research is accessible
Universities share a common goal and public mission advancement of knowledge for the betterment of human kind
Open access is key to the MDG

EVE GRAY

When we talk about open access, we talk about change and change delivery.
It’s not just intellectual property and copyright issues, but values, cultures, systems, practices, everything that underlie the process moving towards scientific research
We faced the biggest problem in facing change – we’ve seen a massive overhaul, of transformative reports, of leveraging the country into a different direction. Undoing the damage of apartheid and colonialism
What is meant by international? What is meant by local?
African knowledge for Africa: we need to rejuvenate, regenerate our own knowledge
SA: first heart transplant in the world. Have their own vaccines. Operate as a leading scientific country
Growing international competitiveness – publication is perceived as a matter of journal articles in international journals. Little or no support for publication in nationally-based publications
Much research output in grey literature, not easily findable or accessible
The Medicines and Related Substances Control Act, 2001
Research has to address the burning economic issues of a country
Things are changing…slowly
Support for open access publications
What needs to be done – open access journals are necessary.
Changing values and promotion systems – we have to somehow pick up on the vision of that vibrant African dance movement, translate this feeling
Providing support for publication efforts
Expand the range of publication outputs
Ensuring the social impact of research
There is a huge amount of research being pumped out and being printed out by NGOs
Great literature is almost inaccessible in universities
Could not access African journals – no access from their own countries or neighboring countries
Electric Book Works has manuals for health-care workers – manuals are very high-quality, out of University of Cape Town
Often forgotten that science information is necessary to trickle down, if everything is online, we can get things to trickle down
Harvard said: it is our duty to disseminate our research. Stanford: Caroline Handy – when you publish research, research for community use is part of the duty

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a2k3-panel-xi-open-access-to-science-and-research

A2K3 Panel XI - Ogg Vorbis

admin — 2008-09-21T14:43:16Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/a2k3-panel-xi.ogg

A trust deficit between advertisers and publishers is leading to fake news

sunil — 2018-10-02T06:44:55Z

Transparency regulations is need of the hour. And urgently for election and political advertising. What do the ads look like? Who paid for them? Who was the target? How many people saw these advertisements? How many times? Transparency around viral content is also required.

The article was published in Hindustan Times on September 24, 2018.

Traditionally, we have depended on the private censorship that intermediaries conduct on their platforms. They enforce, with some degree of success, their own community guidelines and terms of services (TOS). Traditionally, these guidelines and TOS have been drafted keeping in mind US laws since historically most intermediaries, including non-profits like Wikimedia Foundation were founded in the US.

Across the world, this private censorship regime was accepted by governments when they enacted intermediary liability laws (in India we have Section 79A of the IT Act). These laws gave intermediaries immunity from liability emerging from third party content about which they have no “actual knowledge” unless they were informed using takedown notices. Intermediaries set up offices in countries like India, complied with some lawful interception requests, and also conducted geo-blocking to comply with local speech regulation.

For years, the Indian government has been frustrated since policy reforms that it has pursued with the US have yielded little fruit. American policy makers keep citing shortcomings in the Indian justice systems to avoid expediting the MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties) process and the signing of an executive agreement under the US Clout Act. This agreement would compel intermediaries to comply with lawful interception and data requests from Indian law enforcement agencies no matter where the data was located.

The data localisation requirement in the draft national data protection law is a result of that frustration. As with the US, a quickly enacted data localisation policy is absolutely non-negotiable when it comes to Indian military, intelligence, law enforcement and e-governance data. For India, it also makes sense in the cases of health and financial data with exceptions under certain circumstances. However, it does not make sense for social media platforms since they, by definition, host international networks of people. Recently an inter ministerial committee recommended that “criminal proceedings against Indian heads of social media giants” also be considered. However, raiding Google’s local servers when a lawful interception request is turned down or arresting Facebook executives will result in retaliatory trade actions from the US.

While the consequences of online recruitment, disinformation in elections and fake news to undermine public order are indeed serious, are there alternatives to such extreme measures for Indian policy makers? Updating intermediary liability law is one place to begin. These social media companies increasingly exercise editorial control, albeit indirectly, via algorithms to claim that they have no “actual knowledge”.

But they are no longer mere conduits or dumb pipes as they are now publishers who collect payments to promote content. Germany passed a law called NetzDG in 2017 which requires expedited compliance with government takedown orders. Unfortunately, this law does not have sufficient safeguards to prevent overzealous private censorship. India should not repeat this mistake, especially given what the Supreme Court said in the Shreya Singhal judgment.

Transparency regulations are imperative. And they are needed urgently for election and political advertising. What do the ads look like? Who paid for them? Who was the target? How many people saw these advertisements? How many times? Transparency around viral content is also required. Anyone should be able to see all public content that has been shared with more than a certain percentage of the population over a historical timeline for any geographic area. This will prevent algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers, and also help public and civil society monitor unconstitutional and hate speech that violates terms of service of these platforms. So far the intermediaries have benefitted from surveillance — watching from above. It is time to subject them to sousveillance — watched by the citizens from below.

Data portability mandates and interoperability mandates will allow competition to enter these monopoly markets. Artificial intelligence regulations for algorithms that significantly impact the global networked public sphere could require – one, a right to an explanation and two, a right to influence automated decision making that influences the consumers experience on the platform.

The real solution lies elsewhere. Google and Facebook are primarily advertising networks. They have successfully managed to destroy the business model for real news and replace it with a business model for fake news by taking away most of the advertising revenues from traditional and new news media companies. They were able to do this because there was a trust deficit between advertisers and publishers. Perhaps this trust deficit could be solved by a commons-based solutions based on free software, open standards and collective action by all Indian new media companies.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindustan-times-sunil-abraham-september-24-2018-a-trust-deficit-between-advertisers-and-publishers-is-leading-to-fake-news