The Centre for Internet and Society
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Orientation & Training session of Jalbiradari Activists
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/orientation-training-session-of-jalbiradari-activists
<b>An Orientation & Training session of Jalbiradari Activists was held on 4 January, 2017</b>
<p><span style="text-align: justify;">A Marathi Wikipedia orientation and training session was conducted for Jalbirdari activists on 4 January, 2017 at the Kokale District, Sangli, Cooperative Society Hall. The event was keeping in line with CIS-A2K's attempts at engaging with communities of interest. The Jalbiradari water conservationists were introduced to Wikipedia and its projects. They were given an orientation on Marathi Wikipedia as a knowledge resource and encouraged to write about their village, water and environmental issues on Marathi Wikipedia. </span></p>
<p><span style="text-align: justify;">The participants were involved in an open interaction with the community on local issues and cultivation and preservation of local knowledge. With 30 members taking part in the three-hour-long event, four articles were created and edited on Marathi Wikipedia. </span></p>
<p>The meta page for the event can be found <a class="external-link" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Orientation_%26_Training_session_of_Jalbiradari_Activists_on_4th_January_2017">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/orientation-training-session-of-jalbiradari-activists'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/orientation-training-session-of-jalbiradari-activists</a>
</p>
No publisherSubodh KulkarniCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaMarathi WikipediaOpenness2017-04-16T11:30:24ZBlog EntryComments on the Draft National Policy on Software Products
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society submitted public comments to the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Information & Communications Technology, Govt. of India on the National Policy of Software
Products on December 9, 2016. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>I. Preliminary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>1.</strong> This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society, India (“<strong>CIS</strong>”) on the Draft National Policy on Software Products <a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a> (“<strong>draft policy</strong>”), released by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (“<strong>MeitY</strong> ”).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>2.</strong> CIS commends MeitY on its initiative to present a draft policy, and is thankful for the opportunity to put forth its views in this public consultation period.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>3.</strong> This submission is divided into three main parts. The first part, ‘Preliminary’, introduces the document; the second part, ‘About CIS’, is an overview of the organization; and, the third part contains the comments by CIS on the Draft National Policy on Software Products.</p>
<h2>II. About CIS</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>4.</strong> CIS is a non-profit organisation <a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> 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, freedom of speech and expression, intermediary liability, digital privacy, and cyber security.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>5.</strong> CIS values the fundamental principles of justice, equality, freedom and economic development. This submission is consistent with CIS' commitment to these values, the safeguarding of general public interest and the protection of India's national interest at the international level. Accordingly, the comments in this submission aim to further these principles.</p>
<h2>III. Comments on the Draft National Policy on Software Products</h2>
<h3><strong>General Comments</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>6.</strong> CIS commends MeitY on its initiative to develop a consolidated National Policy on Software Products. We believe that there are certain salient points in the draft policy that deserve particular appreciation for being in the interest of all stakeholders, especially the public. An indicative list of such points include:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;"><li>A focus on aiding digital inclusion via software, especially in the fields of finance, education and healthcare.</li>
<li>The recognition of the need for openness and application of open data principles in the private and public sector. Identifying the need for diversification of the information technology sector into regions outside the developed cities in India.</li>
<li>Identifying the need for innovation and original research in emerging fields such as Internet of Things and Big Data.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>7.</strong> We observe that the draft policy weighs in the favour of creating a thriving digital economy, which indeed is a commendable objective per se. However, there are certain aspects which remain to be addressed by the draft policy, to ensure that the growth of our domestic software industry truly achieves the vision set out in Digital India for better delivery of government services and maximisation of the public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>8.</strong> We submit that the proposed policy should include certain additional guiding principles to direct creation of software and its end-utilisation. These principles would ensure responsible, inclusive, judicious and secure software product life cycle by all the relevant stakeholders, including the industry, the government and especially the public. An indicative list of such principles that we believe should be explicitly included in the policy are:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;"><li>Ensuring that internationally accepted principles of privacy are followed in software development and utilisation, including public awareness.</li>
<li>Requiring basic yet sufficient standards of information security to ensure protection of user data at all stages of the software product life cycle.</li>
<li>Enforcing lingual diversity in software to allow for India’s diverse population to operate indigenous software in an inclusive manner.</li>
<li>Mandating minimum standards on accessibility in software creation, procurement and implementation to ensure sustainable use by the differently-abled.</li>
<li>Focusing on transparency & accountability in software procurement for all public funded projects.</li>
<li>Implementing the utilisation of Free and Open Source Software (“<strong>FOSS</strong>”) in the execution of public funded projects as per the mandate of the Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India; thereby incentivising the creation of FOSS for use in both private and public sector.</li>
<li>For software to be truly inclusive of the goals of Digital India, it is essential that to provide supports to Indic languages and scripts without yielding an inferior experience or results for the end user in non-English interfaces. Software already deployed should be translated and localised.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>9.</strong> The inclusion of these principles in substantive clauses of the policy will go a long way in ensuring the sustainable and transparent growth of domestic software product ecosystem.</p>
<h3><strong>Specific Comments</strong></h3>
<h4><strong>10.</strong> Development of a robust Electronic Payment Infrastructure</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>10.1.</strong> CIS observes that clauses 5.4 and 6.7 of the draft policy aim to establish a seamless electronic payment infrastructure. We submit that an electronic payment infrastructure should be designed with strong standards of information security, privacy and inclusivity (both accessibility and lingual).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>10.2.</strong> We recommend that the policy mandate minimum standards of information security, privacy and inclusivity in all payment systems across private and public sectors. The policy should, therefore, ideally specify the respective standards for these categories, for instance ISO 27001 and National Policy on Universal Electronics Accessibility <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a>, alongside other industry standards for Electronic Payment Infrastructure.</p>
<h4>11. Government Procurement</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>11.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.1 of the draft policy seeks to develop a framework for inclusion of Indian software in government procurement. It is commendable that the draft policy identifies the need for a better framework. CIS notes that the existing procurement procedure allows for usage of Indian software. In fact, the Government e-Marketplace(eGM) already has begun to incorporate some of these principles in general procurement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>11.2.</strong> Indeed, the presence of a transparent and accountable government procurement, which leverages technology and the internet, is key to ensuring a sustainable and fair market. CIS recommends that the policy refer to these guiding principles to enable the development of a viable cache of Indian software products by creating more avenues, including government procurement.</p>
<h4>12. Incentives for Digital India oriented software</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>12.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.3 of the draft policy incentivises the creation of software addressing the action pillars of the commendable Digital India programme.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>12.2.</strong> For development of superior quality software which will ensure excellent success of the Digital India programme, CIS recommends that the incentives should be provided <em>contingent </em>to the incorporation of certain minimum standards of software development. Such products and services should, <em>inter alia</em>, adhere to the stipulations under National Policy on Universal Electronics Accessibility, the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites, Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011, etc. In the process, the software should be subjected to reviews by a neutral entity to gauge the compliance with the abovementioned minimum standards.</p>
<h4>13. Increasing adoption of Open APIs and Open Data</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>13.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 6.6 of the draft policy promotes the use of open APIs and open data in development of e-government services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>13.2.</strong> We strongly recommend that open APIs and open data principles be adopted by software used in all government organizations, and non-commercial software . Open Data and Open APIs can serve a vital role in ensuring transparent, accountable and efficient governance, which can be leveraged in a major way within the policy by the public and civil society.</p>
<h4>14. Creation of Enabling Environment for Innovation, R&D, and IP Creation and Protection</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.1.</strong> CIS observes that clause 8.1 of the draft policy seeks to create an enabling environment for innovation, R&D, and IP creation and protection.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.2.</strong> CIS submits that the existing TRIPS-compliant Indian intellectual property law regime is adequately designed to incentivise creativity and innovation in the area of software development. The Indian Patents Act, 1970 read with the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions, 2016 do not permit the patenting of <em>computer programmes per se</em>. Several Indian software developers, notably small and medium sized development companies have made evidence-based submissions to the government previously on the negative impact of software patenting on software innovation <a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>14.3.</strong> CIS recommends that the proposed policy re-affirm the adequacy of the Indian intellectual property regime to protect software development, in compliance with the TRIPS Agreement.</p>
<h2>IV. Conclusion</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>15.</strong> CIS commends the MeitY on the development of the draft policy. We strongly urge MeitY to address the issues highlighted above, especially emphasising the incorporation of essential principles such as information security, privacy, accessibility, etc. Adoption of such measures will ensure a fair balance between commercial growth of domestic software industry and the maximisation of public interest.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify;" />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. National Policy on Software Products (2016, Draft internal v1. 15) available at <a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf">http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf</a></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/National%20Policy%20on%20Software%20Products.pdf">[</a><a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. See The Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a class="external-link" href="http://cis- india.org">http://cis- india.org</a> for details of the organization,and our work.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. See <a class="external-link" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Accessible-format-National%20Policy%20on%20Universal%20Electronics.pdf">http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Accessible-format-National%20Policy%20on%20Universal%20Electronics.pdf</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. See <a class="external-link" href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52159304.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&amp;utm_me%20dium=text&amp;utm_campaign=cppst">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/52159304.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_me dium=text&utm_campaign=cppst</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-software-products</a>
</p>
No publisherAnubha Sinha, Rohini Lakshané, and Udbhav TiwariOpen StandardsNational Software PolicyOpen SourceOpen DataInternet GovernanceOpenness2016-12-12T14:45:11ZBlog EntryOdia Wikipedia: Sambalpur University Workshop
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-sambalpur-university-workshop
<b>An Odia Wikipedia orientation-cum-workshop program was organised for the students of Sambalpur University on 27 November, 2016.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-57c935f1-7aa4-2268-38e8-27623022a030">Over the last couple of years, the Odia Wikipedia community has been successful in organising workshops and outreach programs in different parts of coastal and central Odisha. With over 38 active Wikipedians (as of 2016), the Odia community is growing everyday and expanding across different parts of Odisha. The recent increase in the number of Wikipedians in western Odisha inspired the community members to conduct an introductory Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University.</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-57c935f1-7aa4-4ad9-0835-7f6b5f11bb95"></span></p>
<p dir="ltr">On 27th November 2016, an orientation-cum-workshop program for Odia Wikipedia was organised for the students of Computer Science and Application Department and the Odia Department in Sambalpur University. 57 participants, comprising 30 male and 27 female participants attended the event. 5 faculty members were also present. Dr. Chitta Ranjan Dash, the Vice Chancellor of the University was the Guest of Honour for the workshop. Three Odia Wikipedians- Mrutyunjay Kar, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Nistha Ranjan Dash facilitated the workshop as mentors.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-57c935f1-7aa4-7b5a-8d06-34217967e458"></span></p>
<p dir="ltr">The workshop began with an introduction to Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource digitisation efforts by Dr. Sarada Baboo, a professor from the Computer Science and Application department. The first session introduced the various Wikimedia projects to the participants. The participants were given an introduction on how to contribute to the different Wiki projects. They were also given an orientation on Wikipedia policies and guidelines. After this, the participants were introduced to Odia Wikipedia and its development over the years. The post lunch session trained participants on creating user accounts, articles, and other basic dos and don’ts on Wikipedia. During the training session, over 20 Wikipedians were able to create accounts.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-57c935f1-7aa4-a8ad-d5c7-f6bb586c1a79">The Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University was an important step to raise awareness about the Wikipedia movement in western Odisha, This was the first workshop in Sambalpur University and the second workshop in western Odisha after three years. Over <a href="http://suniv.ac.in/upload/List%20of%20Colleges%20_Aff.pdf">196 colleges </a> are affiliated to Sambalpur University, in seven different districts in western Odisha. A regular follow up with the University, the faculty and the students will help in furthering the free knowledge movement in western Odisha.</span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-sambalpur-university-workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-sambalpur-university-workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherSailesh PatnaikCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOdia WikisourceOdia WikipediaOpenness2017-04-17T06:44:47ZBlog Entry4 tips for DIY makers
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/opensource-november-18-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-4-tips-for-diy-makers
<b>I started learning stencil printing and hand lettering this year, and became quite enthralled with it. These age old techniques really add something special to postcards, which I usually send to myself, my wife, and my friends while traveling.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://opensource.com/article/16/11/4-tips-DIY-maker">Opensource.com </a>on November 18, 2016</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, I started considering how I could make the artwork from these postcards open to others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Linocuts_and_stencils_made_by_Subhashish_Panigrahi" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a free license, usually <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 </a> or <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 4.0 International</a>. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sometimes, I capture the postcard-making process as well, and upload those images to Wikimedia Commons.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If you're considering making your DIY project open, here are four main considerations:</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">1. To share or not to share?</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Deciding whether to share your craft project or image might be an easy "sure, why not?" but you may be wondering "but, is it useful to others?"</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">My opinion is that yes, everything you make could be interesting to others, so why not make it open? There is certainly something in every maker activity that is worth sharing publicly. When I was making a stamp that was quite special and personal, and I did not want the whole world to see it because it was personal, but I did capture the stamp carving process for others to see. You might want to ask around friends and other people in any maker community you are part of. Also, try asking yourself what really would matter to other people so that you can share only useful outcomes and tips rather than sharing everything.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">2. Choosing a license</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I wrote about <a href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators" target="_blank">three tips for sharing your work online</a>. And there are many other resources out there, including <a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> and <a href="http://choosealicense.com/" target="_blank">GitHub</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A simple rule of thumb is: Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain" target="_blank">Public Domain</a>, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">3. Where to share</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is almost a platform to share anything these days. Most popular multimedia platforms support Creative Commons-licensed works, like <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en" target="_blank"> YouTube</a> and <a href="https://vimeo.com/creativecommons" target="_blank"> Vimeo</a> for video, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/" target="_blank"> Flickr </a> for images, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/2015/05/06/medium-embraces-cc-licenses/" target="_blank"> Medium</a> for writing, <a href="https://www.jamendo.com/faq#q8" target="_blank"> Jamendo</a> for music, and many more. <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload" target="_blank"> Wikimedia Commons</a>, mentioned above, is a sister project of Wikipedia and the world's largest multimedia repository; it allows original works to be uploaded and shared by <a href="https://tools.wmflabs.org/relgen/" target="_blank">Copyright holders and others</a> of works like images (.jpg, .png, .gif), presentations (.pdf), videos (.webm and .ogv), and audio files (.ogg).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Know of more places to share works? Let us know in the comments.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">4. Meet birds of feather and exchange ideas</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are tons of global and local events that bring people of all maker interests under a single roof.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An event that I love is Mozilla's <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/tag/maker-party/" target="_blank"> Maker Party</a>. I have been to one in my city of <a href="http://blog.mozillaindia.org/24" target="_blank">Bengaluru</a>, India and can guarantee it is lots of fun!</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Events like this help connect you with other makers who live nearby.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Tell us about your experience</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I hope these tips have helped. Do you have other tips to share? Leave us a comment.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/opensource-november-18-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-4-tips-for-diy-makers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/opensource-november-18-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-4-tips-for-diy-makers</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpennessOpen SourceCreative CommonsWikimedia2016-11-22T02:36:39ZBlog EntryShould Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published
<b>We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Subbiah Arunachalam was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/1/Post-print_APC_paper.pdf">Indian Institute of Science Repository</a> on October 29, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journals and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">More than two decades ago Harnad posted his subversive proposal to a mailing list in which he called on researchers “to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the internet.”<sup>1,2</sup> Many researchers now make their papers freely available either by publishing them in open access (OA) journals or by placing them in repositories or websites. Indeed, a 2013 report asserted that by 2011 “free availability of a majority of papers has been reached in general science and technology, in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics, and statistics,” and that the number of open access papers has been growing by about 2% a year.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Journals make papers open access in two ways: OA journals make all papers open access immediately on publication, and hybrid OA journals make selected papers open access. Most OA journals listed in the <i>Directory of Open Access Journals</i> (<i>DOAJ</i>) do not charge to make a paper open access<i>. Current Science </i>is such a journal. Many OA journals – about 26% according to Solomon and Björk<sup>4</sup> – and all hybrid OA journals levy an article processing charge (APC) to provide OA to a paper. However, according to Crotty,<sup>5 </sup>the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC. The APC levied by journals used by Indian researchers is in the range INR 500 (~US$8) - US$5,000.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">OA journal publishing, particularly by commercial publishers and in the field of biomedicine, is growing rapidly. According to <i>DOAJ</i> there are 9,192 OA journals as of 2 September 2016 published from 130 countries and one can access more than 2.27 million articles. Currently, <i>DOAJ </i>is growing at the net rate of 6 titles per day.<sup>6</sup> The <i>Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources</i> (<i>ROAD</i>) lists 14,031 OA journals published from some 140 countries.<sup>7</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Repositories, where full texts of research publications are deposited and made available online, are of two kinds: central repositories, such as <i>arXiv</i>, and distributed (or institutional) repositories, such as the University of Southampton institutional research repository, <eprints.soton.ac.uk>, the first of its kind. <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Here we are concerned only with the open access journals which make all content open access immediately on publication. Further, our interest is in papers from India that are published in journals levying APC. The question we are particularly interested in is, ‘is paid open access affordable for India?’ And, even if it is affordable, should we go for it?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We assessed the current status of the use of OA journals by Indian researchers using bibliometric analysis of data gathered from <i>Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded</i> (<i>SCIE</i>). We used this analysis to find out the number of papers Indian researchers have published in OA journals charging APC, leading to an estimate of the amount the country as a whole would potentially have spent on APC costs, and to see if publishing in paid OA journals led to higher levels of citations.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Methodology</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We searched for articles, letters, proceedings papers and reviews from India in OA journals</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">indexed in <i>SCIE</i> in the five years 2010-2014. The search made on 11 January 2016 resulted in</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">37,122 papers. Of these, 44 papers resulting from five international collaborations (CMS,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ATLAS, ALICE, STAR and FAITH), and appearing in journals such as <i>Physics Letters B</i>, <i>New Journal of Physics</i>, <i>Nuclear Physics B</i> and <i>BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders</i>, had a very large number of authors (running to several hundreds). We removed them from the data set as they hindered processing the data. Thus we considered 37,078 papers. We downloaded full bibliographic data for all these and analysed the data using Visual FoxPro and found that Indian researchers have used 881 OA journals in which to publish these papers. We visited the web site of each of these journals during January- February 2016 to find out information on APCs levied by them. Also we classified the journals into 22 major field categories following the <i>Essential Science Indicators </i>(ESI) classification. This classification does not allocate journals to multiple fields. We identified papers in which at least one author was from a country other than India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Using the same strategy as used for Indian publications, we recorded the number of papers published by 12 other countries and the proportion of OA papers (data gathered on 29 January 2016).</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Results</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We present here the key findings. Details of our bibliometric analysis are available from the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">authors and will soon be presented in a report.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of OA journals by researchers</i><b> – </b>In the five years considered, SCIE had indexed 6,460,105 papers, of which 748,127 (or 11.58%) were in OA journals. In Fig. 1<b>,</b> we present the share of proportion of journal publications which have appeared in OA journals in 13 countries in the 5year period 2010-2014. Brazil has the highest proportion (close to one in three papers), with</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India coming a distant second (one in seven papers). That Brazil leads is not surprising. Long before the OA movement began, the funding community led by the São Paulo Science</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Center on Health Sciences Information recognized the need for strengthening the visibility of the Brazilian journals, and initiated the SciELO movement in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1997, which later spread to Chile and the rest of Ibero-America and South Africa.<sup>8</sup> As Vessuri et al.<sup>9</sup> have pointed out, a strong sense of public mission among Latin American universities, coupled with the realization that OA improves the presence and impact of Latin American research publications led Latin America to develop its own knowledge exchange mechanisms on its own terms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Estimates of the proportion of open access papers vary widely depending on the source used and when the estimate was made. For example, by analysing journals indexed in <i>Scopus</i> we found that 4,231 of the 22,460 active titles (as of 6 February 2016) were OA (as seen from <i>DOAJ</i> on September 2015) and were listed in either or both of <i>DOAJ</i> and <i>ROAD</i>.<sup>10</sup> Of the more than</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12,000 journals covered by <i>Web of Science,</i> 1,313 journals are OA as of October 2015 as listed</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">by <i>DOAJ</i>.<sup>11</sup> Analyzing data from <i>Google Scholar</i>, Jamali and Nabavi showed that more than 61% of papers were accessible in full text.<sup>12</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of journals charging APC</i> - In 2010, Indian researchers had published their work in 479 OA journals, of which 237 did not charge APC. The number of OA journals used by Indian researchers to publish their work is increasing (Table 1). It has risen from 445 in 2009<sup>13</sup> to 611 in 2014. More than half of the 611 journals levy APC.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not all journals charging APC have a fixed APC. There are many models. Of the 881 <i>SCIE</i>indexed OA journals which Indian researchers have used, 488 charge a fee: 437 charge a fixed APC, 49 levy page charges, and two charge a non-refundable submission fee. Contrary to</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Crotty’s observation that the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC,<sup>5</sup> Indian authors publish a larger number of papers in non-APC journals. However, papers published in journals levying APC are cited a larger number of times on average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The APC OA journal used most often by Indian researchers in the five-year period is <i>PLoS One</i> with a total publication count of 2,404 and average cites per paper (CPP) of 7.32. Starting with 78 papers in 2009,<sup>13</sup> the number increased to 724 papers from India in 2014. Indeed, <i>Current Science</i>, which comes next in the list with 2,334 papers with a CPP of 1.74, was the leader until 2011.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Overseas collaboration </i>- All authors are from India in 30,152 of the 37,078 papers published by Indian researchers in the 881 OA journals; this includes papers in which all authors are from the same institution as well as papers with authors from more than one Indian institution. These papers have been cited 78,722 times for a CPP of 2.61. There are 6,926 papers with at least one author from an address outside India, and these have been cited 39,031 times for a CPP of 5.63.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers have collaborated with authors from some 115 countries. Collaborators are mainly from USA (2,191 papers), UK (815 papers) and Germany (708 papers).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Country of journal publication </i>- Indian authors have published in OA journals from 61 countries. More than half (18,781) were published in 48 Indian journals, six of which charge APC. As one would expect, US and UK journals followed Indian journals in the number of papers published: 7,647 papers were published in 149 US journals of which 107 charge APC, and 2,834 papers were published in 172 UK journals of which 162 charge APC. Indian researchers have published</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">675 papers in 54 Brazilian OA journals of which nine levy APC, 229 papers in 9 Chilean OA journals of which two levy APC, 231 papers in 14 journals published from China of which five charge APC in the five yeras. In these five years Indian authors have published 652 papers in seven Nigerian APC journals. Of these, all but one were delisted from <i>Web of Science</i> after a few years of coverage. Such delisting is all too common. Of the 881 journals studied here, only 263 have been used by Indian researchers in all five years.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i> </i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Citations to papers published in journals levying APC</i> – Number of papers by Indian researchers in 57 journals charging APC and publishing at least 10 papers from India and has a CPP of not less than 10 are listed in Table 2. Table 3 lists the 10 journals that do not levy APC and have been cited at least 10 times on average in the five years. Three journals, viz. <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i>, <i>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</i>, and <i>BMC Genomics</i>, all of which charge an APC of well over US$2,000, have published more than 100 papers from India. In all three journals, CPP of Indian papers are less than CPP of the journal as a whole, and there is a big difference between the CPP of papers written solely by Indian authors and that of those written in collaboration with foreign authors. For example, <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i> has published 138 papers from India (CPP 14.09) out of a total of 6,614. The journal’s average CPP for the 5-year period is 25.29 as against India’s CPP of 14.09. The 80 papers entirely written by Indian researchers has a CPP of less than 10, and the CPP of the 58 papers with foreign collaborators is more than 22.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As many as 92 papers have appeared in 10 OA journals which do not charge APC, none of which are from India, and these have been cited more than 15 times on average. Of the 92 papers, 41 were published in the <i>Bulletin of the World Health Organization</i> at a CPP of about 12.5. In contrast, the CPP of the 478 papers published in the journal during the five years is above 15.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of mega journals- </i>Indian authors have published 3,100 papers in nine mega journals where the papers are accepted without applying the usual standards of strict peer review if they are perceived to be technically sound (Table 4).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Papers classified by field - </i>It is in Clinical Medicine that Indian researchers have published in the largest number of OA journals (208) as well as contributing the largest number of papers (10,036). They have published in 88 journals in the field of Plant and Animal Science, but have published a much larger number of papers in both Chemistry and Biology & Biochemistry in a smaller number of journals.<i> </i></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Discussion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 14.4% of the 37,122 papers from India as seen from <i>SCIE</i> have been published in OA journals. The actual number of OA papers from India will be much larger since, for example,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Scopus</i> is likely to have indexed a larger number of such papers. Additionally, there are papers published in hybrid OA journals and papers published in non-OA journals that are made open access by placing them in institutional or central repositories or freely available through author websites, which indicates that there is a welcome growing awareness of the need for making one’s work OA. Our earlier study<sup>13</sup> has revealed that some 16% of Indian papers were pulished in OA journals indexed in SCIE 2009, but in that study we had considered all categories of papers from OA journals collected comprehensively from various sources.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Potential spend on APC seen in perspective </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We estimated the total APC for all 14,293 papers published by Indian authors in OA journals charging a fixed APC (leaving out 7% of all OA papers charging variable APC). We found there is an average cost of ~ US$1,173 per paper. We compared this figure with the costs on APCs incurred by institutions elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From a survey of a large sample of journals listed in DOAJ carried out in 2014, Morrison <i>et al</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">reported an average APC of US$964.<sup>14</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wellcome Trust, which supports payment of charges incurred by their grantees, reported a total spend of about £4.7 million paid for 2,556 papers, published in OA or hybrid journals, in 2013-14 at an average APC of £1,837. Close to 60% of these papers were published in the journals of the five leading publishers, and of these 68% were in hybrid journals. In 2014-15, the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Charity Open Access Fund, comprising the Trust and five other funders, had paid more than £5.6 million towards APCs for 2,942 papers at an average cost of £1,914.<sup>15</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In its report dated March 2015, RCUK indicated an average APC of £1,600, based on APC paid for 6,504 papers from 55 universities during the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15. The average APC paid varies from university to university, from £778 for the School of Oriental & African</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Studies to £2,248 for Durham University.<sup>16</sup> Over the 15-month period April 2013 – July 2014,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Leeds University alone had paid publishers a little over £270,000, of which about £10,000 was for colour and page charges. For the 166 RCUK funded papers for which APCs were paid during the review period, the average cost of APC was £1,626.74.<sup>17 </sup>University of Cambridge spent</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">£936,000 towards APC in 2014. For the 495 RCUK funded papers the average cost was £1,891.<sup>18</sup> Besides this, the university has also supported payment of page and colour charges and has paid for researchers to join memberships that offer a discount for APCs out of the RCUK fund. There is a growing concern in the university if they should be spending so much money on</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APCs.<sup>18</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Björk and Solomon, in their report submitted to a consortium of European funding agencies in March 2014, had estimated the average APC from a study of journals indexed in <i>Scopus</i> for at least two years to be US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Gerritsma reported that in 2013, the Netherlands had spent €4 million towards 3,314 papers published in OA journals charging APC and in hybrid journals, and indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, at an average APC of €1,220.<sup>20 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2015, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) spent over €418,000 on APCs for 288 papers in Gold OA journals (average €2,376) and €2.38 million on APCs for 913 papers (average €1,453). In addition FWF incurred an expenditure of €273,600 on other costs.<sup>21</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The variation is to be expected, as the sampled journals vary and in the case of India a substantial number of low-APC journals would have been used. Wang et al. have found that the level of APCs varies with the region. European and North American APC OA journals have average</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of more than US$2000, while Asian, African and South American APC OA journals have average APC of less than US$1000.<sup>22</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If we assume that APC was paid in full for all the 14,297 papers (4,775 with foreign collaborators and 9,522 by exclusively Indian authors) published by Indian authors in OA journals charging APC, the total expenditure would be around US$16.75 million. This figure does not include the APC for the other 7% of papers published in journals charging APC on the basis of number of pages, submission fee, and so on. Nor does it include the expenditure on OA papers published in hybrid journals. These journals usually charge much more than journals with fixed APC. According to Björk and Solomon (2014), the average APC for publication charged by hybrid journals published by subscription publishers (such as Elsevier and Wiley) is US$</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2,727, almost double that chaged by fully OA journals published by non-subscription publishers (such as PLoS), US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup> It is possible that APCs for many papers jointly authored with foreign collaborators might have been paid by the other party. Also, in some cases authors might have been granted either a fee waiver or a discount. Allowing for these possibilities, we may assume that the sum spent would still be very high, more than<b> ~</b>US$12 million, or an average of US$2.4 million a year. This amount is in addition to the national expenditure on its academic and research library budget. Data releaesed early this year as part of the Natioanl Institutional Ranking Framework (https://www.nirfindia.org/Ranking) exercise reveal that the academic and library budget is by no means small.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Author pays model has failed </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the initial years of the ‘author pays’ OA journals, the hope was that OA publishing would be cheaper than subscription publishing. Eisen claimed that APC would go down “and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero.”<sup>23</sup> What we see in reality, however, is that the APC charged by <i>PLoS One</i> has gone up from US$1,250 when it was founded in December 2006 to US$1,450 now. The APC charged by <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> has increased from</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">US$1,500 at launch in 2003 to US$2,900 in 2012, a rise of 93% in nine years.<sup>23</sup> The situation at</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">BioMed Central is no different. Comparing the APC levied by the 165 BMC titles between 2010 and 2016, Wheatly has shown that for many titles there has been a substantial rise.<sup>24</sup> Neylon, a former employee of PLoS had recently conceded that “no functional market is emerging and it</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(APC model) might be the wrong economic model.”<sup>25</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the high energy physics community and librarians from more than 20 countries negotiated with publishers to make key journals OA, it resulted in a contract with 11 publishers that would ensure they could make 10 journals OA immediately on publication and, in return, continue to make the profits they were making earlier with the subscription model. From its inception in</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">January 2014, SCOAP<sup>3</sup> is making papers available on an OA basis and it charges an average</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of US$1,165.<sup>26</sup> According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">“</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/">SCOAP</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/"><sup>3</sup></a> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">n</a>early doubled in size this past year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents,” and “the <a href="http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en">Electronic Journals Library</a> added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">7% growth rate.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 1999, Rosenzweig<sup>27</sup> pointed out that the world of knowledge was being “kidnapped and held for ransom” by commercial publishers who have “turned renegade, exiling themselves from the academic enterprise, and focusing entirely on making the most money for their stockholders” and in the process “restricting the flow of knowledge.” Laakso and Björk have pointed out that today commercial publishers are the most common publisher of OA papers and the number of papers published by them jumped from 13,400 in 2005 to 119,900 in 2011.<sup>28</sup> Björk and Solomon<sup>19</sup> have shown that “among the established OA publishers with journals listed in <i>Scopus</i>, the average APC grew by about 5% a year over the two years 2012 – 2013.” Taking such increases into account, India’s APC bill is bound to grow far beyond the US$2.4 million in the future. These cost increases are unpredictable, making it difficult for organizations willing to pay APC to make appropriate provisions in their budgets.</p>
<h3><sub>Affordable OA publishing</sub></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Concerned about the high subscription costs and audience-limiting access rules of many traditional journals and the high levels of APCs charged by OA journals, many editorial boards broke away from publishers of such journals ‘in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher or less-restrictive access policy.’<sup> 29</sup> The most recent example is the <i>en masse</i> resignation of Rooryck and the other members of the editorial board of <i>Lingua</i> to start <i>Glossa</i>.<sup>30</sup> An early example was the resignation of the editor of <i>Evolutionary Ecology</i> along with many members of the editorial board to start <i>Evolutionary Ecology Research</i> in 1998.<sup>29 </sup>Suber maintains a list of such ‘Journal declarations of independence.’<sup>29</sup> Gowers, a strong opponent of publishers making tall claims about the value they add to publications and the huge subscription prices they charge, has launched an <i>arXiv</i> overlay journal called <i>Discreet Analysis</i>, owned by a group of researchers, in which the overall cost per article will be well below $30.<sup>31</sup> His idea is to demonstrate that “in the internet age, and in particular in an age when it is becoming routine for mathematicians to deposit their articles on the <i>arXiv</i> before they submit them to journals, the only important function left for journals is organizing peer review.”<sup> 31</sup> How will these journals survive? Initially, the Association of Dutch Universities and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund <i>Glossa </i>so it can be completely free for both authors and readers, and the Open Libraries of the Humanities will take over the funding after five years.<sup>32 </sup>Seed money from the University of Cambridge will see through <i>Discreet Analysis in</i> the first five years.<sup>31 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It’s important [that these alternative models] acquire a reputation and prestige that people can feel it’s okay to submit to them — rather than the more established traditional journals — without damaging their careers," Gowers says.<sup>32</sup> "We need an alternative, cheap system sitting there — at which point the commercial publishers will become redundant."<sup>33</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Should Indian researchers spend a large sum on APCs?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why do authors choose to publish in certain journals? Scientists want their work not only to be seen and read but also to be appreciated and cited. For them publications are the culmination of their research and a means of achieving prestige and visibility. Moreover, the journals in which authors publish play an important role in the way the global community of scientists and funding agencies evaluate a scientist. Authors choose journals that would bring them maximum visibility, prestige and citations. Although there have been many discssions in recent times about the place of citations in scholarly communication and the undue importance paid to journal impact factors,<sup>34</sup> scientists of all age groups look forward to their papers being cited repeatedly and quickly, and journals proudly advertise their impact factors on their cover pages. Scientists do not really care if a journal is OA or if it charges APC (as long as their institution or funder is ready to cover the costs), nor surprisingly are they chary of surrendering all rights to their paper to the publisher. Many journals charging APC satisfy authors’expectations to a lesser or greater extent and authors are able to find the ones that would accept their papers. In addition, many of the journals run by major commercial publishers are run professionally and their unified graphical appearance gives them an identity. As scholarly communication moves from print to online, these publishers take advantage of emerging technological tools and standards to offer the research community ever better ways of presenting their content and they also energetically market their journals. PLoS, which was started with a view to fighting the commercial publishers, has spent US$3 million on software development in 2013-14 and more than US$413,000 on marketing and advertising in addition to expenses on promotion.<sup>35</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question, from the point ofview of authors, is, “is it all right to spend huge sums for getting papers published in OA journals?” No, says Balaram, former director of Indian Institute of Science. He believes that Indian researchers should not use government funds – money given for research - to subsidize non-Indian journals, and that the money spent on APCs could be better spent on research per se or on libraries.<sup>36</sup> Williams-Jones and colleagues belive that “for many sectors of academe, ‘paying to publish’ is ethically suspicious.<sup>37 </sup>Such an ethical concern has also been raised by Wilson and Golonka.<sup>38</sup> There are other voices from the global South opposed to OA through APC. Babini of the Latin American Social Science Council asserts that paying huge sums as APC could increase the overall costs of research and financially undermine a nation’s research and scientific publishing ecosystem.<sup>39</sup> Nilsen says paying to publish represents a new apartheid system, and that “we need to move away from a system where someone decides who should have access to what.”<sup>40 </sup>For the sake of the global public good, Nilsen recommends that we should abandon the discriminative APC-based publishing practice and adopt open access through repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The APC model of OA is not serving the true purpose of OA, which aims to create a level playing field for access to research. The APC levied by <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> is roughly equal to half of a month’s salary for an assistant professor in the United States, but more than two months of salary for an assistant professor in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, at a time when science is facing a funding crunch, it would be prudent for Indian researchers and research institutions to refrain from paying APCs to journals. A few months ago, both Rao and Swaminathan lamented the shortage of funds for research,<sup>41,42</sup> and more recently the Ministry of Human Resource Development announced some budgetary cuts for Indian Institutes of Technology<sup>43</sup> and the Ministry of Science & Technlogy has told the CSIR laboratories to fund reseach by themselves and to convert ongoing projects into for-profit ventures.<sup>44</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is the alternative model for making research OA?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What is the alternative to publishing in paid OA journals? Balaram suggests that the authors could publish their papers without paying APC and still make them open through interoperable institutional repositories.<sup>36,45</sup> Joshi has explained the advantages of depositing one’s papers in such repositories.<sup>46</sup> Authors may wonder if making a paper available through such a repository is equivalent to publishing in an OA or hybrid OA journal. The answer is yes, very nearly. Journals may insist on an embargo and they may let the author deposit only the author postprint (the refereed version). Experts such as Harnad would recommend the adoption of OA through repositories worldwide so that institutions could cancel subscriptions and use the savings to pay for the much lower-priced, affordable, sustainable OA journals.<sup>47</sup> Use of repositories is picking up around the world. According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> “Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (<i>BASE</i>) repositories collectively added more than 4.7 million documents this quarter for a total of just under 89 million documents,” and “the number of journals actively participating in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>PubMed</i></a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>Central</i></a><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/">,</a> making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow.” <a href="https://arxiv.org/"><i>arXiv</i></a> <a href="https://arxiv.org/">g</a>rew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the last year.<sup>6</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is happening in India? </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are many OA journals in India, and 337 have been listed in <i>DOAJ </i>(as on 3 September 2016). These include journals published by leading Academies, societies and government organizations such as CSIR-NISCAIR, DESIDOC, ICMR, and ICAR, and these are free to authors and readers. MedKnow, although part of a private publishing group, publishes a large number of OA titles, most of which again are free to both authors and readers. But not all Indian OA journals are on a single platform like SciELO. Apart from a few exceptions like MedKnow journals, others do not offer all the web features and metrics that leading publishers offer, which is surprising considering the wealth of technological skills available in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another platform specifically designed to provide open access to journals published in developing countries is Bioline International, a not-for-profit partnership committed to providing open access to quality research journals and reducing the South to North knowledge gap. Bioline currently supports 36 journals from 16 countries<b>.</b> The download statistics of Bioline journals (http://www.bioline.org.br/stats) are very impressive. Kirsop, a founding member of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Bioline International, told us “Within a single month in 2016, some 1.5 million full text articles were downloaded – equivalent to approximately 18 million per annum – showing the value attached to publications resulting from research carried out in regions of the global south, often referred to as ‘the missing science’, but nevertheless essential to achieve a global understanding in such areas as health and the environment.” (Personal communication, 13 April 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Organizations such as CSIR, DBT and DST have already adopted a policy of making research produced in their own laboratories, as well as research they support in other institutions, open access through placing the accepted papers in institutional open access repositories.<sup>48,49 </sup>CSIR-</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">URDIP, Pune, has set up a central platform for OA repositories and harvesting from all three organizations and these could be accessed at http://www.csircentral.net/ and http://sciencecentral.in/. Unfortunately, many laboratories under these apex bodies have not taken the OA policy seriously, nor there seems to be any will on the part of the apex bodies to implement the policy forcefully.These repositories are interoperable and have adopted the best international practices. ICAR also has an open access policy, but it does not seem to have much traction.<sup>50</sup> There are also many institutional repositories (listed in http://roar.eprints.org/), some of them well populated, but others are languishing, largely due to the indifference of scientists.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">By contrast, China seems to have made considerable progress. It was only in 2014 that the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(NSFC) issued open access policies.<sup>51</sup> By mid-March 2016 , the Open Repository of the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">NSFC included 135,000 research papers published between 1998 and 2015 by authors from 1,305 institutions. These research papers have already been downloaded more than 669,000 times. CAS now has two OA portals, namely the Institutional Repository Grid of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with content from 102 repositories, and the China Open Access Journal Portal, with content from hundreds of journals.<sup>52</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Latin America has witnessed the emergence of strong cooperative scholarly publishing ventures, such as SciELO (www.scielo.org) which hosts about 1,250 journals, and Redalyc</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(www.redalyc.org) which hosts, 1,095 journals. Of these more than 2,300 journals, 1,300 do not charge APC and others charge only a modest fee.<sup>53</sup> A SPARC report says, “SciELO and Redalyc do raise the visibility and accessibility of the journals they host, particularly with their local communities. These types of networked meta-publishers allow for central governance of policies, procedures and controls, but are intentionally decentralized to support the development of local capacity and infrastructure ensuring greater sustainability and alignment with local policies and priorities.”<sup>54 </sup>With these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Even so, researchers in Latin America continue to publish a very large proportion of their papers in non-OA journals. For example, as shown in Table 1, in the five years 2010-14, more than 65% of papers from Brazil were published in non-OA journals. The simplest way to make the large volume of non-OA papers freely available is to set up many institutional repositories and populate them quickly. Efforts are already under way in several countries and indeed a network of repositories from nine countries is coordinated by <i>La Referencia</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/), and there are legislations in place in Argentina, Mexico and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Peru to make publicly funded research freely available through repositories.<sup>55</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What needs to be done?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Compared with developments in Latin America and China, India is clearly lagging behind in making her research freely accessible. How can this be changed? We believe that making all research freely accessible through interoperable OA repositories is the ideal solution. According to Houghton and Swan,<sup> 56</sup> till the time we reach an all Gold OA (OA through journals) world, Green OA (OA through repositories) may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy. We suggest the following actions.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Populate OA repositories that are already there, as empty and sparsely populated repositories will not reflect well on the research community.</li>
<li>Set up repositories in institutions where one does not exist. Academic and research librarians can play an important role in setting up and populating repositories.</li>
<li>Academic and research organizations (at the state and central levels, as well as apex bodies), which do not have an OA policy, should adopt a policy similar to those of DBT, DST and CSIR and implement the same.</li>
<li>As part of the implementation, funding agencies and heads of organizations should have a compliance monitoring mechanism that would reward those who deposit their papers, and persuade those who do not.</li>
<li>If the policies of all agencies are aligned, it would bring about many advantages such as ease of compliance, optimization of workflow, and sharing of data and best practices.<sup>57</sup></li>
<li>All organizations may join the CSIR-URDIP effort so that a nation wide platform could emerge for OA repositories. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also, as demonstrated by HAL, France, facilitate “coherent meta-data description, connection to national authority files, quicker take up of new technologies (e.g. visualisation and data mining) and better connection with international initiatives.”<sup>58</sup></li>
<li>Funding agencies and research organizations that are so far unconcerned about their funds being used to meet APCs should stop supporting this practice. </li>
<li>A cadre of scholarly communication workforce should be developed for building institutional repositories and persuading researchers to upload materials.</li>
</ol>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If India and China follow the Latin American model of hosting all or most of their journals on a single decentralized platform and make as many journals as possible OA, and if India, China and Latin America vigorously promote a culture of OA repositories and encourage researchers to self-archive their publications, that would have a great impact on making science and scholarship open, not only in these regions but around the world. All of this can happen only with the willing participation of the scientific community. As Harnad would say, ‘Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you’.<sup>59</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If, instead, researchers continue to pay publishers exorbitant APCs, as Poynder points out, there will soon be a crisis over the cost of APCs, which would hit research the world over, but research in the developing world will be hit harder.<sup>60</sup> As long as we continue to use APC based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Acknowledgement</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are grateful to Peter Suber and Ms Barbara Kirsop for their valuable comments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">References</h3>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Fig1.jpg" alt="Fig 1" class="image-inline" title="Fig 1" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Figure 1.</b> Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 1.</b> Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2">
<p>Year</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (non-APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>All OA journals</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2010</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>242</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2557</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17550</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>237</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4131</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16301</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>479</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6688</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33851</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2011</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>263</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3067</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17367</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>244</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4280</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>507</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7347</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>30012</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2012</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>308</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2800</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15715</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>251</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4157</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9276</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>559</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6957</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24991</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2013</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>326</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3335</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12635</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>268</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4457</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6257</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>594</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7792</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18892</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2014</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>328</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3634</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6950</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>283</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4660</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3057</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>611</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>8294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10007</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15393</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>70217</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21685</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47536</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>37078</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117753</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 2.</b> OA journals charging APC in which Indian authors have published at least 10 papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Nucleic Acids Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>138</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1945</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.09</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,770</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>126</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1409</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.18</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Genomics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>123</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1330</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Nanomedicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>NZ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>94</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1555</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€1,843</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1116</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17.17</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Plant Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>44</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>579</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.16</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Pathogens</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>42</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>781</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.60</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecular Cancer</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>540</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>298</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecules</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>300</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.71</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Computational Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>342</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.68</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>721</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28.84</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,900</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>DNA Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>542</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22.58</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$750</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>354</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.75</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biogeosciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.78</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>278</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Translational Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>238</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.87</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Marine Drugs</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>256</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Neuroinflammation</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>179</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.92</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$450</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Science and Technology of Advanced Materials</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.08</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>374</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,785</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Remote Sensing</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>125</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.36</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Cryosphere</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>112</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>128</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.80</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$200</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1930</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.50</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1077</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15907</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>#</sup>Page charges</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 3.</b> Non-APC journals in which Indian authors have published their papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Bulletin of The World Health Organization</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>515</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.56</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CA</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>173</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.36</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Environmental Health Perspectives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>188</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Machine Learning Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>118</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Materials Today</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20.25</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Earth System Science Data</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>29.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>60.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.67</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Folia Neuropathologica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>PL</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.50</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 4</b>. Mega journals used by Indian researchers</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS One</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2404</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17587</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7.32</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Scientific Reports</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>222</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1523</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£990</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>AIP Advances</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>196</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Springer Plus</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>170</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>235</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.38</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,290</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMJ Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>148</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>FEBS Open Bio</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4.10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PeerJ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$695</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biology Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>83</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9.22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,950</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3100</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20349</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published</a>
</p>
No publisherMuthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ScienceOpen ContentOpen Access2016-10-29T14:47:52ZBlog EntryAdopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication
<b>ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan was published on the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54925/">eprints@IISc repository</a> on October 28, 2016. The article was originally published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54925/1/NatlMedJIndia000-103373_025217.pdf">National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. Funding agencies in Austria, Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden and the UK, and the world’s leading scholarly publishers and associations have integrated their systems with ORCID registry. Among the BRICS countries, China and South Africa are adopting ORCID avidly. India is yet to make a beginning. If research councils and funding agencies in India require researchers to adopt ORCID and link ORCID iDs to funding as well as tracking performance, it will help them keep track of the workflow. Journal editors can also keep track of contributions made by different authors and work assigned to different reviewers through their ORCID iDs.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">INTRODUCTION</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Names in scholarly publishing are not all that simple. Names here mean both names of authors of papers and names of researchers referred to in those papers. They can cause much confusion to researchers, editors of journals, database producers, librarians and bibliometricists, but if we handle them correctly we can overcome most of the problems.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SCHOLARLY LITERATURE: DISAMBIGUATION OF NAMES AND AGGREGATING ONE’S WORKS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 1969, Eugene Garfield had expressed his dismay at the ‘needless ambiguity and confusion’ caused by authors who omit parts of their names and initials in their published works, and recommended that ‘scientists who are just now embarking on their careers would be well advised to measure the information content on their names as they appear in indexes such as Index Medicus, Physics Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and Science Citation Index.<a href="#ftn1">[1]</a> Some 12 years later, he wrote a detailed paper on the problems the scholarly world faces on account of mere names of people.<a href="#ftn2">[2]</a> He had reasons to worry more than anyone else; as the publisher of Science Citation Index, Current Contents and several other search and indexing tools for the world’s scientists and scholars, he had the unenviable task of processing millions of papers and author names not only in the byline of these papers but also in the references cited in them and rendering these author names accurately and attributing research papers to the right authors and institutions within a few weeks of publication.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">People hail from all parts of the world and from different cultures, each having its own peculiarities in naming their people so much so people from one culture may find names of another strange. Added to that are the ways names from different cultures and languages are transliterated into the Roman script. The names in most parts of the western world have three parts, viz. the first name (or given name), middle name and last name (also called the family name or surname). Often the last name may have more than one word, e.g. Duncan Smith, von Braun, van der Waals, de Solla Price. The prefix ‘van’ in some names may be spelt with a capital V, albeit rarely, e.g. Van de Graaff (of generator fame). In some cultures there are a very large number of people having the same surname. For example, close to 85% of China’s population have one of only 129 surnames, and three names in particular, viz. Wang, Li and Chen, are predominant among authors publishing currently. Also there are two Chinese surnames that can be spelt as Wang when publishing in English language, says Jane Qiu.<a href="#ftn3">[3]</a> Eight Chinese names transliterate in Roman script into Wei Wang and to avoid ambiguity in such cases journals may allow authors the option to include their names in their own language in parentheses after the transliterated name.<a href="#ftn4">[4]</a> Among Korean authors, Kim and Park account for a large percentage. In India there are many Agarwals, Guptas, Mukherjees, Raos, Sharmas and Singhs among publishing authors. While some Indians have two-part surnames, e.g. Ghosh Dastidar, Guha Thakurta and Sen Sharma, a few drop their initials altogether, e.g. Karmeshu.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some have hyphenated names, e.g. Noel-Baker, Szent-Györgyi, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, all three Nobel laureates. Curiously, Noel-Baker was born Philip Baker, but took Noel as his second surname on marriage to Irene Noel and subsequently started hyphenating his surname. But in the majority of cases hyphenated names are those of women who add their husband’s family name to their own, e.g. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Rita Levi-Montalcini, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for medicine, and Irene JoliotCurie, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. In a variation, Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, used her husband’s name ahead of her maiden name: Marie Curie, née Sklodowska. Some examples from among Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy: mathematician Rajinder Jeet HansGill, photochemist Krishna Kamini Rohatgi-Mukherjee, plant physiologist Renu Khanna-Chopra, condensed matter physicist Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta, development biologist Professor Priyambada Mohanty-Hejmadi, conservation biologist Professor Asha Chandola-Saklani, and neurophysiologist Professor Sushil Dua-Sharma. Many of these women scientists have published papers both under their maiden names and under their hyphenated family names.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Japan, married couples are required by a 1898 law, which is valid till date, to have the same surname, even though giving up one’s maiden name does disadvantage women in certain ways, including professionally.<a href="#ftn5">[5]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both retaining one’s maiden name and adopting the husband’s surname have their advantages. If one achieves a lot as a young person, one would be better off retaining the name that brought her the reputation in the first place. If one achieves much after taking her husband’s name, she will have much to lose if she ever gets a divorce. Better to hold on to one’s maiden name, says Kalpana Sharma.<a href="#ftn6">[6]</a> Some professionals, e.g. Bhatnagar award winner and fluid flows expert Professor Rama Govindarajan, has chosen this option. The situation is changing in India albeit slowly. A woman in Maharashtra can now use either her father’s or husband’s names in all official documents.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are also rare instances of people changing their names midway in their career, e.g. a woman electrical engineer of Indian origin working in the University of Waterloo has over the years published under three different names, viz. K.H. Sheshakamal, Shesha Jayaram, Shesha H. Jayaram (personal communication, Muthanna J, 23 Dec 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Missing middle name in the byline, spelling mistakes and problems faced in printing (or processing by computers) texts with diacritical marks can all lead to ambiguity. But with all these vagaries, it is important that contributions such as papers, patents, datasets and software are attributed to the right contributors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many researchers have recognized the problem of author name disambiguation. A Scopus search (on 28 June 2015) using the key words ‘author name’ and ‘disambiguation’ led to 86 papers in the 13-year period 2003–2015. Of these, 46 had the keywords in the title. Some of these papers were related to the problems faced by biomedical databases, e.g.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Author Name Disambiguation for PubMed, http://online library.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23063/pdf</li>
<li>Author Name Disambiguation in MEDLINE, http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805000</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From 2012 onwards PubMed uses a ranking algorithm for author searches to show more relevant results by disambiguating common author names.<a href="#ftn7">[7]</a> This helps pooling papers by the real A.K. Sen when there are papers by others with the same name and initials.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The name ambiguity problem can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), UK, says that our inability to associate valuable research outputs with their right authors ‘has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced. Ineffective reporting and sharing of research impact on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.’ According to her, ‘wider adoption and use of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)’ is the solution to this problem.<a href="#ftn8">[8]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">WHAT IS ORCID?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A person’s ORCID iD takes the form of a unique 16-digit number, e.g. 0000-0000-0000-0000. ORCID also gives each person a web page profile based on the iD, e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-00024398-4658, listing their iD number, name(s), institution(s) and publications. (Generally ORCID is used for the organization and the registry, and ORCID iD to denote the identifier itself.) Publications here go beyond research publications such as journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, reports, research techniques, software and inventions to include books, lectures/ speeches, websites, etc.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These profiles or records together comprise the ORCID registry. This registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers (http://orcid.org/node/47) is created and maintained by an open, non-profit, community-driven effort. ORCID iDs help distinguish individuals with common names, and they are not affected by changes in name or name order or alphabet in which the name is rendered. ORCID is researcher-controlled; the researcher decides what information is included in her ORCID record.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID iDs can be embedded in research workflows. If included by the publisher or funding agency, they are part of the metadata associated with scholarly works and grants. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as DOIs and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But ORCID is not the first such attempt to associate unambiguously research papers (and other output such as datasets and software) with the right authors. Fenner has listed a number of them.<a href="#ftn9">[9]</a> Some of these cover only specific fields. Some are country specific. Some are proprietary. Some are linked to specific databases while others want to cover a wide area of science and scholarship. Fenner’s list includes RePEc Author (set up by Thomas Krichel in 1999), LATTES (an information platform mandatory for researchers in Brazil, set up by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development or CNPq, in 1999), VIAF (set up by OCLC in 2003), NARCIS (set up in 2004 by the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands and mandatory for all researchers in the Netherlands), arXiv Author ID (set up in 2005 by Cornell University for researchers in physics and related disciplines), Scopus Author ID (set up in 2006 by Elsevier), Names Project Mimas (set up in 2007 by the British Library for authors and institutions in all academic disciplines), Researcher ID (set up in 2008 by Thomson Reuters) and Author Claim (set up by Thomas Krichel in 2008).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If there are many author identity services already available, why add ORCID, one may ask. The other services are not truly interoperable, whereas ORCID allows linkage to other identifiers such as Scopus ID and Researcher ID. ORCID is the only service trying to associate its identifier with other existing author identifiers, with more than publications, and to collaborate across the community to embed it at the time that a work is ‘released’ by a researcher. Also, most other services are linked to a single bibliographic database (e.g. Researcher ID is linked to Web of Science).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">‘Thus, since none of the available author identifier services looked like the solution to the name ambiguity problem, the ORCID initiative was started in late 2009 and formed as a nonprofit organization in August 2010.’<a href="#ftn10">[10]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why should a researcher have an ORCID iD?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This section draws on information mainly from private communication with the Executive Director and other staff of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID and the Library Guide of the University of Southampton.<a href="#ftn11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It is for life, irrespective of where one chooses to live and work. Connections between the ORCID registry and other databases help one to keep one’s research profile updated and to make it visible worldwide. Authors with an ORCID iD can have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record.<a href="#ftn12">[12]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Often researchers waste much time in filling forms that require address, employment history, collaborator names, affiliation, etc. when applying for jobs, awards, academy fellowships or grants or submitting manuscripts to journals. One can have all such information in one’s ORCID profile and draw upon it at short notice. Researchers can save much of their productive time by linking their ORCID iDs to the grants or manuscript processing systems.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the Caltech Library Guide points out, as one collaborates across disciplines, institutions and borders, one ‘must interact with an increasing number and diversity of research information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming, and often frustrating’ (http://libguides.caltech.edu/orcid).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To obtain the list of publications of a researcher from a database such as Web of Science, one would need to give the name (with all variants), research domains and names of organizations (with all their variants) associated with the author. With all that, one may not get the full list. But if one uses the researcher’s ORCID iD in the identifier field, the search will give the correct list instantaneously.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anstey, editor of the 125-year-old British Journal of Dermatology, has explained lucidly why researchers, editors and funders should embrace ORCID and how through ORCID iDs one could connect to websites such as Web of Science, figshare, Impact story and others.<a href="#ftn13">[13]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">How do researchers get an ORCID iD?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Scientists, researchers, teachers, students, clinicians, scholars, authors and anyone at all, contributing to scholarly outputs from anywhere in the world can sign up for a free ORCID iD through the ORCID website (https://orcid.org/register). It is also possible to create an ID at other websites that are integrated with ORCID, for example manuscript submission websites of journals. About 5000 journals, including those published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press, use ScholarOne developed by Thomson Reuters and whenever one submits a paper to these journals one is asked to provide an ORCID iD. And if you do not have one you can create it through the publisher’s Application Program Interface (API). Claiming an ORCID iD is not at all difficult. After claiming, researchers can associate the ORCID iDs with their education and employment details and details related to collaborators, publications and outputs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Including one’s publications is simple. One can import bibliographic details of one’s publications having unique identifiers (e.g. DOI, ISBN) from the list of databases integrated with ORCID registry. The list includes Scopus, Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, Crossref Metadata Search, Redalyc, etc.<a href="#ftn14">[14]</a>One can just log in to ORCID and choose the database from which one wants to import bibliographic data. For publications that are not indexed by the databases integrated with ORCID, one can use the template provided by ORCID to manually add details. Also ORCID has created a tool by which one can import bibliographic data from BibTeX (.bib) files into one’s ORCID record, including files exported from Google Scholar and other popular reference management tools.<a href="#ftn15">[15]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Is one’s ORCID private information?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, one can choose which information to be assigned as public or private in one’s record except the actual iDs assigned by ORCID that are designed to be publicly available. Once researchers have claimed their ORCID iD, the settings are in their sole control. ORCID has a privacy selector option that lets one set the privacy level of all new works, education, employment and funding items. Usually, everyone makes the list of publications public.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID features</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID offers its essential features for free to individual researchers and organizations across the world. Researchers would be able to automatically update their ORCID record with links to published manuscripts in which they have included their ORCID iD. However, ORCID charges membership fees from organizations such as publishers, funders, and academic and research institutions, in order to sustain the registry and the mission to achieve name disambiguation, and in return offers them premium API services and personalized technical support. Also, when many organizations join as a consortium, they benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization.<a href="#ftn16">[16]</a> Indeed, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Director John Willinsky considers ORCID ‘an important emerging technology with opportunities to help shape and improve the open access publishing landscape worldwide’.<a href="#ftn17">[17]</a>Organizations can integrate ORCID iDs into research management systems and workflows using the free public API. ORCID releases a public data file annually under Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication) to support broad access to data that are made public by individual researchers through their ORCID records. The file contains the public information associated with each user’s ORCID record. Each record is included as a separate file in both JSON and XML formats (http://orcid.org/content/ orcid-public-data-file-2014).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID helps institutions track one’s work, compile information for university-level reporting (including total funding received by its scholars), and more efficiently manage information on faculty profiles. By eliminating redundancies and automating some reporting functions, ORCID will be especially helpful in reducing time and monies spent on other assessment activities such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.<a href="#ftn18">[18]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Feedback from a pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organizations that have adopted ORCID were likely to see ‘measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation—especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders— with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.’<a href="#ftn19">[19]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jan Jan Jan Jan</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2013 2014 2015 2016</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Year</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 1. Growth of ORCID iDs (http://support.orcid.org/ knowledgebase/articles/150557-number-of-orcid-ids)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Funders, 5%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Associations, 7%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Repositories,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">10%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Publishers,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">13%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Research institutes,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">65%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 2. Sectoral distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Middle East and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Africa, 2% South America, 1%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Australasia, 6%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Asia, 8%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">North Europe, 53%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">America,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">30%</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">FIG 3. Geographical distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Uptake of ORCID</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The number of live ORCID iDs grew rapidly from late 2012 (Fig. 1) and as of 29 July 2016, it exceeded 2.43 million. These are currently used by more than 200 research and workflow platforms at academic and other research institutions, at funding agencies and at publishers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As of mid-December 2015, more than 350 organizations have opted for ORCID’s member services and are at different stages of integrating ORCID iDs into their systems and workflows (Miyairi N, personal communication, 18 Dec 2015). As of 30 September 2015, 65% of ORCID members were universities (Fig. 2) spread all over the globe (Fig. 3). A representative list of different categories of members is provided in Box 1. The large European contingent is a result of three national consortia. These proportions are expected to be fluid over the next couple of years as more consortia are formed and join ORCID (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recognizing that publishers can promote systems that would provide support to researchers and to science, commencing January 2016, eight publishers will be requiring the use of ORCID iDs by corresponding authors during the publication process. These include the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS; publishers of Science), American Geophysical Union</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(AGU), eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, the Public Library of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Box 1. Uptake of ORCID </b>Among the long list of members of ORCID are:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Publishers: </b>AIP Publishing, Elsevier, National Academy of Sciences (USA), Oxford University Press, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Science Open, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Associations: </b>American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Astronomical Society, American Chemical Society, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, American Society of Microbiology, American Society of Civil Engineers, Association of Computing Machinery, Electrochemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), IOP, Modern Language Association, Royal Society of Chemistry</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Universities: </b>Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Cornell University, Lund University, Stockholm University, City University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, CINECA, Italy’s consortium of 70 universities and four research institutes</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Academies: </b>African Academy of Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Royal Society</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Funding agencies: </b>National Institutes of Health (USA), Department of Energy (USA), Wellcome Trust (UK), National Institute for Health Research (UK), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Intergovernmental bodies: </b>CABI, CERN, International Food Policy Research Institute, International Water Management Institute</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Libraries: </b>British Library, Royal Library – Denmark</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Repositories: </b>Social Science Research Network (SSRN) For the full list of members, see http://orcid.org/about/ community/members</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Science (PLoS), and the Royal Society. More than 3000 journals are already collecting ORCID iDs from corresponding authors. Currently about 75% of all registrations are through journal accounts.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Similarly, six consortia too will require the use of ORCID iDs. These are: Jisc (50 universities and research councils, UK), Italy/ ANVUR (70+ universities and research institutes), Australia, via the Australian Access Federation (40 universities, research institutes, and Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council funders), and three library consortia in the US: Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) consisting of 15 universities in the US midwest, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), a consortium of 35 research libraries located in the central and western US, and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) comprising 29 core member academic research libraries and approximately 90 affiliate member academic and/or research libraries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jisc negotiated an ORCID consortium through which universities would benefit from premium ORCID membership at significantly reduced costs. The official launch event for the consortium took place at Imperial College in late September 2015 with the participation of more than 50 UK universities, ORCID, Jisc, GuildHE, RCUK and Current Research Information System (CRIS) vendors.<a href="#ftn20">[20]</a>Since August 2015, the Wellcome Trust has required all lead applicants for grants to provide an ORCID iD.<a href="#ftn21">[21]</a>From 23 September 2015, an ORCID iD has become mandatory for all new National Institute of Health Research (NIHR, UK) personal award applications.<a href="#ftn22">[22]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Italy has implemented ORCID on a national scale, and has signed a three-year consortium membership agreement with ORCID. Under the auspices of ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems) and CRUI (the Conference of Italian University Rectors), 70 universities and four research centres initially participate in the consortium (Cineca). ANVUR made ORCID mandatory in order to participate in the National Assessment from November 2015.<a href="#ftn23">[23]</a>The Italians expect that at least 80% of Italian researchers will have an ORCID iD, with links to their research output by the end of 2016.<a href="#ftn23">[23]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is now included in the Danish National Open Access Strategy and the National Research Data Strategy. The Danish Council for Independent Research recommends, and the Novo Nordisk foundation requires an ORCID iD in funding applications. Currently DEFF, a library collaboration funded by several ministries, is sponsoring a national ORCID implementation project with project partners including seven of the eight Danish universities, a consortium of all Danish university colleges and a consortium of research institutions under the Ministry of Culture.<a href="#ftn24">[24]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Australia, according to Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania, ‘there is an active ORCID activity, and it has been adopted (or recommended) for universal application, but this has not yet reached the status of a mandate by government’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The Australian ORCID Consortium was launched on 1 January 2016 with 38 organizations (http:// aaf.edu.au/orcid/). The Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales, and Queensland, Macquarie University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, La Trobe University and Charles Darwin University and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are all members of ORCID. ORCID Working Group of Australia comprising research councils and associations has developed a consortium model for implementing ORCID iDs across the Australian research sector.<a href="#ftn25">[25]</a>Funding agencies are also keen to partner with ORCID. Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) mandated the use of ORCID in 2013. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) asks that grantees use ORCID iDs to manage information in their ScienCV system.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many other funding agencies across the world have also adopted ORCID:<a href="#ftn26">[26]</a></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The Swedish Research Council (SRC) mandated the use of ORCID in Spring 2015.</li>
<li>Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has mandated the use of ORCID starting in 2016.</li>
<li>European Commission H2020 Grantee Guidelines recommend that contributors be uniquely identifiable through identifiers which are persistent, non-proprietary, open and interoperable (e.g. through leveraging existing sustainable initiatives such as ORCID).<a href="#ftn27">[27]</a></li>
<li>Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) will mandate the use of ORCID in the next funding cycle.</li>
<li>Autism Speaks, a US-based awareness, advocacy and funding body, requires all investigators and mentors to register with ORCID to obtain a unique iD. This enables Autism Speaks to update one’s funding record and to monitor one’s research progress. Autism Speaks will not consider applications without ORCID accounts for the key personnel.<a href="#ftn28">[28]</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Publishing platforms such as Aries Editorial Manager, eJournal Press, and ScholarOne have already built-in ORCID support so authors publishing in those journals can create their ORCID iDs through them. PKP is working on developing modules for the Open Journal Systems used by more than 8600 journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Research information systems such as Elements, Plum Analytics, PURE, SmartSimple, InfoEd, University Office and Research Master, and the open access repository platforms DSpace, Dryad, EPrints, and VIVO have also built-in ORCID support.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Towards the end of 2015, Altmetrics integrated ORCID with its Explorer apps, and now one can search for Altmetric attention data for all the research outputs associated with one’s ORCID profile and thus scholars can get credit for all their research contributions, including journal articles and participation in social media.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SUPPORT TO ORCID</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Right from the beginning, ORCID’s aim was to become completely self-sustaining based on member fees. However, they did have some sponsors and they did take some loans from their own members/stakeholders (http://orcid.org/about/community/ sponsors).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In September 2011, ORCID received an NSF Eager grant of US$ 200 000 via the University of Chicago.<a href="#ftn29">[29]</a> The APIs developed with this funding and released in November 2011 could be used by third parties to integrate grant, manuscript or personnel tracking systems with ORCID. This project led to the formal launch of ORCID and its website (http://orcid.org). The philosophy and evolution of ORCID were disseminated through journals such as Nature and EduCAUSE, outreach meetings and social media channels such as twitter.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Seeing its value, a few philanthropic foundations came forward to support ORCID. An award by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to ORCID funded the pilot integration of ORCID identifiers by a group of universities and science and social science professional associations, such as Purdue University and the Society of Neurosciences. This programme supported the collaborative elicitation and documentation of ‘use cases’ and open source code, and established a collaborative venue for disseminating best practices. All projects were completed in December 2014. Partnering institutions have shared integration source code and lessons learnt with the ORCID community through ORCID’s GitHub open source repository and online ‘use cases’, and now serve as reference sites for organizations planning similar integrations.<a href="#ftn30">[30]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April 2015, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded US$ 3 million to ORCID to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support international adoption and technical integration.<a href="#ftn31">[31]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID IN EMERGING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The National Science Library (NSL) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has taken the lead in China and is taking steps to adopt ORCID nationwide.<a href="#ftn32">[32]</a> China fully recognizes the importance of the unique author identifiers, especially so for Chinese authors and the NSL sees the value in an international, open, and researcherdriven person identifier. Scientists in China are willing to work with ORCID to promote it in CAS and in the country. To this purpose, the NSL is enlisting cooperation from Web of Science, the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), CAS Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) Journal Association, University STM Journal Association, and a number of major research and academic libraries. NSL has developed the iAuthor platform, as an easy Chinese front gate to register for an ORCID identifier and to interoperate with Chinese journals, CSCD and others. The NSL iAuthor service was launched in October 2014.<a href="#ftn32">[32]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is yet to pick up in India. As of 15 September 2015, more than 1.5 million ORCID iDs have been assigned. Of these, 14 439 have been registered with an email address that ends in ‘.in’ and 17 048 records where the country is set to India (email communication from ORCID, 29 Jun 2015). That comes to <1.14%. Many authors may be using web mail addresses and we will not be able to identify them as Indian researchers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID is just starting in Latin America, according to Dominique Babini, Open Access Program Coordinator at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) (personal communication, 1 Jan 2016). According to Abel Packer, Director of SciELO, ‘ORCID is not yet widely adopted in LA. There is an increasing awareness of it and its role and importance. But, only a few institutions adopted it as an obligatory policy to their affiliates’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). Less than 10% of the authors fill the ORCID field in the submission form in the online manuscript submission/processing services used by SciELO Brazil. But, it will be adopted if funding agencies and journals make it mandatory on their submission systems. A barrier to its wide adoption is that researchers have many options to manage their profiles (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The first to join ORCID were:<a href="#ftn33">[33]</a> Redalyc, the University of the State of Mexico’s open access platform; CONCYTEC – National Council of Science and Technology in Peru; and UNESP (Sao Paulo State University) in Brazil.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Interest in ORCID has been growing in Africa for some time. In South Africa alone over 3500 researchers have registered and three universities, viz. University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science are ORCID members, as is the National Research Foundation. In all of Africa, there are >7000 registered researchers mostly from South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunis, Ghana, Kenya and Botswana. The cities in Africa that lead in ORCID use are Cairo, Tunis, Lagos, Algiers, Giza, Cape Town, Pretoria and Alexandria.<a href="#ftn34">[34]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the Asia–Pacific region there were 37 members of ORCID<a href="#ftn35">[35]</a>as of August 2015, including 13 in Australia, 3 in New Zealand, 6 in Hong Kong, 5 in Taiwan and 4 in Japan. There is one in India—a multinational company providing editing and publishing services—with offices in many countries and does not really qualify to be known exclusively as an Indian entity.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">SOME CONCERNS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some are critical of ORCID. One criticism is that ORCID is not open access and it appears to be a complicated, expensive, proprietary and monopolistic system, and the participation of several commercial publishers makes it a Trojan horse which could eventually lead to strengthening the stranglehold of the publishing industry over scholarly communication. We were alerted to this concern by Thomas Krichel (personal communication, 6 Jul 2015). Krichel ignores the fact that without the participation of large bibliographic databases, ORCID cannot provide the service effectively. Bringing on board Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), etc. is not only a clever move but is an absolute necessity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many others do not agree with this view. Bilder et al.<a href="#ftn16">[16]</a> believe that ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization. Also, as Paglione<a href="#ftn36">[36]</a> has put it: ‘One of the core principles of ORCID is that all software we develop will be publicly released under an open source software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. In addition to transparency, releasing our code will improve interoperability and integration with external services, lead to more robust code because more individuals are auditing and testing it, and, with an extended developer community, enable faster code iteration and evolution.’ Haak has also listed the open features of ORCID, viz. it provides free, barrier-free access, it is democratic and transparent, and it is open access.<a href="#ftn37">[37]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another concern is: what if unscrupulous individuals claim authorship on papers that are not theirs, if the ORCID authorship has not been previously claimed by the true author? Is there any safeguard to prevent such a possibility? Can ORCID help prevent fraudulent reviewing?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the early days, it is possible for someone to claim authorship of papers written by others. But, according to Laure Haak (personal communication, 10 Dec 2015), ‘ORCID is a public resource, and if someone claims erroneously this can be monitored by the community and reported and addressed using ORCID’s dispute procedures (see http://orcid.org/orcid-dispute-procedures). As universities and other employers of researchers are using ORCID to assert affiliation (and funders are asserting awardees also using ORCID), there becomes built a web of trusted data about an individual’s research activities, all with researcher consent.’ Also, as more and more publishers receive ORCID iDs of authors as part of the metadata when authors submit papers, and as Crossref updates the ORCID records, it will reduce unethical claims.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As far as peer-review fraud is concerned, there are attempts to counter it using ORCID.<a href="#ftn38">[38]</a> But, these are social problems and technical solutions are not the answer. The fight between good and evil is often a see-saw. However, as the uptake of ORCID gains momentum it will become difficult for such fraudsters to lay claim on others’ works.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are some reservations though about the costs involved in becoming a member of ORCID. Here is what J.K. Vijayakumar of King Abdullah University, Saudi Arabia, told us: ‘if an institution wants to use ORCID to integrate with their repository, research management systems, etc., the institution needs to become a member (the fees are high and one has to pay even more if ORCID integration is required for more than one system). This needs to be debated and ORCID should bring down the membership fee according to income of the country, so that developing nations can also take part’ (personal communication, 11 Jul 2015). This seems to be a good suggestion. In fact, a member can use one member API credential in many systems. ORCID also provides a substantial discount for small organizations (<US$ 200 000). In addition, affordability is partly why the consortium member model was launched. Haak says: ‘We continue to evaluate membership fees and are starting an initiative for adoption in developing countries in 2016’ (personal communication, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What we are concerned more is the fact that although the number of live ORCID iDs exceed 2.43 million (as of 29 July 2016), only about 337 000 of them have at least one work (https://orcid.org/statistics). Only about one in five iDs is actually being used.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">DISCUSSION</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The value of ORCID is evident even in its first 5 years. As Jonathon Kram of the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit at Wellcome Trust says, ‘the ability to uniquely identify contributors is a deceptively simple concept which, if realized, could enable forms of real-time understanding of scientific research that up to now have been extremely costly (if not impossible).’<a href="#ftn39">[39]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the Modern Language Association (MLA) enabled in June 2015 retroactive assigning of ORCID iDs to the nearly two million records in its International Bibliography, which holds the key to language and literary scholarship for more than 90 years, it met an especially critical need in the humanities and arts, where publication types and venues are so diverse, needing more work to be done to create clarity and connect the parts than in the sciences. It would also bring increased recognition and validation of humanities scholarship.<a href="#ftn40">[40]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 2012, concerned by the lack of quality, comprehensive data about biomedical researchers, the US NIH recommended the development of a simple, comprehensive tracking system for trainees, and implemented a researcher profile system called the Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae (SciENcv), and encouraged the adoption of unique, persistent ORCID identifiers for researchers.<a href="#ftn41">[41]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ORCID, along with open access and open educational resources, is integral to the open knowledge movement. It supports ‘the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature’.<a href="#ftn42">[42]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Such benefits of ORCID adoption will be fully realized only if ORCID iDs are adopted widely across the research community, and if ORCID iDs are integrated within systems of higher educational institutions, funders and publishers.<a href="#ftn43">[43]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If research councils such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and funding agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) mandate ORCID iDs for all researchers in all their laboratories and for all applicants for grants, India can make quick progress. Vice chancellors of universities, directors of research institutions, and the governing boards of academies and professional associations and societies could insist on all researchers in their respective institutions registering for an ORCID iD. Scholarly journals published by the science academies, CSIR-NISCAIR, ICAR, ICMR, professional associations, etc. could mandate inclusion of ORCID iDs by all authors at the time of submitting manuscripts. It would help immensely if India were to adopt a manpower tracking system based on ORCID in all areas of science, technology and innovation, similar to that used by NIH.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India has done reasonably well in the area of open educational resources (OER). In particular, the National Programme of Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL) executed by a consortium of IITs and Indian Institute of Science is highly regarded and is used well. But it took several years of voluntary effort before green open access became acceptable to a small percent of Indian researchers and research institutions, long after it became standard practice in many countries. We hope this time around things will move quickly and many researchers and institutions will adopt ORCID soon.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are grateful to Dr L.L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Nobuko Miyairi and Alainna Wrigley of ORCID, Rachel Bruce of Jisc, Thomas Krichel of GESIS and RePEc, Peter Suber of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Martin Fenner of DataCite, Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dominique Babini of CLACSO, Abel Packer of SciELO, for answering our questions and providing some valuable information. We are indebted to Subbiah Gunasekaran of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, for valuable discussion and for alerting us to some important developments. The comments of two referees were very helpful in rewriting and improving the original text.</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication</a>
</p>
No publisherSubbiah Arunachalam and Muthu MadhanOpen Educational ResourcesOpennessOpen ResearchOpen Access2016-10-28T16:28:49ZBlog EntryOpen source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Bengaluru
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-knowledge-international-blog-october-26-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-open-source-in-everyday-life-how-we-celebrated-the-software-freedom-day-in-bengaluru
<b>The free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The group consisted of open source contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map, and users of FOSS solutions. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was originally published by <a class="external-link" href="http://blog.okfn.org/2016/10/26/open-source-in-everyday-life-how-we-celebrated-the-software-freedom-day-in-bengaluru/">Open Knowledge International Blog</a> on October 26, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Each participant shared their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it plays in their day-to-day life. From how a father has been trying to introduce about open source to his young son while migrating from proprietary to open source back and forth as his job demands so, to an Open Street Map contributor who truly believes that large-scale contributions to open source can make the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lies in it. All of those who gathered agreed with the fact that FOSS has widened their freedom in choosing how they want to use, share and remix the software they use.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>When Software Freedom Day was started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined. It grew to a whopping </span><a href="http://fred.dao2.com/?p=273"><span>1000</span></a><span> by 2010 across the world. About the aim of the celebration, SFD’s </span><a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/index.php/about"><span>official website</span></a><span> says,</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>“Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high-quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit organization Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their communities.”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><img alt="sfd_2016_bengaluru_by_nima_lama-cc-by-sa-4-0" class="alignleft wp-image-20774 size-medium" height="199" src="http://i2.wp.com/blog.okfn.org/files/2016/10/SFD_2016_Bengaluru_by_Nima_Lama-CC-BY-SA-4.0.jpg?resize=300%2C199" width="300" />The participants in our group bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and we are moving towards adopting openness as a society. And all the participants also agreed that there is a significant disconnect in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing. So they planned to meet more regularly in events organized by any of the FOSS communities and try to connect with more people using social media and chat groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both Free software and open source software. Adopted by well-known software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, the free software has many names — libre software, freedom-respecting software, and software libre are some of them. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>As defined by the </span><a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-intro.html"><span>Free Software Foundation</span></a><span>, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and non-commercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and non-commercial way, however, depends on the particular license the software is released under. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The </span><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/"><span>Creative Commons</span></a><span> licenses have recommendations for a broad range of </span><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks/"><span>free licenses</span></a><span> that one can choose for the software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are </span><a href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators"><span>several different</span></a><span> open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition"><span>Open Source</span></a><span>” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by educational advocacy organization </span><a href="https://opensource.org/history"><span>Open Source Initiative. </span></a><span>Open source software is created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/index.php/about/sponsors"><span>Supported</span></a><span> by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who </span><a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/index.php/about/sponsors"><span>argues</span></a><span> that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD </span><a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/its-software-freedom-day"><span>encourages</span></a><span> everyone to gather in their own cities (</span><a href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/map/index.php?year=2015"><span>map</span></a><span> of places where SFD was organized this year), educate people around them about free software, promote on social media (with the hashtag </span><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SFD2016"><span>#SFD2016</span></a><span> this year), even hacking with free software, organizing hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with</span><a href="http://www.htxt.co.za/2015/09/03/flying-freedom-day-gloriously-combines-drones-and-craft-beer/"><span> flying a drone running free software</span></a><span>! </span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="southasia-quote" class="size-large wp-image-20776 aligncenter" height="300" src="http://i0.wp.com/blog.okfn.org/files/2016/10/SouthAsia-quote.png?resize=600%2C300" width="600" /></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>From South Asia, there were </span><a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/India"><span>13 celebratory events in India</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Nepal?highlight=%28/bCategoryCountry2016/b%29"><span>8 in Nepal</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Bangladesh?highlight=%28/bCategoryCountry2016/b%29"><span>1 in Bangladesh</span></a><span> and </span><a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Sri%20Lanka?highlight=%28/bCategoryCountry2016/b%29"><span>4 in Sri Lanka</span></a><span>. South Asian countries have seen the adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The </span><a href="http://www.fsmi.in/about"><span>Free Software Movement of India</span></a><span> was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has </span><a href="https://data.gov.in/about-us"><span>launched</span></a><span> an open data portal at </span><a href="http://data.gov.in/"><span>data.gov.in</span></a><span> portal for, initiated a </span><a href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/policy_on_adoption_of_oss.pdf"><span>new policy</span></a><span> to adopt open source software, and </span><a href="https://opensource.com/government/15/6/indian-government-includes-open-source-rfps"><span>asked</span></a><span> vendors to include open source software applications while making Requests for proposals. Similarly, several free and open source communities and organizations like </span><a href="http://mozillaindia.org/"><span>Mozilla India</span></a><span>, </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India"><span>Wikimedia India</span></a><span>, </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CISA2K"><span>Centre for Internet and Society, </span></a><a href="http://in.okfn.org/about/"><span>Open Knowledge India</span></a><span> in India, </span><a href="http://mozillabd.org/"><span>Mozilla Bangladesh</span></a><span>, </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh"><span>Wikimedia Bangladesh,</span></a> <a href="http://www.bdosn.org/about-bdosn"><span>Bangladesh Open Source Network</span></a><span>, </span><a href="https://okfn.org/network/bangladesh/"><span>Open Knowledge Bangladesh </span></a><span>in Bangladesh, </span><a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Nepal"><span>Mozilla Nepal</span></a><span>, </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Nepal"><span>Wikimedians of Nepal </span></a><span>and </span><a href="http://np.okfn.org/about/"><span>Open Knowledge Nepal</span></a><span> in Nepal, </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Pakistan"><span>Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan</span></a><span> in Pakistan, </span><a href="http://www.opensource.lk/"><span>Lanka Software Foundation</span></a><span> in Sri Lanka, that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software.</span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><b><i>We promote open source and open Web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.</i></b><b><i><br /> </i></b><b><i>“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from </i></b><a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/India#Objectives"><b><i>Mozilla India wiki</i></b></a><b><i>) </i></b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a </span><a href="http://research.ijcaonline.org/volume42/number18/pxc3878099.pdf"><span>research paper</span></a><span> that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money that are spent in purchasing proprietary software, </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>“A large sum of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because the government is providing computers to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason, the government is to expend a significant amount of many for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying a significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize the cost of the projects.”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Check </span><a href="https://opensource.com/life/15/9/how-will-you-celebrate-software-freedom-day"><span>more ideas</span></a><span> for celebrating Software Freedom Day, and a few more </span><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/240188/seven_ways_to_celebrate_software_freedom_day.html"><span>here</span></a><span> while planning for next year’s Software Freedom Day in your city.</span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-knowledge-international-blog-october-26-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-open-source-in-everyday-life-how-we-celebrated-the-software-freedom-day-in-bengaluru'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-knowledge-international-blog-october-26-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-open-source-in-everyday-life-how-we-celebrated-the-software-freedom-day-in-bengaluru</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpennessFOSSOpen Source2016-10-27T01:07:06ZBlog Entry(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lack-of-representation-of-non-western-world-in-creation-of-web-standards
<b>World Wide Consortium (W3C) as a standard setting organization for the World Wide Web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a serious lack of participation from people from non-western countries. We also found serious lack of gender diversity in the EME debate.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">W3C is the organization which sets the standard for HTML 5. Recently it got surrounded by controversy due to the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) draft specification (David Dorwin et al. 2016). EME aims to prevent piracy of digital video by making it hard to download the unencrypted video stream. But it also raises lots of issues regarding implementation in Free and Open Source Software, Interoperability, Privacy, Security, Accessibility and fair use. (Cory Doctorow 2016)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In this study we looked at aspects of the debate which both of the sides ignored, the third world! We found that out of 48 people who participated in the debate around EME on W3C's public-html mailing list, none of them were from the continents of Asia, Africa or South America. These regions make up almost 80 % of the world's population and more than 60 percent of world's internet users (Stats 2016). When a group of people doesn't get represented a in the standard making process it is expected that their concerns don't get represented either. The representation of people is specially important in the EME debate because laws around Digital Rights Management around the world are different. For example Indian laws does not disallow manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools whereas the law in USA does (Prakash 2016b). The cultural norms around the world are quite different and also the conditions under which people use the internet are different. India has the lowest average internet speed across the world (Akamai 2016). A large of fraction of Indian population (37% in 2010) accesses internet through Cyber Cafés (TRAI 2016). These factors makes the ability to download digital content much more important for an Indian internet user than a North American or European internet user.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Methodology</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We used BigBang<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> python package to download the achieves of the public-html mailing list at W3C.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> Our dump contains all the messages between 31st August 2010 to 15th May 2016. Then we filtered out all the emails with EME, encrypted media or DRM in the subject line. There were 472 such emails. We then de-duplicated the list of senders as some senders used multiple emails in the course of discussion. There were 48 unique senders afters de duplication. Then we looked up their social media profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Github), personal website or page at employers site to determine the region they belong to and their gender. All the source code used for the analysis is available on our github repository.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Result</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Regional Diversity</h3>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Region</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Participant (%)</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Email (%)</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Africa</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Asia</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Australia and New Zealand</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>5 (10.4)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16 (3.4)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Europe</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13 (27.1)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>146 (30.9)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>North America</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>30 (62.5)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>310 (65.7)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>South America</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0 (0)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Total</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>48 (100)</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>472 (100)</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As mentioned in the Introduction above there was absolutely no participation from the whole continents of Africa, Asia, or South America with most of the emails being sent by North Americans.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Gender Diversity</h3>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Gender</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Participant(%)</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Email(%)</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Male</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47 (97.9)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>466 (98.7)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Female</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1 (2.1)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6 (1.3)</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Total</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>48 (100)</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>472 (100)</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There was only one women participating in the discussing contributing 1.3 % of the emails sent. The numbers reflects widely discussed lack of gender diversity in Tech and Open communities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The debate inside W3C around EME also seriously lacked in gender diversity, which is typical of open communities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Stakeholder Community</h3>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Stakeholder Community</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Participants per work category</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>Emails sent per stakeholder category</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>FOSS browser developer</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>5</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>56</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Digital Content Provider</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>186</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>DRM Platform Provider</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>100</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Accessibility</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Security Researcher</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>0</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Privacy</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Other W3C Employee</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>None of the Above</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>71</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Total</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>48</b></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><b>472</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We observe that there was no participation from the Security Researcher community and negligible participation from privacy community. Voice of Digital Content Provider was overrepresented with almost 40% of emails sent by them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Methodological remarks:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Participants are categorized on the basis stakes of their employer and not specifically on the work they do. For example someone who works on privacy in Google will be placed in "DRM platform provider" instead of "Privacy".</li>
<li>W3C and Universities are considered to neutral and their employees are categorized by the work they do.</li>
<li>Google's position is very interesting, it is a DRM provider as a browser manufacturer but also a content provider in Youtube and fair number of Google Employers are against EME due to other concerns. Therefore Christian Kaiser has been paced as Content provider because he works on Youtube, and everyone else has been placed as DRM provider.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Discussion and Future Work</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The lack of diversity in W3C is not unique. (Graham, Straumann, and Hogan 2015) showed a significant western bias in Wikipedia, gender bias in Wikipedia has also a well known and is being actively worked upon. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has also been criticized for under representing interests of non North American and West European world (Prakash 2016a).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We hope that W3C and other organizations will increase the diversity in their standard making process so that global voices actually shape the global internet.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Acknowledgement</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This work was done during my internship at The Center for Internet & Society, India. I thank Sunil Abraham for useful and timely feedback and Pranesh Prakash, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari for informed discussions.</p>
<hr />
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">References</h2>
<ul>
<li>Akamai. 2016. “Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016.” Accessed August 20. <a href="https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/akamai-state-of-the-internet-report-q1-2016.pdf"><b>https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/akamai-state-of-the-internet-report-q1-2016.pdf</b></a>.</li>
<li>Cory Doctorow. 2016. “Interoperability and the W3C: Defending the Future from the Present.” <i>Electronic Frontier Foundation</i>. <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present"><b>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present</b></a>.</li>
<li>David Dorwin, Jerry Smith, Mark Watson, and Adrian Bateman. 2016. “Encrypted Media Extensions, W3C Editor’s Draft.” Accessed May 13. <a href="https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/"><b>https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/</b></a></li>
<li>Feminism, Geek. 2016. “Geek Feminism Wiki FLOSS.” <i>Geek Feminism Wiki</i>. Accessed October 5. <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS">http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS</a>.</li>
<li>Graham, Mark, Ralph K. Straumann, and Bernie Hogan. 2015. “Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia.” <i>Annals of the Association of American Geographers</i> 105 (6): 1158–78. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791"><b>10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791</b></a>.</li>
<li>Prakash, Pranesh. 2016a. “CIS Statement at ICANN 49’s Public Forum.” <i>The Centre for Internet and Society</i>. Accessed August 20. <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/icann49-public-forum-statement"><b>http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/icann49-public-forum-statement</b></a>.</li>
<li>Prakash, Pranesh. 2016b. “Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010.” <i>The Centre for Internet and Society</i>. Accessed August 20. <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment"><b>http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment</b></a>.</li>
<li>Stats, Internet Live. 2016. “Number of Internet Users (2016) - Internet Live Stats.” Accessed August 20. <a href="http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/"><b>http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/</b></a>.</li>
<li>TRAI.. “Recommendations on National Broadband Plan.” Accessed August 20. <a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/Recommendation/Documents/Rcommendation81210.pdf"><b>http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/Recommendation/Documents/Rcommendation81210.pdf</b></a>.</li>
<hr />
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><sup><sup>[1]</sup></sup></a><sup> </sup> https://github.com/datactive/bigbang</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2"><sup><sup>[2]</sup></sup></a><sup> </sup> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3"><sup><sup>[3]</sup></sup></a><sup> </sup> https://github.com/hargup/eme_diversity_analysis</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lack-of-representation-of-non-western-world-in-creation-of-web-standards'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lack-of-representation-of-non-western-world-in-creation-of-web-standards</a>
</p>
No publisherguptaOpen StandardsAccess to KnowledgeWeb StandardsEncrypted Media ExtensionsOpenness2016-10-20T01:44:41ZBlog EntryOpenData Week in Madrid - OD4D Summit, Open Data Charter Meetings, and IODC16
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opendata-week-in-madrid-od4d-summit-open-data-charter-meetings-and-iodc16
<b>Sumandro Chattopadhyay took part in three open data events in Madrid in the first week of October 2016. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">OD4D Summit</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sumandro Chattopadhyay has been a member of the Open Data Research Network (funded by IDRC), which is now part of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network. The Network completed 2 years and held its first summit on October 3, 2016. <a class="external-link" href="https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/od4d-summit-tickets-26804581224">The event</a> was organized by IDRC. Participants discussed the way forward for the Network. Among other things the need for regional cooperation in open data policies and practices in the South, South East, and East Asia was noted.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Open Data Charter Meeting</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sumandro represented CIS in the Open Data Charter Lead Stewards' meeting held on October 5, 2016. The meeting was focused on finalising the business plan of the Charter for 2017-2020, including setting up a secretariat for coordinating and leading the work. The document was thoroughly discussed and will be revised further by the Lead Stewards during the next month, before sharing the draft version with the General Stewards in mid-November.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A meeting was held with the General Stewards and other participants on the evening of the same day. For more info, <a class="external-link" href="http://opendatacharter.net/">click here</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">IODC 16</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The 4th International Open Data Conference (IODC 16) organized by red.es, IDRC, the World Bank and Open Data in Madrid on October 6 and 7, 2016 brought out a lot of real concerns, sometimes even slightly bitter and worried, about the actual state of open data across the world and the relevance/implications of open data for various stakeholders. More info on IODC <a class="external-link" href="http://opendatacon.org/iodc16/about/">here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sumandro spoke at the Regional Talk session focusing on Asia. He spoke on <a class="external-link" href="https://internationalopendataconfer2016.sched.org/speaker/sumandrochattapadhyay1">Opening Data for innovation: from supply-driven to demand-driven Open Data strategies</a> and moderated the <a class="external-link" href="https://internationalopendataconfer2016.sched.org/event/7PVe">session on demand-driven open data strategies</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Collected tweets from IODC can be <a class="external-link" href="https://storify.com/ajantriks/iodc16">accessed here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opendata-week-in-madrid-od4d-summit-open-data-charter-meetings-and-iodc16'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opendata-week-in-madrid-od4d-summit-open-data-charter-meetings-and-iodc16</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen DataOpenness2016-10-16T03:11:54ZNews ItemWhy Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up
<b>In an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://thewire.in/72286/open-access-academic-publishing/">published in the Wire</a> on October 12, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p><span>“…</span><i><span>if you are a member of the knowledge elite, then there is free access, but for the rest of the world, not so much … Publisher restrictions do not achieve the objective of enlightenment, but rather the reality of ‘elite-nment.” </span></i><span>Lawrence Lessig</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In 2011, </span><span>speaking impassionately</span> <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/1345337" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="to an audience at CERN"><span>to an audience at CERN</span></a><span> – one of the world’s largest institutions for nuclear physics research, headquartered in Geneva – Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a political activist, highlighted the crisis of access to scientific scholarship. Indeed, over the last six decades, public access to scholarly works has diminished. Works that can be freely searched and read represent only a sliver of the entire wealth of human knowledge. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>With the emergence of academic journals in the seventeenth century, the practice of exchanging manuscripts for review and comments became popular, leading to the establishment of the peer-review system. In fact, until the eighteenth century, there existed a strong belief in the intellectual commons and traditions of sharing knowledge between scholars. These traditions dated back to scholarship flourishing in ancient Greece. Open access was the default, and not the exception to the norm.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, by the nineteenth century, there occurred a game-changing shift in the approach to knowledge production. It was theorised that the commons approach was inefficient and that knowledge needed to be exclusively owned to spur further production. This was in line with the incentive theory of copyright law, which was an added justification to the commoditisation of knowledge. In such circumstances, all scholarly works increasingly came to be fortified within the expensive walls of academic journals. Journals left no stone unturned to capitalise on scholars vying to get published in prestigious titles (<i>Nature</i>, <i>Lancet</i>, <i>Cell</i>, etc.).</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The business model rarely rewarded authors or peer reviewers. On the contrary, some journals required authors to pay a considerable fee to publish their work. Subscription charges to such research, a large part of which was funded by the government (i.e. taxpayers), hit the roof and could be afforded only by elite institutions. And with the advent of the digital age, the fortresses moved online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, before the internet arrived, there had been efforts to counter the entrenchment of scholarly works. They were mostly in the nature of social movements, located broadly within the philosophical umbrella of openness. The nineties marked a significant increase in the modes of access, through devices connected to the internet. Previously a fringe movement, openness was now entering the realms of publishing, software, standards development, education and data. It manifested in Linux, Wikipedia, open web standards, open educational resources, open government data, Creative Commons and, particularly, open access publishing. Just last month, a UN report called for open access to research to improve public health. </span></span></p>
<p><span>Open access publishing was a breakaway from the traditional scholarly publishing model. It offered a different model of </span><i><span>online</span></i><span> research publication informed by the principles of transparency, free access and unrestricted access. </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="Three key definitions"><span>Three key definitions</span></a><span> exist, and the </span><span>Budapest Open Access Initiative</span><span> (2002) provides <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="a good overview">a good overview</a> of it:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; "><span><span>There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, open access is </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/writing/jbiol.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="compatible"><span>compatible</span></a><span> with </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#copyright" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="copyright"><span>copyright</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#peerreview" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="peer review"><span>peer review</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#journals" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="revenue"><span>revenue</span></a><span> (even profit), print, preservation, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322577" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="prestige"><span>prestige</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4552042" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="quality"><span>quality</span></a><span>, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature</span><span> (as Peter Suber </span><span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="wrote">wrote</a> in</span><span> 2004). The model broadly offers two routes: gold and green. Gold open access involves publication in an open access journal. The journal provides for peer-review, retention of copyright by the author and in most cases requires author-side fees. Green open access involves publishing a work in an online repository, with/without peer-review. The models have several variations, and adoption often depends on their suitability for a particular discipline. Many </span><span>institutions <a href="http://sparcopen.org/coapi/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="now have">now have</a> an</span> <span>Open Access Mandate policy</span><span>. </span></p>
<h3><span>Latest challenges to open access publishing</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>For a 15-year-old movement (formally), open access publishing is making a serious dent in the market for scholarly publications. It has emerged as a formidable competitor to the traditional model. How else do you explain the </span><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="unfortunate acquisition"><span>unfortunate acquisition</span></a><span> of SSRN –</span><span> one of the largest online open access repositories – by the largest publisher of academic journals, Elsevier, earlier this year? Where, within a few days of Elsevier gaining control, </span><span>users began to notice</span> <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="problematic takedowns"><span>problematic takedowns</span></a><span> of articles on SSRN.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The acquisition was a severe blow to open access publishing. To be fair, there remain certain issues intrinsic to open access publishing models that need urgent resolution. For instance, while some open access journals provide high quality services at levels comparable to that of paywalled journals, a large majority has been unable to reach reasonable standards of publication.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, as it has emerged lately, many are yet to crack the business model while a few are driven by malicious attempts to con authors. Most commercial open access publishers have resorted to a system of levying from the authors an article-processing charge (APC). These publishers include large players such as the <i>Public Library of Science</i> journals and BioMed Central. APCs are justified as necessary costs for publication. Thus, sometimes they are reasonably applied only to peer-reviewed submissions. However, sometimes they are blatantly misused by publishers who quote exorbitant APCs. As a result, APCs have become a serious concern for the academic community, with the reentry of an undesirable price barrier which has shifted the burden from the reader to the author.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In one noteworthy development, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint against the OMICS group for deceiving authors and misrepresenting its editorial quality. The OMICS group has its roots in Hyderabad and runs a multitude of open access journals. It carried a notorious reputation for soliciting articles profusely, and then holding the articles hostage unless the authors paid hefty fees for their publication. It apparently charged the fees for conducting peer-review, which as this </span><span>harrowing</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="account"><span>account</span></a><span> of an author</span><span> reveals, was an utter sham. It also seems that the group targeted unsuspecting scholars from developing countries, where there was a higher concentration of early-career researchers eager to get their works published.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Holding articles hostage and releasing unchecked versions must have already caused irreparable damage to several researchers’ reputations. In this day of web-caching and -indexing facilities, one wonders if the researchers will ever be able to obliterate linkages to their unchecked manuscripts. Further, in the long run, this phenomenon will ruin or suppress promising careers – especially from developing countries. As a result, the present </span><span>lack of diversity in top-rung academia</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="may not be eliminated"><span>may not be eliminated</span></a><span> for a long time.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Such harmful, predatory practices have not escaped the FTC’s notice, and it has stated that it will pursue cases of similar nature to protect authors and consumers. This is the first time in the world when a governmental authority has taken cognisance of predatory practices in OA publishing. This will hopefully lead to an appropriate cleansing effect of the players in this field, and enhance the credibility of open access journals.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Thus, self-regulation and standard-setting remains an area for improvisation in the open access publishing community. At the cusp of the movement, proposed structures were mired in legal and economic arguments. It is yet to overcome the challenge of economic sustainability and mature into a stable as well as replicable business model. The movement will be celebrating the Open Access Week for the ninth year later this month. It has gifted scholars immeasurably and lent itself to the progress of science and arts. Here’s hoping the community will iron out the remaining challenges to further strengthen the movement soon. <br /></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpennessOpen Access2016-10-12T16:22:10ZBlog EntryHow we celebrated Software Freedom Day
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/subhashish-panigrahi-mozilla-open-mic-october-6-2016-how-we-celebrated-software-freedom-day
<b>A small group of 6 FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map and users of FOSS solutions gathered in Bengaluru to celebrate Software Freedom Day. Subhashish Panigrahi who was a part of the event, reports the developments. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?</h3>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="f423" style="text-align: justify; ">Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, free software has many names — free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both free software and open source software. As defined by the<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-intro.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Free Software Foundation</a> — one of the early advocates of software freedom — free software allows users to not only use the software with complete freedom, but also study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form however depends on the particular license the software is released under. The<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Creative Commons</a> licenses have recommendations for a wide array of<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> free licenses</a> that one can choose for the software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> several different</a> open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Source</a>” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by an educational-advocacy organization<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://opensource.org/history" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Open Source Initiative.</a> Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="09ca" style="text-align: justify; "><a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/index.php/about/sponsors" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Supported</a> by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/index.php/about/sponsors" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> argues</a> that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/its-software-freedom-day" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> encouraged</a> everyone to gather in their own cities (<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/map/index.php?year=2015" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">map</a> of places where SFD was organized this year) to: educate people around them about free software, promote it on social media (with the hashtag<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SFD2016" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> #SFD2016</a> this year), hacking with free software, organizing hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.htxt.co.za/2015/09/03/flying-freedom-day-gloriously-combines-drones-and-craft-beer/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> flying a drone running free software</a>!</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="ed8d" style="text-align: justify; ">In South Asia, there were<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/India" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 13 celebratory events in India</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Nepal?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 8 in Nepal</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Bangladesh?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 1 in Bangladesh</a> and<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/SriLanka?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> 4 in Sri Lanka</a>.</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="f183" style="text-align: justify; ">South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.fsmi.in/about" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Free Software Movement of India</a> was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://data.gov.in/about-us" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> launched</a> the open data portal at<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://data.gov.in/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> data.gov.in</a>, initiated a<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/policy_on_adoption_of_oss.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> new policy</a> to adopt open source software, and<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://opensource.com/government/15/6/indian-government-includes-open-source-rfps" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> asked</a> vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals. Similarly, there are many free and open source communities and organizations that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software like<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://mozillaindia.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Mozilla India</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Wikimedia India</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CISA2K" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Centre for Internet and Society,</a><a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://in.okfn.org/about/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Open Knowledge India</a> in India,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://mozillabd.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Mozilla Bangladesh</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Wikimedia Bangladesh,</a><a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.bdosn.org/about-bdosn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Bangladesh Open Source Network</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://okfn.org/network/bangladesh/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Open Knowledge Bangladesh</a> in Bangladesh,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Nepal" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Mozilla Nepal</a>,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Nepal" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Wikimedians of Nepal</a> and<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://np.okfn.org/about/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Open Knowledge Nepal</a> in Nepal,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Pakistan" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan</a> in Pakistan,<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://www.opensource.lk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Lanka Software Foundation</a> in Sri Lanka.</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="920a" style="text-align: justify; ">We promote open source and open web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--startsWithDoubleQuote graf--p graf" id="54aa" style="text-align: justify; ">“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/India#Objectives" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Mozilla India wiki</a>)</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="5c8d" style="text-align: justify; ">Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a<a class="markup--p-anchor markup--anchor" href="http://research.ijcaonline.org/volume42/number18/pxc3878099.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> research paper</a> that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money that are spent in purchasing proprietary software,</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="a9f7" style="text-align: justify; ">A Large amount of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because government is providing computer to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many* for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects.</p>
<p class="graf-after--p graf--p graf" id="9577" style="text-align: justify; ">This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in Bengaluru. The group consisted of FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map (OSM), and users of FOSS solutions. Each participant shared their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it plays in their day-to-day life — from how a father tries to introduce his son to open source software while migrating from proprietary to open source back and forth as his job demands so, to an OSM contributor who truly believes that large scale contributions to open source can make the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lie in it. The participants bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and how as a society we are moving towards adopting openness. There is a great disconnect in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing, agreed all the participants. So they planned to meet more regularly and try to connect more people using social media and chat groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof.</p>
<hr />
<p>The blog post which was originally published by Mozilla Open Mic on October 6 can be <a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/mozilla-open-mic/how-we-celebrated-software-freedom-day-cae98c2cce06#.47ejlrf8x">accessed here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/subhashish-panigrahi-mozilla-open-mic-october-6-2016-how-we-celebrated-software-freedom-day'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/subhashish-panigrahi-mozilla-open-mic-october-6-2016-how-we-celebrated-software-freedom-day</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpen StandardsOpennessFOSS2016-10-07T02:02:18ZBlog EntryIndian language localization community meets in New Delhi
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-mayank-sharma-october-3-2016-indian-language-localization-community-meets-in-new-delhi
<b>Localization is one of the less glamorous aspects of computing. Despite the fact that less than 6% of the world speaks English, a majority of projects don't feel inclined to accommodate the rest of the population. One of the primary reasons for sticking to English is the steep learning curve and the lack of standardization in various aspects of the localization process.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The post by Mayank Sharma was <a class="external-link" href="https://opensource.com/life/16/10/gilt-conference">published by Opensource.com</a> on October 3, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://fuelproject.org/" target="_blank">FUEL Project</a> organized the <a href="http://gilt.fuelproject.org/" target="_blank">GILT conference</a> in New Delhi, India September 24-25 to highlight and address these issues. The annual event showcases the efforts of language technology organizations and volunteer communities, but this year's also gave a platform for non-technical users to voice their concerns. The Indic computing developers were joined by academics, reporters, language researchers, publishers, and entrepreneurs who rely on localization tools to connect and interact with audiences in the various regional languages in India. The brainstorming between the two groups, both on and off the stage, was one of the highlights of the conference.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img height="236" src="https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/resize/group_1-520x236.jpg" width="520" /> <sup></sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>Mozilla ran a two-day hackathon alongside the conference that was attended by teams from India, Nepal and Germany. Photo by Rajesh Ranjan. All Rights Reserved.</sup></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Focus on standardization</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another recurring theme discussed in detail at the conference was the need for standardization. The FUEL Project spearheads standardization efforts with its terminology management system to preserve consistency across translations. The project also created translation style guides for various languages, including Spanish, German, French, Scottish Gaelic, and several Indian languages. In addition to these guides, the project is also working on a couple of tools to help maintain the accuracy of the translations. One that caught the attention of the translators at the conference is the Unicode Text Rendering Reference System (UTRRS). It's a web app that lets you enter a character, word, or phrase and then compares it to a reference image generated by a text rendering engine.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">The current state of localization</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The conference began with an inaugural address by the keynote speakers. Rajesh Ranjan, who heads the FUEL Project and is currently the open source community manager at the Indian Government's National eGovernance Division (NeGD), kicked things off by talking about the evolution of the 8-year-old project. There was also an enlightening address by Jeff Beatty, who heads localization efforts at Mozilla. He talked about the role of his alma mater, the University of Limerick, in the initiation and growth of multilingual computing. Later, Vinay Thakur, director of project development at NeGD, discussed the Indian Government's increased interest in localization and listed the various initiatives currently underway.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was also reiterated by Mahesh Kulkarni, assistant director at CDAC's GIST research labs. He talked about the scale of the government's plan for making all its official websites available in all the officially recognized 22 Indian languages.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Addressing problems</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Kulkarni also chaired a panel discussion later in the day. The panel members talked about the issues plaguing the localization community and what it would take to solve them. Sudhanwa Jogalekar, a well-respected contributor to Indic computing, suggested that translators should get ISO certified as a first step toward standardization. Jogalekar pointed to the ISO 7001:2015 standard, which certifies conformity in translation services. Another panel member, Prabhat Ranjan, executive director of the technology think tank TIFAC, talked about the stress on translation in the Vision 2035 document recently released by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ranjan's team found English to Hindi translation easier when documents are first translated into another Indian language. Based on this experience, Ranjan bounced the idea of agreeing on a meta language to ease the translation process.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">A chat with the Document Foundation</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The conference also had a video conference session by the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli about LibreOffice. While the talk was fairly overview-ish the Q&A generated some valuable suggestions that Vignoli promised to take up with the LibreOffice developers. One of the concerns raised by Pavanaja U.B. was that localizing the office suite was a cumbersome process, as it involved recompiling the entire application. Pavanaja, who is well-known in the localization community for creating the Kannada version of the Logo programming language, requested Vignoli ask LibreOffice developers to brainstorm a less tedious process for the localizers. Later in the day, Pavanaja also talked about his experience localizing Wikipedia in Kannada and Tulu languages.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Unicode</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img height="292" src="https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/resize/karunakar-520x292.jpg" width="520" /> <sup></sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>Karunakar G demos an in-development spell checker for the Hindi language. Photo by Mayank Sharma. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" target="_blank">CC-BY 3.0</a>.</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second day began with a session on the evolution and current status of the Unicode standard. It was delivered by Karunakar G, one of the stalwarts of the Indic localization community. A longtime localization developer, Karunakar also demoed the support for Indian languages in LibreOffice. He highlighted a few missing features, such as the lack of an Indic thesaurus and autocorrect functionality.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Sailfish OS</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Karunakar was followed by Raju Vindane, who introduced the audience to the <a href="https://sailfishos.org/" target="_blank">Sailfish OS</a>. He also demoed the only Sailfish OS phone available in the Indian market, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Fish" target="_blank">Intex Aqua</a>, which retails for about $90. Vindane mentioned that while the community is encouraged to contribute and improve the Indic translations to the Sailfish OS project, these wouldn't be included in the Indian phone, as Intex does its translations in-house.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Other highlights</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img height="292" src="https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/resize/ryan-520x292.jpg" width="520" /> <sup></sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>Ryan Northey asks the community to explore the use of XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format). Photo by Mayank Sharma. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" target="_blank">CC-BY 3.0</a>.</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The day also had introductory presentations by Ryan Northey, lead developer at Translate House, and Satdeep Gill from the WikiTongues project. Northey mentioned that there's been a disconnect between software development and localization, and that going forward localization should become a part of the software development cycle.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In addition to the scheduled sessions, there were several fruitful discussions during lunch and tea breaks. The presentation-free exchange of gray matter between the stalwarts and the young padawans were a delight to witness. The 2016 edition of the GILT conference helped bring together longtime developers and experts from the government with niche communities and individuals working on different aspects of localization in various parts of the country. The conference ended with the participants hoping that the Government's increased focus on localization would translate into a considerable leap in the quality and quantity of localized content and localization tools.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-mayank-sharma-october-3-2016-indian-language-localization-community-meets-in-new-delhi'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-mayank-sharma-october-3-2016-indian-language-localization-community-meets-in-new-delhi</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen SourceAccess to Knowledge2016-10-03T13:26:31ZNews ItemFuel Gilt Conference 2016
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2016
<b>Fuel Gilt Conference 2016 was organized by the Fuel Project is being held in New Delhi on September 24 and 25, 2016. This is the fourth conference in series. Subhashish Panigrahi made a presentation at this event.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Technical and other interface strings that fall under the ambit of FUEL are actually a subset of several other localization projects. They can also be used for bettering the corpus of machine translation. And there is a need for collaboration between communities and institutions -- both free and open source, and the proprietary ones -- to help grow their corpus. More and more collaborations in place will help the volunteer localizers even more as the localization suggestions will increase drastically with partnerships are more. Two existing such partnerships could be Pontoon by Mozilla and Content Translation by the Wikimedia Foundation. When the former shows localized strings from memory as suggestion and even include translations by proprietary organizations like Microsoft, the latter helps Wikipedians create Wikipedia articles faster by translation suggestions sourced from the corpus of Apertium and Yandex. Bettering collaboration needs strengthening two major aspects; a) growing professional and mutual bonding with other communities/organizations that are there in the same domain, and b) creating technical infrastructure to address the aforementioned pluralism. In my talk, I will detail about my own experience and best practices from working with several communities beyond borders and lessons learned from from my own work and the work of many others. A larger discussion with other colleagues at the Conference will hopefully shape into creating a manual or a few Open Educational Resources of some kind to help the future localization leaders. For more info, <a class="external-link" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentation_by_Subhashish_Panigrahi_at_the_FUEL_GILT_Conference_2016,_New_Delhi.webm#.7B.7Bint:filedesc.7D.7D">click here</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Video</h3>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eJfnWodVvlo" width="500"></iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2016'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2016</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoOpennessOpen Source2016-09-25T03:27:38ZNews ItemSoftware Freedom Day: The Importance of Free and Open Source Software
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/dna-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-software-freedom-day-importance-of-free-and-open-source-software
<b>Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 celebrates the liberty that free and open software and the philosophy of freedom brings into people’s lives. When SFD was started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined. It grew to a whooping 1000 by 2010 across the world. Explaining the aim of the celebration, SFD’s official website says,</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/column-software-freedom-day-the-importance-of-free-and-open-source-software-2256118">published by DNA</a> on September 17, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit organisation Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organise the local SFD events to impact their own communities</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both Free software and open source software. Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, the free software has many names — libre software, freedom-respecting software and software libre are some of them. As defined by the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-intro.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Software Foundation</a>, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form however depends on the particular license the software is released under. The <a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> licenses have recommendations for a wide array of <a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">free licenses</a> that one can choose for software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are <a href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">several different </a>open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Source</a>” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by educational-advocacy organisation <a href="https://opensource.org/history" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Source Initiative</a>. Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Supported by several global organisations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost, but it provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD encourages everyone to gather in their own cities, educate people around them about free software, promote on social media (with the hashtag <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23SFD2016" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#SFD2016</a> this year), even hacking with free software, organising hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software!</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From South Asia, there are <a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/India" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">13 celebratory events in India</a>, <a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Nepal?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">8 in Nepal</a>, <a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Bangladesh?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">1 in Bangladesh</a> and <a href="http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2016/Sri%20Lanka?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryCountry2016%5Cb%29" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">4 in Sri Lanka</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organisational level and by the government. The <a href="http://www.fsmi.in/about" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Software Movement of India</a> was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has launched an open data portal at data.gov.in portal, initiated a new policy to adopt open source software, and <a href="https://opensource.com/government/15/6/indian-government-includes-open-source-rfps" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">asked</a> vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals. Similarly, several free and open source communities and organisations like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India in India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh in Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal in Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan in Pakistan, Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka, that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We promote open source and open Web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organisations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/India#Objectives" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mozilla India wiki</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a <a href="http://research.ijcaonline.org/volume42/number18/pxc3878099.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">research paper</a> that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money spent in purchasing proprietary software.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>A large amount of money of the government can be saved if it uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, because government is providing computers to all educational institutes from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects</i>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/dna-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-software-freedom-day-importance-of-free-and-open-source-software'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/dna-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-software-freedom-day-importance-of-free-and-open-source-software</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpen StandardsOpennessFOSSAccess to Knowledge2016-09-18T03:46:29ZBlog Entryସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସ: ଆମ ହାତେ ଆମ କୋଡ଼ ଲେଖିବା
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/software-freedom-day
<b>Software Freedom Day (SFD), which celebrates the use of free and open software, was celebrated in many cities today. The piece sheds light on the philosophy of software freedom, and how free and open source software is making a significant social change. I have also shared how anyone can contribute to the FOSS movement in different ways and celebrate SFD.</b>
<p>The blog post was mirrored in <a class="external-link" href="https://odia.yourstory.com/read/b3b56fd08a/-?c=16">Your Story</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.odishastory.com/odia/2016/09/software-freedom/">Odisha Story</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://aajiraodisha.org/software-freedom/">Aajira Odisha</a> on September 17, 2016. The originally published piece can be <a class="external-link" href="http://psubhashish.com/post/150524560200/sfd">accessed here</a>.</p>
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<p>ଫ୍ରି ଓ ଓପନ ସୋର୍ସ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ପଛରେ ଥିବା ସାମାଜିକ ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ଓ ପ୍ରତିଟି ବ୍ୟବହାରୀଙ୍କୁ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ବ୍ୟବହାର, ବଦଳ ଓ ବାଣ୍ଟିବାର ସୁଯୋଗ ଦେବା ଉଦ୍ଦେଶ୍ୟରେ ପାଳିତ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସ ।</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2For.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F%25E0%25AC%25B8%25E0%25AC%25AB%25E0%25AD%258D%25E0%25AC%259F%25E0%25AD%25B1%25E0%25AD%2587%25E0%25AC%25B0&t=MGEyZDliNWFkMTM2YTUyNjUyN2VkOWVkMzlmYzBlYjUyZTE5ZDQ3MSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର </a>ଶବ୍ଦଟି ବୋଧେ ଆଉ କାହାରି ପାଇଁ ଅଜଣା ଅଶୁଣା ନୁହେଁ । ଆପଣଙ୍କ ମୋବାଇଲ ଫୋନରୁ କମ୍ପୁଟରଯାଏ ଓ ଏବେ ଏକ ସ୍ଥାନରେ ନ ଥାଇ ସେଠାରେ ଥିବା ଭଳି ଅନୁଭବିବା ପାଇଁ ବ୍ୟବହୃତ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FVirtual_reality&t=NWI3ZTNhNThmZGRjMjc2MWVkNjU0OTE3N2EwNmYyM2E5OTZhOGZjYSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ଭର୍ଚୁଆଲ ରିଆଲିଟି</a> ଓ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAugmented_reality&t=NDQ0OTRhYTM0YWVhYWExNTI2ZjQ3ODlmNjY3NmIyN2M3N2IzZWU1ZixtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ଅଗମେଣ୍ଟେଡ଼ ରିଆଲିଟି </a>ହେଡ଼ସେଟରେ ହାର୍ଡ଼ଓଏର ବା ଯାନ୍ତ୍ରିକ ଉପକରଣକୁ ସଠିକ ଭାବେ ପରିଚଳାନା କରିବା ହେଉଛି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରର କାମ । ଆଉ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରରେ ଟିକେ ଗୋଳମାଳ ହେଲେ କେବେ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.howtogeek.com%2F163452%2Feverything-you-need-to-know-about-the-blue-screen-of-death%2F&t=Yzc1NWI1MjU5MmE5NmZjZTNlMmRkMjE2ODg4ZDM5YzU0MWI0Y2IyOSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">କମ୍ପୁଟରର ସ୍କ୍ରିନ ନେଳି </a>ପଡ଼ିଯାଏ ତ ପୁଣି କେବେ କେବେ ମୋବାଇଲରେ ଠିକଣା ଜାଗାରେ ଯେତେ ଦବେଇଲେ ବି କାମକରେନା । ତେବେ ଉଣାଅଧିକ ସାଧାରଣ ଲୋକେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରରେ ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଆଉ ତାଙ୍କ ଜୀବନ ପାଇଁ ତା’ର ଭୂମିକା ବାବଦରେ କେବେ ଶୁଣିନଥିବେ । ଆଉ ଏଇଟି ସତରେ ଏକ ଅନାଲୋଚିତ ବିଷୟ । ତେବେ ଏ ବିଷୟକୁ ବୁଝିବା ଆଗରୁ ଆମ ଚଳନ୍ତି ସମାଜର କିଛି ଉଦାହରଣ ଆଡ଼େ ଆସନ୍ତୁ ଆଖିପକେଇବା । ଦିନ ଥିଲା ଆପଣ ରେଡ଼ିଓରୁ ଆକାଶବାଣୀ ଲଗେଇ ଗୀତ, ଖବର, ନାଟକ ଆଦି ଶୁଣୁଥିଲେ । ହେଲେ କେବେ ଆକାଶବାଣୀ ଆପଣଙ୍କ ପାହୁଲାଟିଏ ମାଗିଥିଲା କି ନାଁ ଆପଣ ଭଲ ଭଲ ପ୍ରୋଗ୍ରାମ ଆସୁଛି ବୋଲି ଖୁସିରେ କେବେ କିଛି ଦେଇଥିଲେ? କିନ୍ତୁ ଆପଣଙ୍କ ଅଜାଣତରେ ଆପଣ ସତରେ କିଛି ଦେଇଛନ୍ତି । ତା’ ହେଉଛି ଟିକସ । ଆପଣ ଛୋଟରୁ ବଡ଼ ଯାଏ ଯାହା କିଣୁଛନ୍ତି ପ୍ରାୟ ସବୁ ଜିନିଷରେ ଟିକସ ଦିଅନ୍ତି ଆଉ ଚାକିରି କି ଅନ୍ୟ ଉପାୟରେ ପଇସା ଅରଜୁଥିଲେ ବର୍ଷ ଶେଷକୁ ଇନକମ ଟିକସ ବି ଦିଅନ୍ତି । ଏସବୁ ସରକାରଙ୍କ କାମରେ ଲାଗେ । ତେଣୁ ଆକାଶବାଣୀର ରେଡ଼ିଓ ପ୍ରୋଗ୍ରାମ ହେଉ କି ମୋଦିଙ୍କ ବିଦେଶ ବୁଲା ହେଉ ସବୁ ଆପଣଙ୍କ ପଇସାରେ ହିଁ ହେଉଛି । ସରକାରୀ ଓ ବେସରକାରୀ ଉଭୟ ସ୍ଥାନରେ ଏଇ ଏକା ଜିନିଷ । ତେବେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର କ୍ଷେତ୍ରରେ ବି ଏଇ ଏକା ଅବସ୍ଥା । ସାଧାରଣରେ ଜଣାଶୁଣା ମାଇକ୍ରୋସଫ୍ଟର ଉଇଣ୍ଡୋଜ ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ ପାଇଁ କେତେ ପଇସା ନିଜ ଅଜାଣତରେ ଦେଉଛନ୍ତି ତାହା ନୂଆ ଲାପଟପ କିଣିଲାବେଳକୁ କେବେ ଗଣିନଥିବେ । କିନ୍ତୁ ସେଇଟି ଜମାରୁ ମାଗଣା ଆସିନଥାଏ । ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରଟିଏ ଏକ ବା ଅନେକ ଉଚ୍ଚସ୍ତରର ନିର୍ଦ୍ଦିଷ୍ଟ କାମ କରୁଥିବା ବେଳେ ଏକ କମ୍ପୁଟର କି ମୋବାଇଲର ସାମଗ୍ରୀକ ହାର୍ଡ଼ଓଏର ବା ଯନ୍ତ୍ରପାତି ଓ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସବୁକୁ ପରିଚାଳନା ପାଇଁ ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରାଯାଏ । ବିଭିନ୍ନ ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ ଓ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଭିନ୍ନଭିନ୍ନ ଉପାୟରେ ତିଆରି ହୁଏ । କେବେ ଏସବୁ ମାଇକ୍ରୋସଫ୍ଟ କି ଆପଲ ଭଳି ବଡ଼ ବଡ଼ କମ୍ପାନି ତିଆରି କରି ବିକନ୍ତି ତ କେବେ କେବେ ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ ବା ଛୋଟ ବଡ଼ ସଂଗଠନ ମଧ୍ୟ ବିକନ୍ତି । କିନ୍ତୁ ଏସବୁ ବାଦେ ଆଉ ଏକ ଧରଣର ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଗଢ଼ାଳି ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ-ସଂଗଠନ-କମ୍ପାନି ମଧ୍ୟ ଅଛନ୍ତି । ସେମାନେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ତିଆରି କରି ଖାଲି ବଜାରରେ ଛାଡ଼ନ୍ତି ନାହିଁ ବରଂ ସେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରର <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSource_code&t=YjU1NjY2NTlkZTE3NmNiZDg3ODE3NzkzOTQxY2ZmYjdmNGI4M2Q2OCxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ସୋର୍ସ କୋଡ଼ </a>ମଧ୍ୟ ଛାଡ଼ନ୍ତି । ଅର୍ଥାତ ଗଣିତ କଷି ଫଳାଫଳ ସଙ୍ଗେ କିପରି କଷିଲେ ସୋପାନ ତଳକୁ ସୋପାନ ଲେଖି ବୁଝାଇଦିଅନ୍ତି । ଫଳରେ ଆଉ କେହି ସେହି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରରେ କିଛି ବଦଳ କରିବାକୁ ଚାହିଁଲେ କିମ୍ବା ପୁରୁଣା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରରେ କିଛି ନୂଆ ଯୋଡ଼ି ଉନ୍ନତ କରିବାକୁ ଚାହିଁଲେ ତାଙ୍କୁ ସେଥିରେ କେହି ବାଧା ଦେବେନାହିଁ । କିନ୍ତୁ ନୂଆ ଫଳାଫଳ ବା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରଟି ବଜାରରେ ଛାଡ଼ିଲା ବେଳେ ତାଙ୍କୁ ମୂଳ ଗଢ଼ାଳିଙ୍କୁ ଉପଯୁକ୍ତ ଶ୍ରେୟ ଦେବାକୁ ପଡ଼ିବ । ଧରନ୍ତୁ ଆପଣ ଚନ୍ଦକାରୁ କଲରାପତରିଆ ବାଘର ଖୋଳ ଆଣି ତାକୁ ଧଳା ରଙ୍ଗ ମାରି ଧଳା ବାଘ କଲେ । ଆପଣଙ୍କୁ ସେ ଧଳା ବାଘକୁ ଶିମିଳିପାଳରେ ଛାଡ଼ିଲା ବେଳେ ଚନ୍ଦକାରୁ ମୂଳ କଲରାପତରିଆ ବାଘ ଆଣିଥିଲେ ବୋଲି ଉଲ୍ଲେଖ କରିବାକୁ ପଡ଼ିବ । ମଜା କଥା ହେଉଛି ଏଭଳି ନିଆରା ଧାରା ଆମ ସମାଜରେ ଜମାରୁ ନୂଆ ନୁହେଁ । ଅକ୍ଷୟ ମହାନ୍ତି ସାଲବେଗଙ୍କ ଲିଖିତ ପୁରୁଣା ଗୀତକୁ ଆଉଥରେ ବୋଲିବା ପରେ ସେ ହଜିଲା ଗୀତସବୁ ଲୋକତୁଣ୍ଡରେ ଆହୁରି ଜଣାଶୁଣା ହେଲା । ହେଲେ ଅକ୍ଷୟ ମହାନ୍ତି ଗୀତର ଗାୟକ ଓ ସଙ୍ଗୀତ ନିର୍ଦ୍ଦେଶକ ଭାବେ ନାଁ ନେଲା ବେଳେ ସାଲବେଗଙ୍କ ରଚନାରୁ ବୋଲି ଲେଖିବାରେ ଉଣା କରିନାହାନ୍ତି ।</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ଏହି ଧାରା ଆମ ସମାଜରେ ସବୁକାଳେ ସବୁସ୍ଥଳେ ରହିଛି । ହେଲେ ଆଧୁନିକ ସମାଜରେ ଅନେକ ଲାଭଖୋର କମ୍ପାନି ନିଜ ଲାଭ ଲାଗି ଏ ସାମାଜିକ ଚଳଣିଟିକୁ ପାଶୋରି ପକାଇଛନ୍ତି । ମାଇକ୍ରୋସଫ୍ଟରୁ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରି ଆକୃତି, ଅପ୍ରାନ୍ତ ଯାଏ ପ୍ରାୟ ଅଧିକାଂଶ ସାଧାରଣରେ ବ୍ୟବହାର ହେଉଥିବା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ହେଉଛି <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FProprietary_software&t=NmQ5NGVjNzU0MDYxYzkzOGI3YzQ1MGQ5NTRiMzJmMjlmNWE3ZDBkOCxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ପ୍ରୋପ୍ରାଇଟରି </a>ବା ପୂରା ନିବୁଜ । ମାନେ ଆପଣ କେବଳ କିଣି ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିପାରିବେ କିନ୍ତୁ ବାଣ୍ଟିପାରିବେ ନାହିଁ କି କୌଣସି ବଦଳ କରିପାରିବେ ନାହିଁ । କଲେ ଆପଣଙ୍କ ବିରୋଧରେ କୋର୍ଟରେ ଉକ୍ତ କମ୍ପାନିମାନେ କେସ କରି ତଳିତଳାନ୍ତ ମଧ୍ୟ କରିପାରିବେ । ଏ କପିରାଇଟର ଫାନ୍ଦ ଏଡ଼େ କୁଟିଳ ଯେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ତିଆରି କରିଥିବା କମ୍ପାନିମାନେ ସବୁକାଳେ ତାଙ୍କର ମନୋମୁଖୀ ପତିଆରା ରଖିପାରିବେ । ଏଣୁ ଥୋକେ ଭାବିଲେ ବଡ଼ ବଡ଼ ଧନୀ କମ୍ପାନିମାନଙ୍କର ଏ ଗୁମାନ ସେମିତି ଥାଉ । ଆମେ ଚାଲ ବିକଳ୍ପ ଓ ଉଚ୍ଚମାନର କିଛି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ତିଆରିବା । ଲୋକ ସ୍ୱାଧୀନ । ଯାହାକୁ ଯାହା ରସିବ ତାକୁ ସେ କିଆଫୁଲ ପରି ବାସୁ । ଆଉ ଏ ଥିଲା ଏକ ସାମାଜିକ ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା । ବିକଳ୍ପ ବାଟଟି ହେଲା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା । ଏଥିରେ କୌଣସି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଗଢ଼ିଥିବା ମୂଳ ଗଢ଼ାଳି ଓ ତା’ ପରେ ସେଥିରେ ଯୋଗଦାନ କରିଥିବା ସଭିଙ୍କୁ ସମାନ ଭାବେ ସମ୍ମାନ ଦେଇ ଯୋଗଦାନକାରୀ ଭାବେ ସେମାନଙ୍କ ନାମ ଉଲ୍ଲେଖ କରାଯାଇଥାଏ । ଖାଲି ନାଁ ନୁହେଁ ଅନେକ ସମୟରେ ଖୋଲା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସଙ୍ଗେ ଜଡ଼ିତ ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ ଓ ସଂଗଠନସବୁ ଏମିତି ଆଖିଖୋସିଲା ଭଳି କାମ କରନ୍ତି ଯେ କିଣା ଆଉ ବୁଜା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର କିଣିବାରୁ କି ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବାରୁ ମନ ମରିଯିବ । ତିନି ବର୍ଷ ତଳେ Firefox ବ୍ରାଉଜର ତିଆରିରେ ଭାଗନେଇଥିବା Mozillaର ସ୍ୱେଚ୍ଛାସେବୀ ଯୋଗଦାନକାରୀମାନଙ୍କୁ ସମ୍ମାନ ଜଣାଇ ଆମେରିକାର ସାନ ଫ୍ରାନସିସ୍କୋ ସହରରେ ଏକ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.mozilla.org%2FMonument&t=ZTI1ZDNhYjdlMmFjYWI0ODVhMWMxYjU3ODc3MDEwYjdjNGU2M2Y5ZixtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ବିଶାଳ ସ୍ମାରକୀ</a> ଗଢ଼ି ସେଥିରେ ସମସ୍ତଙ୍କ ନାମ ଲେଖାଯାଇଥିଲା । ଭାବନ୍ତୁ ଏ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପରେ ସାମାନ୍ୟତମ ଯୋଗଦାନ କରିଥିବା ଲୋକଟିର ନାଁ ବି ଇତିହାସରେ ଲେଖାହୋଇ ରହିଗଲା । ୨୦୦୧ ମସିହାରେ ଇଂରାଜୀ ଓ ତା’ ପରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ସମେତ ବାକି ବିଶ୍ୱଭାଷାରେ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ତିଆରି ଖୋଲା ଜ୍ଞାନକୋଷ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2For.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F%25E0%25AC%2593%25E0%25AC%25A1%25E0%25AC%25BC%25E0%25AC%25BF%25E0%25AC%2586_%25E0%25AC%2589%25E0%25AC%2587%25E0%25AC%2595%25E0%25AC%25BF%25E0%25AC%25AA%25E0%25AC%25BF%25E0%25AC%25A1%25E0%25AC%25BC%25E0%25AC%25BF%25E0%25AC%2586&t=YWE1N2E5ZDlhNDU5NTY2MzM2ZjIwOTQ4NzkyNTQwOWI4OWZiNDkzOCxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର</a> ଇତିହାସ ବି ଏମିତି । ଏହି ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ ୱେବସାଇଟଗୁଡ଼ିକ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMediaWiki&t=MDZhOGJhMjRlY2I4YzlkMmYwNWYzMGM5OTliMWRkNDAwNDA1NTZkZSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ମିଡ଼ିଆଉଇକି</a> ନାମକ ଖୋଲା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରରେ ତିଆରି । ଆଉ ସେଇ ଏକା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରକୁ ନିଜ ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ଅନୁସାରେ ବଦଳାଇ ଉଇକିଲିକ୍ସ ଓ ଉଇକିଟ୍ରାଭେଲ ଭଳି ଅଲଗା ଅଲଗା ୱେବସାଇଟ ଆଜି ଚାଳିତ ।</p>
<p>ତେବେ ଅନେକେ ଭାବୁଥିବେ ଯେ ଏ <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFree_software&t=MzBmMWZkOGNiMDM1ZDVlYTM5YmIyNDhmMmQxMDA2M2MzN2QyZDZkMyxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ଫ୍ରି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର</a> କଣ ସବୁବେଳେ ମାଗଣା? ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା କ୍ଷେତ୍ରରେ ଗତ କେଇ ଦଶନ୍ଧି ଧରି କାମ କରି ଏ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନକୁ ବହୁ ଆଗକୁ ନେଇଥିବା <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FRichard_Stallman&t=MDc2MGQxYjJiYzVhMDNiYTM1MDFiZThiOThlZWU3ZDU4NTEwNDY5NixtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ରିଚାର୍ଡ଼ ଷ୍ଟଲମ୍ୟାନ</a> ଖୁବ ସହଜ ଓ ସରଳ ଢଙ୍ଗରେ ଏ ବିଷୟଟି <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gnu.org%2Fphilosophy%2Fopen-source-misses-the-point.en.html&t=YWY5NDEzNTEyODc5NjYwMTMxYmFkNzA0MjU1NzEwOWUzNjExZmEzNSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ବୁଝାଇଦିଅନ୍ତି</a> ।</p>
<p>ଫ୍ରି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ମାଗଣାରେ ବଣ୍ଟାଯାଇପାରେ ବା କିଛି ଦରରେ ବିକାଯାଇପାରେ । କିନ୍ତୁ ଏଥିରେ ଥିବା “ଫ୍ରି” ମାଗଣା ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ଖୋଲା ଜ୍ଞାନ ଭଳି “ଫ୍ରିଡ଼ମ” ବା ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତାକୁ ସୂଚାଏ ।</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ତେଣୁ କୌଣସି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବା ଆଗରୁ ତା’ର କପିରାଇଟ ବାବଦରେ ସେଥିରେ ଥିବା ନିୟମାବଳୀ ପଢ଼ିଲେ ବୁଝାପଡ଼ିବ ଯେ ତାହା ଏକ ପ୍ରୋପ୍ରାଇଟରି କି ଫ୍ରି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର । ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ମଣିଷର ଜନ୍ମଗତ ଅଧିକାର । ଆଉ ଜ୍ଞାନ ବାଣ୍ଟିବା ଲାଗି । ବାନ୍ଧି ରଖିବା ଲାଗି ନୁହେଁ । କାରଣ କେହି ଜ୍ଞାନ ତିଆରି ନାହିଁ ବରଂ ସଭିଏଁ ଜ୍ଞାନର ନାନାଦି ଭଣ୍ଡାରକୁ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବା ପାଇଁ ବାଟ ତିଆରି କରିଥାନ୍ତି । ତେଣୁ ସେ ବାଟରେ ବାଡ଼ କିଆଁ? ନିକଟରେ ସମାଜର ଏହି ପୁରାତନ ଧାରାକୁ ବାହୁଡ଼ି ଯିବା ପାଇଁ ଅନେକ ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ, ସଂଗଠନ ଓ ବଡ଼ ବଡ଼ କମ୍ପାନି ଧୀରେ ଧୀରେ ସେମାନେ ତିଆରୁଥିବା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରର ସୋର୍ସ କୋଡ଼ ଖୋଲାରେ ଦେଲେଣି । ଫଳରେ ସାଧାରଣ ବ୍ୟବହାରକାରୀ ଓ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଗଢ଼ାଳିଙ୍କ ହାତରେ ସ୍ୱାଧୀନ ଭାବେ ସେମାନେ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରୁଥିବା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରକୁ ନିଜ ଆବଶ୍ୟକ ଅନୁସାରେ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିପାରିବେ । ଆଉ ସମାଜର ମୌଳିକ ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ବିଭିନ୍ନତାର ବହୁରଙ୍ଗ ଏଥିରେ ସମୁଜ୍ଜଳେ ଫୁଟିଉଠିବ ।</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ଆମ ସମାଜର ଏହି ବାଣ୍ଟିବାର ଧାରାକୁ ନୂଆ ଟେକନୋଲୋଜି ଯୁଗରେ ଉଜ୍ଜୀବିତ କରିବା ଲକ୍ଷରେ ଜଗତ ସାରା ୨୦୦୪ ମସିହାରୁ ସେପ୍ଟେମ୍ବର ମାସର ତୃତୀୟ ସପ୍ତାହରେ “<a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fsoftwarefreedomday.org%2F&t=YmZiZWNhMmY4ZWJlNjUxMDU3NDliOGE1MDA1NGQ3YTk1ZDk0ZDQwNCxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଫ୍ରିଡ଼ମ ଡେ</a>” ବା “ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସ” ପାଳିତ ହୋଇଆସୁଛି । ଏଥିରେ କୌଣସି ନିର୍ଦ୍ଦିଷ୍ଟ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ଖୋଲା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ପଛରେ ଥିବା ଦାର୍ଶନିକ ଓ ସାମାଜିକ ଦୃଷ୍ଟିକୋଣଟି ସଭିଙ୍କୁ ବୁଝାଇବା ହେଉଛି ମୂଳ ଲକ୍ଷ । ଆଉ ଯେଯାଏ ବଡ଼ କମ୍ପାନି ସାଧାରଣ ଲୋକଙ୍କୁ ସମ୍ପୂର୍ଣ୍ଣ ତଥ୍ୟ ନ ଜଣାଇ କପିରାଇଟ ବଳରେ ବାନ୍ଧି ରଖିଥିବେ ସେଯାଏ ବ୍ୟବହାରୀ ବାପୁଡ଼ା ବା ଜାଣିବ କେମିତି ଏ ଭିତର ଗୁମର? ନିଜ ହାତରେ ନିଜ ଶାସନର ଡୋର ଧରିବା ଯେମିତି ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ନିଜ ବ୍ୟବହାରରେ ଲାଗୁଥିବା ସଫ୍ଟଓଏରର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ବି ଏକାଭଳି ପ୍ରତିଟି ବ୍ୟବହାରକାରୀର ଅଧିକାର । ତେଣୁ ଏ ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସକୁ ସଭିଏଁ ନିଆରା ଢଙ୍ଗରେ ପାଳନ୍ତି । <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.htxt.co.za%2F2015%2F09%2F03%2Fflying-freedom-day-gloriously-combines-drones-and-craft-beer%2F&t=ZjkyZDkzYTg2MmMxODBjMGQ3YWZlZjVhYjAwMTM0ZGM0NTI5MWY5ZSxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">ଆଫ୍ରିକାରେ</a> କିଛି ବର୍ଷ ଆଗରୁ ଫ୍ରି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଚାଳିତ ଏକ ଡ୍ରୋନ ବା ଚାଳକବିହୀନ ପବନଯାନଟିଏ ଛାଡ଼ିଥିଲେ । ଅନେକ ସ୍ଥାନରେ ଲୋକେ ଏକାଠି ହୋଇ ଏ ବାବଦରେ ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ବାବଦରେ ଆଲୋଚନା କରନ୍ତି । ଆଉ ପୁଣି କେଉଁଠି ସାଧାରଣ ଲୋକଙ୍କୁ ତାଙ୍କ କମ୍ପୁଟରରେ ଫ୍ରି ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ଇନଷ୍ଟଲ କରିବା ପାଇଁ କ୍ୟାମ୍ପ କରନ୍ତି । ଫଳରେ ଲୋକେ ନିଜ କମ୍ପୁଟରରେ ମାଇକ୍ରୋସଫ୍ଟର ବିକଳ୍ପ ଓ ଉବଣ୍ଟୁ ଭଳି ଖୋଲା ଲିନକ୍ସ ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ କିମ୍ବା <a href="http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mozilla.org%2Fen-US%2Ffirefox%2Fnew%2F%3Futm_medium%3Dreferral%26utm_source%3Dfirefox-com&t=NGZlNzIwNGI0MmU0MjhiMjQ5MjVlZDQ5N2RkMDQxNWJiZDdhNmZjOCxtOFE1Q3pwMw%3D%3D">Mozilla Firefox</a> ଭଳି ବ୍ରାଉଜର ଇନଷ୍ଟଲ କରିପାରିବେ । ସଫ୍ଟଓଏର ସ୍ୱାଧୀନତା ଦିବସର ଚିହ୍ନ ସ୍ୱରୂପର ଲେଖକର ଏ ଲେଖାଟି ମଧ୍ୟ ଏକ ଖୋଲା ଲାଇସେନ୍ସରେ ଆଉ ଶ୍ରେୟ ଦେଇ କେହି ଚାହିଁଲେ ତାହାକୁ ପ୍ରକାଶ କରିପାରିବେ ।</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/software-freedom-day'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/software-freedom-day</a>
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No publishersubhaOpen StandardsOpennessAccess to Knowledge2016-09-18T03:33:00ZBlog Entry