Centre for Internet & Society

OSOD 2013: International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data

by Prasad Krishna

Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist at the International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data, 2013, held on October 07, 2013 at the Indian Statistical Institute. She gave a presentation on "Government Copyright and the Open Access Conundrum"

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GFM 2013

by Prasad Krishna

Nishant Shah participated in a panel discussion with Wendy Chun, Tom Levine and Geert Lovink , around 'The End of Bibliographies: New Media and Research'. Nishant also participated as a panelist in a panel discussion on 'Open Up: Pragmatism and Politics of Open Access'. The programme was held at the University of Luneberg in Germany from October 3 to 5, 2013.

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Open Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe

by Subbiah Arunachalam

Researchers face two problems related to information access: making their own research more visible to researchers elsewhere and making worldwide research readily available to them. Open access (OA) can solve both of them.

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Open Access Dialogues - Report and Policy Recommendations

by Sumandro Chattapadhyay

The Open Access Dialogues were a series of global electronic debates facilitated by Eve Gray and Kelsey Wiens, in partnership with The African Commons Project (South Africa) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), during November 2012 to March 2013. It was supported by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and was hosted at WSIS Knowledge Communities Discussion Forum.

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Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants

by Subhashish Panigrahi

On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.

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Use made of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers to Publish their Findings

by Madhan Muthu and Subbiah Arunachalam

Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) ournals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.

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Strategic Issues Emerging from Open Access Dialogues - Final Report

by Sumandro Chattapadhyay

A series of discussions - on the Chat Literacy forum of ELDIS and on Twitter - was organised during November 2012 to March 2013 to identify the global challenges in 'Navigating the Complexities of Open Access'. The discussions were facilitated by Eve Gray and Kelsey Wiens, in partnership with The African Commons Project (South Africa) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), through support from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. On behalf of CIS, Sumandro Chattapadhyay co-coordinated and contributed to these discussions.

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Aaron Swartz: The First Martyr of the Free Information Movement

by Lawrence Liang

Well known American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist died on January 11, 2013. Lawrence Liang from the Alternative Law Forum discusses with Newsclick the tragic loss. The interview was conducted by Prabir Purkayastha.

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Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013

by Subhashish Panigrahi

Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”

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The Violence of Knowledge Cartels

by Nishant Shah

We are all struck with a sense of loss, grief and shock since we heard of the death of Aaron Swartz, by suicide. People who have been his friends have written heart-felt obituaries, saluting his dreams and visions and unwavering commitment to a larger social good.

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