Centre for Internet and Society

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:41:15Z

My paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015. The final paper will be shared by second week of May. Here is the accepted abstract.

Where are the NGOs?

On February 04, 2013, several members of the DataMeet group <http://datameet.org/> were invited by the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Project Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU) – the nodal agency responsible for developing, implementing, and managing the Open Government Data Platform of India <https://data.gov.in/> – to share thoughts on the status of the implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), the open data policy of India, and discuss potentials for collaboration. A key proposal made by the NDSAPPMU team regarding how DataMeet can contribute to the implementation process, involved DataMeet mobilising the developer community connected to the group to build applications that use the opened up data and demonstrate the value of open government data to drive greater contribution by government agencies and greater utilisation by citizen groups. For DataMeet, a network of open data users and advocates, this invitation to collaborate sets up a slightly different problematic than that in most of the cases of free and open source software development project. The task here is to develop projects that use already available data, which may not offer significantly return to investment at present, but will accellerate the process of opening up of more valuable government data.

However, building an application that effectively utilise government data to foreground a compelling argument or story requires more than a team of developers – it also require domain experts with a deep sense of the context from which the data is emanating. With a vibrant scene of nongovernmental organisations involved in monitoring, analysis, and implementation of developmental projects, many of such domain experts in India are located within such organisations, with some being in the academic institutes too. Reporting from an open data community meeting organised by the World Bank at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on December 10, 2014, Isha Parihar asks: “Where are the NGOs?” She points out that “[t]he discussions around open data [in India] also highlight the absence of nonprofit organisations among the technologyfocused groups, entrepreneurs, and businesses [1].” This observation is especially critical as the meeting was organsied by World Bank not only to gather public responses to be presented to Government of India, but also to take stock of the open data community in India. The absence of NGOs, although, does not indicate at the lack of interest of the nongovernmental research and advocacy organisations in India to work with government data. Such organisations, on the contrary, have a long history of accessing, using, sharing, and communicating government data obtained through both proactive and reactive disclosure mechanism. While surveying such practices in a recent report, Sumandro Chattapadhyay argues [2] that the lack of a common understanding of the open data community in India emerges from both the lack of an established forum where commercial and non-commercial reusers of data discuss and articulate their requirements and demands, and the existence of an established range of actors accessing, using, and resharing government data for commercial and noncommercial purposes who are still uncertain regarding how open government data will exactly transform and augment their existing practices.

Whose Open Data Community is it?

In the context of the emerging open data ecosystem in India, thus, the notion of the open data community comes forward as both the problem – in terms of the community not yet being there to effectively take forward the open data agenda – and the solution – as the component of the ecosystem that can successfully bridge gaps between interests and capacities of various stakeholders. Given the gap and the stakeholder concerned, the open data community is expected to perform various critical functions. This paper tracks these conceptualisations of open data community in India. Based upon conversations with fourteen organisations working across four cities in India, the question of 'whose open data community is it' is explored in this paper following three pathways – (1) by documenting how the understanding of the open data community, and the location of the organisation concerned in reference to that, changes across these organisations, (2) by describing how the idea of who all are included in the open data community in India changes across these organisations, and (3) by identifying how different organisations formulate the intended audiences of the open data community in India. In doing so, I argue that a range of critical challenges being experienced by the open data ecosystem in India often gets articulated as things that can be resolved by a more active and effective open data community. This distorts the distribution of responsbilities across various kinds of stakeholders for contributing to the open data ecosystem. In conclusion, I note the need to stop using open data community as a solution-for-all-open-data-evils, and for a pragmatic approach to understand the kinds of open data challenges it can address, and those that it cannot.

Endnotes

[1] Parihar, Isha. 2015. On the Road to Open Data: Glimpses of the Discourse in India. Akvo. January 14. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://akvo.org/blog/on-the-road-to-open-data-glimpses-of-the-discourse-in-india/

[2] Chattapadhyay, Sumandro. 2014. Opening Government Data through Mediation: Exploring Roles, Practices and Strategies of (Potential) Data Intermediary Organisations in India. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/report/sumandro_oddc_project_report.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/whose-open-data-community-is-it-abstract

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:40:49Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001-2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon. The sections will discuss the activities and experiences of civil society organisations in Asia and India, respectively, in national, regional, and global Internet governance processes. The draft outlines of the sections are shared here. Comments and suggestions are invited.

In the (draft) Foreword to the Asia Internet History – Third Decade (2001-2010), Prof. David J. Farber writes:

One of the early attempts to extend the reach of the Internet to Asia was via the “Johnny Appleseed” approach. That is a set of people responded to queries by people in Asian countries asking how they could connect with the growing Internet by offering to supply tapes to key people in the requesting countries, often by physically going with the tapes, as well as providing access points to the USA Internet. The people that we, I was one of the seeders, worked, with became the leaders in their nation and founded the initial national networks that blossomed with time and often formed the basis of commercial Internets. The traditions that these network frontier pioneers established lead to the eventual spread of the benefits of Internet access to not only their nations but became models for the spread to the rest of Asia…

I am honoured to contribute to the pioneering series titled Asia Internet History, edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon, by foregrounding a range of other individuals and organisations that often worked outside but in engagement with the national governments, and technical and academic institutions that govern the connecting tapes of the Internet, to ensure mass access to and effective usages of Internet in Asia.

The two sections, to be authored me, provides an overview of ‘civil society organisations’ working across Asian countries that have played a critical role in the shaping of policy-making and discourse around Internet governance during 2000-2010, and then undertakes a closer look at the organisations working in India and their interventions at national, regional, and global levels.

Please read the draft outlines of the overview section and the section on Indian organisations, and share your comments. The comments can be posted on the GitHub page where the outlines are hosted, on this page, or over email: sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

The outlines can also be directly downloaded as markdown files: the overview and the India section.

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

Here is a tentative list of key civil society organisations from Asia that have participated and intervened in Internet governance processes during 2001-2010. Please suggest organisations missing from the list.

Bangladesh

Cambodia

China

Indonesia

EngageMedia, Australia and Indonesia
ICT Laboratory for Social Change (iLab)
Indonesian CSOs Network for Internet Governance
Indonesian ICT Partnership Association (ICT Watch)
Internet Society Indonesia Chapter [website is under construction]

India

Iran

Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Centre (ICTRC) [URL is not working]

Japan

Centre for Global Communications (GLOCOM) [Academia?]
Internet Society Japan Chapter
Japan Computer Access for Empowerment (JCAFE) [URL is not working]
Japan Computer Access Network (JCA-NET)

Kuwait

iJMA3 - Kuwait Information Technology Society (KITS)

Lebanon

Lebanese Center for Civic Education (LCCE)

Malaysia

Internet Society Malaysia Chapter

Myanmar

Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO)

Nepal

Internet Society Nepal Chapter

Pakistan

Philippines

Democracy.Net.PH
Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) [URL not working
Internet Society Philippines Chapter

Regional

Singapore

Internet Society Singapore Chapter

South Korea

Sri Lanka

Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter

Thailand

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-and-india-outlines

NETmundial: Tracking Multistakeholder across Contributions

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:53:37Z

This set of analysis of the contributions submitted to NETmundial 2014 is part of the effort by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, to enable productive discussions of the critical internet governance issues at the meeting and elsewhere.

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Data compiled by Sumandro and Jyoti.
Download the data .

This scatter plot shows the number of times the word *multistakeholder* (including *multi-stakeholder* and *multistakeholderism*) appears across contributions submitted to NETmundial.

X axis (horizontal) gives the serial number of contributions and Y axis (vertical) gives the number of times the word appears on a contribution.

Click on the types of organisation below the chart to highlight the corresponding organisations on the chart.

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness, and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Panday, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-tracking-multi-stakeholder-across-contributions

NETmundial - Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:51:51Z

Created by Sumandro using R.
Download the R code .
Download the data.

These word clouds show the hundred most frequently appearing words in the aggregated contribution text of each type of organisations.

The size of the words in these diagrams refer to their frequency of appearance. A larger size refers to higher frequency of appearance. The colour of the words have been differentiated to group the words according to their freuqency of appearance. The color hierarchy is as follows: Green, Pink, Blue, Red.

While creating these word clouds, certain common English words (like, 'the' and 'and') and obvious words for the contributions (like, 'internet' and 'governance') have been ommitted. The full list of ommitted words have been documented in the R code used to generate the diagrams.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-word-clouds-of-contributions-by-types-of-organisation

NETmundial - Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:47:53Z

Created by Sumandro using Datamaps.

The map shows (in *green*) all the countries from where no government agency has submitted any contribution to NETmundial. Governments of the countries appearing in *white* have contributed to the NETmundial process.

Inter-governmental and international bodies that have submitted contributions to NETmundial -- such as OECD and UNESCO -- have not been considered while creating the above map.

To see the map of all the countries from where there have been no contributions (by any kinds of organisation) to NETmundial, click here.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Panday, and with data entry support from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-governments-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial

NETmundial - Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:40:03Z

Created by Sumandro using Datamaps.

The map shows (in *green*) all the countries from where no contributions (by any kinds of organisation) have been submitted to NETmundial. Countries appearing in *white* are those from where contributions have been submitted.

Organisations that have indicated (in their submitted contribution) that they are either 'global' or 'international' organisations with headquarter in a specific country(ies), or a coalition of several organisations from different countries, have not been considered while making the above map. Such organisations (not considered while making this map) include African ICT/IG Stakeholders, Association for Progressive Communications, Best Bits, Just Net Coalition, OECD, etc.

To see the map of all the countries from where the respective governments have not submitted any contributions to NETmundial, click here.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

Built on Bootstrap by Sumandro

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-countries-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial

NETmundial - Contributions by Types of Organisation

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:57:11Z

This Sankey diagram shows all the countries/regions from where contributions have come in on the left side, and all the various types of organisations on the right side. Use the mouse cursor to hover over a country to see what proportion of the submissions from that country has come from which type of organisation, or hover over an organisation type to see what proportion of submission from such organisations have come in from which countries.

The height of the blue bars next to the country/region names and organisation types indicate at the respective proportions among all the contributions.

Certain submissions have been contributed by global organisations, such as Internet Society, ICANN and Commonwealth agencies. These submissions have been included in the 'Global' division in the above chart.

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Download the data.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-types-of-organisation

NETmundial - Contributions by Countries of Origin

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:55:43Z

Created by Sumandro using Google Charts.
Google Terms of Use and Data Policy.
Download the data.

This treemap chart divides up contributions submitted to NETmundial 2014 into their countries of origin, which are also clustered into regional divisions. The size of the rectangles indicate the total number of submissions from the respective region/country.

Right click on the regions to see the division of submissions from the countries within that region. Left click to go back.

Certain submissions have been contributed by global organisations, such as Internet Society, ICANN and Commonwealth agencies. These submissions have been included in the 'Global' division in the above chart. Also, Russia has been included within Europe, and China has been included within East Asia.

The visualisations are done by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, based on data compilation and analysis by Jyoti Pandey, and with data entry suport from Chandrasekhar.

All code, content and data is co-owned by the author(s) and Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 India license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-countries-of-origin

NETmundial - Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

sumandro — 2014-04-25T09:59:13Z

Image above: Comparing Absolute Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

Image above: Comparing Relative Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

Created by Sumandro using R.
Download the R code.
Download the data.

These heatmaps compare the appearance of fifty most frequently appearing words (for all 187 contributions) across the contributions made by different types of organisation. Click on them to see the larger images. Hit *escape* to come back to this page.

The first heatmap shows the absolute appearance of the words -- that is the total number of times each word appears in contributions by a type of organisation.

The second heatmap shows the relative appearance of the words -- that is the ratio of the word's appearance in contribution by a type of organisation divided by total number of contributions by that type of organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-comparing-appearance-of-fifty-most-frequent-words

Open Access Dialogues - Report and Policy Recommendations

sumandro — 2015-12-22T06:52:58Z

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.

Report: Download (PDF)

Policy Recommendations (as below): Download (PDF)

Is Open Access Only for Rich Countries?

Authors: Eve Gray, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Kelsey Wiens and Alistair Scott

It is not unusual for analysis of research systems in the developing world to provide startlingly low figures for the participation of developing countries in world research. For example, the Times of India last October cited a report that claimed that India produced only 3.5% of the world’s research – a shocking statistic, the newspaper commented. The commonly accepted figure for Africa’s contribution is even worse, at 0.3%. In reality, these figures do not reflect at all the size and shape of the national research systems in these count ries nor their productivity. Rather, they are a measure of how many journal articles are published in journals in the global North and particularly in journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI indices.

The developing world has been badly served by the scholarly publishing system inherited from the 20th century. The commercialization and consolidation of scholarly publishing over the last 60 years has progressively put the publication of the bulk of the world’s research in the hands of a small number of giant co rporations, in an environment characterized by very high and continuously escalating subscription charges, putting access to the world’s research out of the reach of most developing countries. If Harvard complains, as it did recently, that it cannot afford the subscriptions to the major journals, then what could be said for universities in Africa or India?

To add to this, the impact of the dominant systems for measuring the quality and impact of global research have a perverse effect in the developing world, consigning its research to the periphery and categorizing it as of ‘local’ interest rather than being ‘global’, or ‘international’ in its importance.

Global Open Access Policy

Global Open access policy moved forward decisively from late 2011 to early 2013, with UNESCO’s launch of its Open Access to Scientific Information Programme [1] and the World Bank’s launch of its Open Knowledge Platform [2]. At national and regional levels, the Finch Group Report in the United Kingdom [3], the White House Memorandum on Access to Federally Funded Research [4] in the US A and the announcement of the open access provisions of the Horizon 2020 Framework for Research and Innovation [5] in the European Union all marked a global move to entrench open access to publicly funded research. These policies commit political weight and financial support to policy implementation, based on an understanding of the contribution that OA can make to innovation and thus to social and economic development across the world. In the face of these developments, the developing countries, which currently tend to have fragmented OA and research communication policies, face the risk of falling even further behind in finding their place in global and locally relevant research production.

What these events have added to the policy debate about open access over the last year is not only the recognition of the need for government - level logistical and financial support for open research communication, but also a widening of the mandate for open access. Early formulations of open access policy focused on opening up ‘the peer reviewed journal literature’, as the founding document on Open Access, the Budapest Open Access initiative, defined it in 2002 [6]. The principle was that these publications should be freely available to readers, to read, to download and data-mine.. It is this approach that largely informs the UNESCO’s Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access (2012) [7]. The World Bank policy, on the other hand, takes a broader view of open access, applying a Creative Commons CC-BY licence to the work that it commissions, thus allowing for reuse and repurposing of content in order to reach the widest possible audience and have the maximum development impact [8].

Open Access Dialogues

A number of policy issues emerged from the Open Access Dialogues (OAD), facilitated by Eve Gray, The African Commons Project and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, in late 2012 and early 2013 with participants from South Africa, India and Latin America. The overriding policy outcome was an expressed desire to expand the concept of open access to include other kinds of openness, such as open education and open development and to expand beyond journal articles in leveraging the benefits of openness in developing countries, as well as involving outside - university knowledge producers and distributors in the OA agenda. O ver - reliance on the ISI Impact Factor was also a key aspect of the present OA system that came in for criticism , leading to demands for the formulation of research reward systems that are better aligned with national and institutional research strategies and development of alternative metrics for evaluating research success.

The discuss ion took place on the UNESCO/WSIS Knowledge Communities discussion forum, where a total of 19 discussants, excluding the core team, took part. Additionally, the OAD Facebook page was ‘liked’ by 116 people (as of 1 March 2013), with the most common age grou p being 25 - 34 and the gender bias being towards female users at 60%. Two (one hour - long) Twitter discussions were also organised, which attracted 83 unique users in total, who shared 530 tweets using the #developOA hashtag.

Strategic Issues and Policy Recommendations

Beyond the Impact Factor

The ISI Impact Factor (IF) remains the dominant measure for research evaluation and determining academic rewards and promotions in the Anglophone world and beyond. The discussants identified the extreme preference for publication in ('closed') journals with high Impact Factors (IF) as a central obstacle to effective research communication aligned with national and regional goals. Of particular concern was the role this system has had in aligning developing country research activities with academic interests in the universities of the global North, and thus di verting developed country research away from local challenges and opportunities. This model also renders invisible much of the research that is actually produced that addresses local/national/regional concerns. Another concern was bibliographic malpractices including bias against citing works from developing country scholars and work published in non - 'prestigious' journals. Strong argument s were made for the use of article-level metrics as opposed to journal - level impact measurement . Studies were suggested to argue that article-level impact increases with OA journals.

Policy recommendations:

Replacing reliance on bibliometric s and journal-level citation indexes with article-level metrics and emerging alternative metrics that take into consideration the circulation and usage of knowledge beyond higher education institutes.
Developing education policies and guidelines to evaluate res earch and researchers in their specific contexts of relevance and impact, and aligning academic rewards with national, regional and local development strategies.

Uneven Geographies and the Need for Sustainable Models

Attention was drawn to the unfortunate lack of awareness about the nature and potential of OA across developing countries, even in scholarly communities. Simultaneously, the discussants highlighted several success stories of OA journals in developing countries, though mostly from science disciplines. Thus the developing world experiences an uneven geography of OA awareness and adoption, where the OA agenda is being pursued successfully by specific scholarly communities but not translating into widespread support across the higher academia landscape nor into coherent national policy development.

The role played by the global commercial businesses of scholarly works in impeding the Open Access agenda in developing countries was mentioned by most of the commentators. Simultaneously, the complicity of developing country academics in reinforcing the culture of 'prestigious' journals published by global publishers was also criticized. The increasing embracing of Author Processing Charges (APC), the discussants feared, will further entrench this uneven geography of OA adoption and research visibility. This issue is crucial since it is generating a sense of cynicism about OA as yet another incarnation of commercial exploitation of scholarship that advantages the rich countries. The use of fee waivers was criticised for being only an exceptional measure that serves to reinforce exclusion of researchers outside of or new to the dominant scholarly publishing system. There is a need, it was argued, to develop a sustainable business model that is functional in making knowledge circulate in ways that are useful to society, and not solely driven by profit-making needs of publishers.

Policy recommendations:

Promoting a bottom-up strategy for OA adoption in the developing world by focusing on capacity and community building exercises. This could involve scholarly colleagues and advocates gathered around thematic and/or disciplinary forums, facilitated by institutional and governmental recognition and support.
Linking the issue of OA to academic works to the structural problems in developing country academics, adopting a wide-ranging and systematic approach to research capacitation. There is a need to promote OA through curriculum development, knowledge dissemination, training and advocacy, engaging actors ranging from senior administrators to young scholars.
Addressing and involving non-university circuits of learning, of both institutional (primary and secondary education) and non-institutional (informal learning groups around MOOC courses) varieties, and also non-governmental organisations working o n education in particular, and development in general.

A Broader Vision for Open Access

A number of discussants argued for a broader mandate for OA than the traditional journal focus. There were two aspects to this recommendation: firstly, OA should align with other forms of ‘open’ agendas , such as open science, open education and open development, and secondly, OA policies should support distribution and re - usage of a wider range of research outputs. Thus the scope of OA needs to be broadened to focus on the needs of potential consumers of research findings rather than only on the scholar-to-scholar discourse that journals constitute. This wider agenda could include research data, multimedia, 'grey literature ’ such as research and briefing papers, and policy papers. In the context of developing countries, it was argued that 'translations' of research for communities outside academia were important, especially ' recognizing the importance of publishing in a format that most appropriately meets the information and knowledge needs of those who can use the research to improve society's development', as a leading public health academic argued in the OA dialogue.

This broader vision of OA challenges the conventional hierarchy of basic research over applied research, proposing that OA can provide a communicative continuum between scholar - to - scholar discourse, teaching and learning needs, and the mobilization of research for development.

Policy recommendations:

Build on the present governmental acceptance of the OA agenda by strategically using it as an entry point to promote the broader 'open' agenda, including open sharing of research data, bibliographic data, policy papers etc.
Recognize, support and reward OA initiatives and systems that facilitate sharing of a wide range of academic outputs, from journals, books and other scholarly publications to development - focused research outputs targeted at communities outside of higher academia.
Financial and logistical support for the creation and maintenance of websites, repositories, archives and other (offline/outreach) initiatives aimed at hosting and sharing a wide-range of academic outputs, including data and multimedia, and mandating licences that allow for re-use of scholarly materials ( such as CC-BY), for development and educational needs.
A comprehensive (national and international) institutional policy approach, ensuring a central role for research communication in universities and research institutes and for integrated administrative, technology and skills infrastructure to support these roles.

Notes

[1] See: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-access-to-scientific-information/

[2] See: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/

[3] The Finch Report: http://www.res earchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-executive-summary-FINAL-VERSION.pdf

[4] The White House Open Access Memorandum: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research

[5] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-790_en.htm

[6] http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read

[7] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/

[8] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23164491~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-access-dialogues-report

Strategic Issues Emerging from Open Access Dialogues - Final Report

sumandro — 2015-10-11T04:39:10Z

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.

The final report of the Open Access Dialogues was published by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and can be accessed here.

A sub-report summarising the experiences and arguments expressed by the Indian participants in the Dialogues was prepared by Sumandro, which can be read below or downloaded here.

Strategic issues emerging from the comments of Indian participants

1. Lacking OA awareness, even among scholarly communities

Many, if not all, commentators emphasised the unfortunate lack of awareness about the notion and possibilities of Open Access across India, including among the scholarly and/or higher education related communities. Often the notion of Open Access is quite familiar, especially among scholars, but without a clear understanding of its benefits and how to make one's scholarly works openly accessible.

2. Uneven geography of OA success stories

The above point must be read along with strong success stories emerging from Indian OA journals, mostly from science disciplines. A recent study reveals that 970 Indian OA journals are included in the 'Journals Citation Report 2011' (science), and the Impact Factors of these journals are on the rise. This indicates towards a very uneven geography of OA awareness and adoption in India, with the OA agenda being pursued successfully by specific scholarly communities but not translating into widespread support across the higher academia landscape.

3. Global businesses of scholarly works and complicity of Indian researchers

The role of global businesses of scholarly works in impending the Open Access agenda in the India was mentioned by most of the commentators. The publication, and especially distribution, of publicly funded research is dominated by global publication houses. Additionally, the complicity of Indian researchers in reinforcing the culture of exclusive and 'prestigious' journals published by global publishers is also well understood and criticised.

4. Citation Indexes as necessary evil

While the discussants argued against an over-emphasis on Impact Factors in judging a quality and success of journals, especially for IF being biased against new journals, and thus against newly started OA journals. At the same time, measurement of citations remains a crucial way of understanding readership and impact of scholarly works. There was a strong recommendation of article-level metrics as opposed to journal-level ones. Studies were suggested to argue that article-level impact increases with OA journals. Another concern is bibliographic malpractices, including biases against citing works from Indian (or, developing world) scholars and against citing works published in non-'prestigious' journals.

5. Open Access must not only be about access to journals

A strongly expressed opinion was that the OA agenda must move beyond journal publications. The journal-centric approach emphasises the supply side of knowledge but fails to appreciate the demand of knowledge, especially in a country like India where primary and secondary education remain vital challenges. Further, even within higher academic circles, OA agenda must expand into other forms of scholarly works beyond journal essays, such as primary data and other research materials, especially since all such forms are also produced by public funds. Open Access to 'gray literature' (produced by private and non-profit research organisations) is also crucial, as much policy-making tends to be shaped by such works.

6. Open Access and the consumers of knowledge

The commentators emphasised the nature of OA to knowledge as a public good. The OA agenda must address the consumers of knowledge outside the university system, and especially across socio-economic classes. While open university education and participation in MOOC-models of learning are on the rise in India, there is a threat that this digital-centric approach reinforced existing digital divides in access to knowledge.

Policy Suggestions

1.'Mainstreaming' the OA agenda: Instead of locating OA as a separate agenda, it will be useful to 'mainstream' it within larger development/research related funding initiatives by making OA publications of research outcomes a necessary grants condition.

2.OA as the entry point to a broader 'open' agenda: The OA agenda can build upon its existing institutional and governmental acceptance and implementation to promote a broader 'open' agenda, including open sharing of research data, open formats for and sharing of bibliographic data etc.

3.Moving the OA discussion and knowledge organisation beyond higher education communities: Addressing non-university circuits of learning, of both institutional (primary and secondary education) and non-institutional (informal learning groups around MOOC courses) varieties, is a crucial challenge for the OA agenda in the developing world. Another crucial community of potential OA supporters would be the non-governmental and non-profit organisations working in the field of education in particular, and development in general.

4.Removing policy biases against Open Access journals in academic administration: Combined global and local efforts remains important to reshape national academic administration policies to stop discrimination against OA publication of scholarly works, such as higher academic benefit for publication in closed 'prestigious' journals.

5.Encouraging and supporting scholarly communities (often with a disciplinary and/or thematic common ground) to undertake OA knowledge production: Promoting the OA agenda must also adopt a bottom-up strategy in the developing world, and this would require capacity and community building exercises involving local and global scholarly colleagues and enthusiasts gathered around thematic and/or disciplinary focii, as well as institutional and governmental recognition and support.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/strategic-issues-emerging-from-open-access-dialogues-final-report

researchers@work

sumandro — 2019-03-13T01:14:21Z

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society produces and supports pioneering and sustained trans-disciplinary research on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society; organise and incubate networks of and fora for researchers and practitioners studying and making internet in India; and contribute to development of critical digital pedagogy, research methodology, and creative practice.

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society undertakes and supports research, incubation, and pedagogic works at the intersections of internet and society.

We take ‘internet’ as a shorthand for the unevenly implemented and governed global communication system that uses internet protocol suite (including TCP/IP and others) for networking devices and networks worldwide, and the ecosystem of socio-technological practices, institutions, and industries that constitute it.

We undertake grounded investigations and strategic interventions to document, analyse, and respond to transforming social realities and challenges emerging from entanglement of digital devices, data, and networks with various aspects of everyday lives.

We are interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between internet and digital technologies on one hand, and socio-material and geo-political structures on the other.

Research

Our research engagements are structured through five clusters:

Incubation

We recognise the urgent need do imagine and organise networks of people and groups toward forming enabling organisational structures and mobilising resources for practice-oriented research, archival, and creative works. We are committed to explore and realise possibilities of incubating new formations and practices of collaborative critical research, as well as strategic groupings to undertake applied research on urgent socio-technical concerns.

Pedagogy

Questions of pedagogy in the digital era on one hand, and those of learning about the digital on the other, are of key interest to the researchers@work programme. Our pedagogic engagements have two focus areas:

Creating communities and fora for research and teaching about topics related to internet and digital media
Creating free, open, multilingual, and reusable resources for teaching and learning about such topics

Towards operationalising the first area of focus, we have initiated an annual conference series - titled Internet Researchers' Conference - to create an annual temporary space (across India) for internet researchers to gather and share their works and experiences. We have also launched a Medium-based blog - r@w blog - to serve as a publishing venue for short- and long-form reflections on internet and society, as well as of critical media works and recordings of presentations and discussions.

Connect

E-mail: raw@cis-india.org

Mailing List: researchers@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-front

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized

sumandro — 2015-07-13T07:16:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_12_Resized.jpg

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized

sumandro — 2015-07-13T07:15:32Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_10_Resized.jpg

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized

sumandro — 2015-07-13T06:44:24Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_04_Resized.jpg

Centre for Internet and Society

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

Where are the NGOs?

Whose Open Data Community is it?

Endnotes

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

NETmundial: Tracking *Multistakeholder* across Contributions

NETmundial - Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation

NETmundial - Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

NETmundial - Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?

NETmundial - Contributions by Types of Organisation

NETmundial - Contributions by Countries of Origin

NETmundial - Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words

Open Access Dialogues - Report and Policy Recommendations

Report: Download (PDF)

Policy Recommendations (as below): Download (PDF)

Is Open Access Only for Rich Countries?

Global Open Access Policy

Open Access Dialogues

Strategic Issues and Policy Recommendations

Beyond the Impact Factor

Uneven Geographies and the Need for Sustainable Models

A Broader Vision for Open Access

Notes

Strategic Issues Emerging from Open Access Dialogues - Final Report

Strategic issues emerging from the comments of Indian participants

1. Lacking OA awareness, even among scholarly communities

2. Uneven geography of OA success stories

3. Global businesses of scholarly works and complicity of Indian researchers

4. Citation Indexes as necessary evil

5. Open Access must not only be about access to journals

6. Open Access and the consumers of knowledge

Policy Suggestions

researchers@work

Research

Incubation

Pedagogy

Connect

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized

NETmundial: Tracking Multistakeholder across Contributions