Centre for Internet and Society

Vidhi Doshi - Fingerprint Payments Prompt Privacy Fears in India (The Guardian)

Vidhi Doshi — 2017-02-13T09:21:42Z

This article by Vidhi Doshi on the use of Aadhaar-based payments by private companies in India was published by The Guardian on February 09, 2017. Sumandro Chattapadhyay is quoted in the article.

Originally published by The Guardian.

For two years, Indian officials have been trawling the country, from city slums to unelectrified villages, zapping eyeballs, scanning fingerprints and taking photographs.

Last month, Indian shoppers started to see the results. With the launch of a government-backed fingerprint payment system, tied to India’s growing biometric data bank, registered citizens can – in theory at least – now pay for things with the touch of a finger.

India’s extraordinary biometric database, named Aadhaar after a Hindi word for ‘foundation’, is the biggest of its kind in the world. It was initially sold to the public as a welfare delivery mechanism that would ensure the country’s 1.25bn citizens were each receiving the right quantity of subsidised rice or cooking fuel, while weeding out fraudsters.

But now this pool of more than a billion people’s biometric data is being used by banks, credit checking firms and other private companies to identify customers, raising questions about privacy and security.

As one of his flagship policies, prime minister Narendra Modi pledged to create a “digital India” in which the country’s cash-centric economy would switch to credit and debit cards, squeezing the parallel economy of untaxed cash transactions and giving more citizens access to digital financial services.

In a surprise television announcement last November, Modi announced the demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes (around £6 and £12), wiping out 85% of the country’s circulating currency overnight.

Two days later, when the banks reopened, long queues snaked around almost every branch, with millions lining up to open bank accounts for the first time. Many used their 12-digit Aadhaar number, linked to their biometric profile, to sign up. Within three weeks, 3m bank accounts had been opened using fingerprint verification, according to estimates.

The moment marked a radical change for India’s banking system, under which applicants were traditionally required to file photocopies of passports or voter IDs. Banks could take weeks, sometimes months, to verify them. Now applicants’ encrypted biometric data can be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a government agency, to be matched against their Aadhaar data, re-encrypted and sent back to the bank.

Despite technical teething problems, the system is designed to allow very fast authorisation. “All this happens in a matter or two or three seconds,” explains Ajay Bhushan Pandey, UIDAI’s director general.

For Pandey, the benefits are clear: paper documents are easy to forge and hard to verify, especially in India where until recently thousands of people still used handwritten passports. Not so biometric data.

Privacy fears

Pandey emphasises that private banks and companies aren’t able to access the entire Aadhaar database, only to use the government interface, which allows them to verify identities.

Nonetheless, many Indians are worried about the privacy implications. Sumandro Chattapadhyay, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society thinktank, is one of them.

For starters, says Chattapadhyay, the law governing use of the biometric database, fast-tracked through parliament last year, is flimsy when it comes to the private sector. Since India lacks a general privacy or data protection law, this leaves corporate use of Aadhaar services effectively unregulated, he says.

This is particularly worrying, says Chattapadhyay, because of the data-sharing possibilities opened up by Aadhaar. It makes it easier for companies not only to share information on individuals’ consumption and mobility habits, but also to link this data up with public records like the electoral register, he says. “Both lead to significant threats to privacy of individuals.”

Chattapadhyay’s fear is that private companies could eventually gain access to government-held personal data, such as income or medical records, while the government could use company data like phone records to target specific individuals in political campaigns.

Already companies are linking Aadhaar numbers with collected metadata. Credit-checking startup CreditVidya, for example, identifies clients using their biometric ID in combination with their internet browsing history and other data, to assign credit scores for users who have no record of loan repayments. Banks then store this processed metadata, for example whether or not someone’s Facebook name is consistent with the name on their bank account.

Its founder Abhishek Agarwal admits there are risks for users: “[I]f someone managed to hack the bank’s security system, as well as the Aadhaar database, they could potentially be able to link your Facebook or LinkedIn data with your biometric information.” But he says this would be hard to do.

Pandey insists the companies are carefully vetted before they can use Aadhaar authentication. But, like Agarwal, he acknowledges the system can never be 100% secure: ““I wouldn’t say it is impossible to break the system, but it is very, very difficult.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/vidhi-doshi-fingerprint-payments-prompt-privacy-fears-in-india-the-guardian

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli

Admin — 2018-11-06T01:36:39Z

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".

Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, Bombay University has formulated and going to start a "Diploma course in Community Resource Management " with the support of TRTI, Pune from 2nd of oct 2018. This is a historic attempt to impart education of the level of a diploma to rural, especially tribal youth without any condition of academic qualification. The course was conducted at Mendha(Lekha) an hamlet in Dhanora taluk of Gadchiroli District. CIS-A2K has collaborated with TRTI to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/van-bodh-workshop-for-content-development-on-forest-resources-at-gadchiroli

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

The blog post throws light on providing access to Vachana Sanchaya, a eleventh century Kannada literature.

The article was published in Open Access Week on April 3, 2014.

During early 11th century a form of spiritual Kannada language poetry in the Indian state of Karnataka called Vachana sahitya became quite popular. It started flourishing in the 12th century by a religious movement called Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, compiled over 11,000 vachanas (verses). 21,000 of these verses in 15 volumes were published by the Government of Karnataka into an online portal called Samagra Vachana Samputa. Two Wikimedians along with two linguists brought these verses on a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya. Kannada Wikimedians, Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI along with Kannada linguist O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy converted the font to Unicode to make the verses searchable on this project. The entire collection is now ready to enrich the Kannada WikiSource.

The text in Samagra Vachana Samputa were typed using fonts of ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. Indic characters generally replace Latin ones inside the font that makes them completely useless when someone does not have the particular font installed in the computer. This is a typical problem with non-Latin fonts, especially Indic typefaces. In case of this particular publication, there were more than 5 ISCII standards which made searching and reusing content completely impossible. Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash started writing scripts to make the Vachanas searchable through an index. This demanded a user friendly platform for the linguistic researchers, students, and the public interested in accessing this literature.

Omshivaprakash worked on designing the architecture for this platform using open source software tools. Hanchagaiah was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, Vachana Sanchaya project has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these verses. The public has been using the repository and accessing vachana from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not only a gateway for reading the literature, but also a research platform for Kannada language and literature. It has options for researchers to help in reviewing content which in turn will help to add references from research papers.

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

Other similar projects could take help from this project and use any part of the processes.

Plans going foward:

To initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary.
To continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyāsa and Muddann (work to be started)
To extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

Authored by Pavithra Hanchagaiah, Omshivaprakash HI and Subhashish Panigrahi. Draws inspiration from another article published on Opensource.com under CC-BY-SA 4.0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/openaccessweek-april-3-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-vachana-sanchaya

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

Kannada Wikipedian Omshivaprakash, Pavithra and I co-authored this article on digitizing Vachana Sahitya, a 11th century Kannada literature on WikiSource.

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI, Wikimedians from India are co-authors with Subhashish Panigrahi in this article. This was originally posted on Wikimedia blog and published by GlobalVoices on March 18, 2014.

In the poetry of Kannada (an Indic language), Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the 11th Century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century, as part of the “Lingayatha” movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume “Samagra Vachana Samputa” by the government of Karnataka have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with a Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called “Vachana Sanchaya” and ready to enrich Kannada Wikisource.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O.L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had trouble using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. I (Pavithra Hanchagaiah) started to help gather information about vachanas and document it in Unicode by writing scripts for open source software. Further discussions were had to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be easily searchable with an index. This demanded us to build a platform supporting all these activities, which would help the linguistic researchers, students and members of the general public who have an interest in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model, and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime I was running various scripts to fix errors in conversion of ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to consume by the modules developed for concordance. We spent weekends & holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr. Swamy and Vasudendra, we learned how concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to research on Vachana Sahitya. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements – free and open source software technologies were used to keep the platform active while managing the entire project. I provided critical hacks for digitization and gave feedback through suggestions.

Working System Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!	Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Working System

Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

We are glad to see people accessing vachanas from our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. There have been approximately 500,000 pageviews to our site in the first few months of our platform’s public launch. Interestingly, commonly searched Kannada words like “ಕರ್ಮ”(Karma en:Work/Deed) , “ಸತ್ಯ” (Sathya -en:Truthfulness ) and “ನದಿ” (River) have resulted in quick and easy results.

Plans for the future

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ, ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು. ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

Our system is extensible with respect to adding new feature – we have a review desk for researchers to help us with the review of content. Later we will also be adding required references to Vachanas from various research works that have been done around this literature. The content is available to the public through OpenData API and will be distributed as public domain through Wikisource once the review work is complete. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers and anyone interested in working around building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. This system is meant to evolves around other works rather than having to change and re-invent the wheel for more such projects. Vachana Sahitya will further help us to initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researchers get together to tag the words, glossary etc in the coming days. We can also fulfill the need of various language tools like spelling and grammar checker for users through crowd-sourcing the development. The next projects under the “Kannada Sanchaya” are Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya which are in the pipeline with initial phases of work underway. Our idea is to extend this platform from Vyasa to Muddanna and possibly the contemporary literature work available in the public domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/vachana-sanchaya-11th-century-kannada-literature-to-enrich-wikisource

Vacancy: Programme Officer (Delhi)

pranav — 2019-03-29T08:44:03Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is seeking applications for the position of Programme Officer, for research on intellectual property rights and access to knowledge. The position is full time and will be based in CIS’ Delhi office.

Responsibilities

To support and drive new research initiatives of the work done by the IP team, the Programme Officer will be primarily responsible for the following tasks –

Planning and developing research in the subject areas (including, but not limited to) of access to knowledge, international trade and IP treaties, intermediary liability, limitations and exceptions in copyright law, software patents, licensing of SEPs;
Participating in strategic meetings organised by stakeholders;
Locating opportunities and building research partnerships with stakeholders contributing to current and emerging issues;
Contributing to current debates in the relevant research areas.

Core Competencies

Awareness of issues at intersection of Intellectual Property law and emerging tech
Critical appreciation of open knowledge initiatives
Effective communication and collaboration
Intellectual curiosity and openness
Respect for diversity

Functional Competencies

Ability to learn-at-work, especially about the IP-Access to Knowledge and tech ecosystem
Highly organised, motivated, and able to take initiative;
Ability to produce high quality writing outputs regularly
Able to travel for domestic and international engagements

Required Skills and Experience

A degree in law (at a minimum)
Publications to demonstrate good writing and analytical capabilities
Excellent communication skills

Location and Remuneration

This position is based out of the Delhi Office of CIS.

Monthly remuneration for the position will be INR 50,000 (including taxes).

Application Process

We invite interested (and eligible) candidates to apply for the position by sending the following documents to anubha@cis-india.org and copy sunil@cis-india.org, with “Application for Programme Officer (IP)” as the subject.

Cover letter: This should introduce your relevant academic, professional, and other experiences, and describe the kind of work you look forward to do as part of the IP team. We strongly recommend reading CIS’ outputs under this vertical while writing this letter.
CV: This should provide details of your academic, professional, and other achievements.
Work Samples: The position will require you to produce high quality writing outputs regularly. Please share two samples of your writing (published or unpublished). At least one sample should demonstrate an in-depth understanding of intellectual property law.

Interested candidates are invited to send their applications at the earliest - latest by Sunday, March 31st. The shortlisted candidates will be interviewed by the CIS team. If needed, there will be multiple rounds of interviews. We will take the final hiring decision by early April, and invite the selected person to join us from May 1st, 2019.

Please do not hesitate to write to us at anubha@cis-india.org for any clarification regarding this.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-programme-officer-delhi

USTR elaborates the Two Dozen Digital Rules of Club TPP

sinha — 2016-07-29T08:00:00Z

Members of the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are now scrounging the world to include more countries in its fold. The Digital 2 Dozen(D2D) is a bite-sized document which packs the TPP into 24 key tenets. The D2D, aggressively championed by the US as the path forward for the global digital economy poses some critical questions for India: first, how will India position itself against US pressure in the larger scheme of US-India foreign relations, and how much is it willing to concede its policies in the name of trade; second, how will reduced barriers and establishment of a level field for Indian and foreign IT and internet companies alike, hurt Indian consumers and businesses? This week, the Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Holleyman discussed the Digital 2 Dozen document with Ambassador Shyam Saran (Chairman, RIS). The exchange was moderated by Samir Saran (Observer Research Foundation). I attended the discussion and this post is a summary of the key points.

For a background on the data protection and privacy aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and Digital 2 Dozen principles, please read CIS' piece here.

Ambassador Robert Holleyman

Ambassador Holleyman opened with stating that trade agreements are created to build a foundation for national policies. He added that the D2D is not merely a tech D2D, rather it is based on the premise that our economies have digitised to a large extent, and hence, the TPP contains provisions on agriculture as well. The TPP tries to combat barriers to the growth of digital economy, and the D2D provides the most modern and the highest standard of such provisions. The D2D tenets can be divided into three categories:

1. Provisions to ensure the internet is open and safe, and an effective channel for trade and services.

2. Provisions to combat protectionist and restrictive provisions of member nations. The D2D talks about eliminating rules that seek to make foreign companies localise their data by building expensive data centers in every market they seek to serve. Further, TPP also seeks to prevent countries from 'forcing' foreign companies from transferring their technologies and production processes as a pre-condition for doing business there.

3. Provisions on IPRs to 'build a level playing field' in order to 'protect' innovators and creators in the digital space.

“ ...The TPP rules on enforcement of IPRs are strong and balanced and embody the TRIPs standards. For instance, countries are required to to impose criminal penalties on trade-secret violations such as cyberhacking.”

He added:

“We believe these rules are the foundation for next 20 years of the digital economy. To make sure that India does not fall behind we want to work with India (for the adoption of these rules). We're encouraged by the new government's programmes and the PM's engagement with US and silicon valley leaders.

We encourage India to level the playing field. To that end the USTR is working with the Indian Ministries of Communications and IT, and Commerce and Industry to exchange practices for building open markets. We want to work together in eliminating localisation policies given that how a lot of IT companies have established investment heavy R&D centers in India, and they rely heavily on the free flow of cross border data. Imposition of localisation of data would be detrimental in this age of cloud-computing. We're aware that the Indian government is reviewing its policies on cloud-computing and encryption, and we encourage the government to consider the implications of the such policies carefully, for India is also a leader in global IT and would be a potential framework setter at that.”

The D2D also endorses elimination of custom duties on ICT products, and the Ambassador added that the US was very pleased to see India deposit their instrument of accession on the Trade Facilitation Agreement with the WTO. The US has been pleased to see India's ratcheting up its norms for IPR protection. He mentioned that the two countries held a successful copyright workshop earlier this year, and later this year they plan to conduct a workshop on trade secret protection. The D2D also says that conformity assessment procedures are excessive and should be eliminated. This emerges from US' IT industries concerns on the compulsory registration of ICT products that required re-testing in Indian labs.

He made a case for opening up Indian markets by quoting a study which revealed that the Indian market for ICT products is worth 65bn dollars, while the global market stands at 2 trillion dollars. So while India could leverage its exports to meet the demand, the question remains if we want to foster a market based on openness. In his opinion, openness has enabled the IT sector in India to access other markets. However, he observed that countries were erecting barriers to this openness by restricting the cross-border free-flow of data, particularly and this is where the TPP assumes importance. The real challenge now is for the US and India to prepare their own version the the D2D.

On the route of D2D, the Ambassador was largely optimistic:

“The TPP has Obama's backing and the US Congress should ratify the deal before the elections. Other TPP members have already initiated steps to ratify the deal in their countries. For phase II, 13 non-member countries have already approached the US to be a part of TPP since the deal was concluded.”

Ambassador Shyam Saran

He began by stating that the India-US engagement on digital economy would become an area of close cooperation for US-India relationship. A few years ago the US pharma was unhappy with Indian generics, and this tussle left a bad taste between the countries, and also spilled over into the political side. Disagreements on several issues such as IPR, WTO subjects, etc still persist, despite some developments reflecting mutual trust and confidence (for instance the counter-terrorism initiative).

He welcomed potential cooperation in the digital field, because that would dispel the negativity and prevailing perception of India and US not being on the same page. The one area that has been a shaky pillar is the trade and economic relationship. In his frank opinion, the Indian establishment perceives USTR's outlook on trade issues as quite adversarial. He was mindful of a developing India's unique needs and priorities:

“In regard to the differences between India and US on trade and economic issues, it is not surprising because we must also be mindful of the reality- we are a developing country, wheras the US is highly developed and technologically advances - thus, we need different lenses for each. This is something we need to address, (remember how we acknowledged and fixed this in our defence relationship re the nuclear deal). The lesson that I draw is that here is an area critical to both countries' growth, and we need to address this differential aspect...”

According to him, right now India has an ambiguous position on the TPP. Holleyman had mentioned that the deal was based on an open platform, and Shyam pointed out that it was in fact conceived through closed door negotiations. It is common knowledge that rules at TPP were arrived at through complex negotiations between 13 countries, which surely was a process of complex give and takes. At this stage, it was not possible for India to look at one chapter and agree to meet the “gold standards” set in it.

According to him, D2D was important to the US solely in terms of trade benefits for its own businesses. He said that to convince the Indian government, the USTR will have to first convince the Indian IT industry the D2D benefits- which he was skeptical of. The reason was that this 'opportunity' comes across as a clear case of double-standards when the US talks about lowering barriers in India, and on the other hand is increasing barriers on its own shores (several pending bills in the US Congress indicate this). Similarly, immigration troubles for the Indian talent pool have only gone up. The other aspect he raised was on localisation and IPRs. He said that while stands on these issues were being formulated, it should also be expected that the government will take into account concerns of privacy and security. In the US itself, the US treasury has said in regard to banking and financial transactions localisation may be necessary.

He closed by offering an alternative route to the US – one of working with India as a partner in the Digital Economy instead of fixating on barriers and/or nitpicking on Indian legislations. This would be a more sustainable way to capitalise on India's growth potential and align with its digital future.

Samir Saran

Samir responded to the discussants by offering his thoughts (and questions) on D2D and the digital economy, broadly:

“...Can the digital space be a new space for a partnership? Three stories are important in the context of a trade document:
First is dominated by access – India is seeing 6 million new internet users every month and most of them are on low-cost mobile devices. Can a trading normative process allow to continue this phenomenon as it is?
Second is opportunity – India is already responding to investment flows. In terms of privacy and security – if India believes that it can become the digital infrastructure hub, it will need to develop world-class encryption tools. Similarly in terms of free-flow of information, when Obama and PM met they endorsed the same. So it is a step back from localisation, anyway. So you see India changing positions to make the atmosphere more business conducive.
Third is security – How can you make free-flow of data uni-directional? Why is it that you want data to flow unfettered when it creates value, but you are creating barriers for giving data for security purposes?...

...Further, in a phase when the mood worldwide is in favour of de-globalisation, will hyperglobalisation through FTAs work?...”

Finally, Holleyman acknowledged that historically India and US have had differences, but with the digital economy perhaps they can forge some approaches. He accepted that some of the points were written squarely for the US tech sector, but he hoped that the other 11 partners of the TPP will come out with what the D2D means to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ustr-elaborates-the-two-dozen-digital-rules-of-club-tpp

Using the Wikimedia sphere for the revitalization of small and underrepresented languages in India

subodh — 2024-02-10T04:35:45Z

This report explores opportunities within the Wikimedia movement and projects to help revitalise small and underrepresented languages in India and provide recommendations to CIS’s Access to Knowledge team in furthering this effort. The report is mainly based on a roundtable conversation on Digital Access in Bhubaneswar with a diverse range of backgrounds and professions, including independent researchers, representatives from non-profit organizations, retired government officials, Wikimedia contributors (both Odia and Santali), ecological activists, directors of research institutes, consultants, and journalists. This was organized by the Access to Knowledge team of CIS in collaboration with Vasundhara, Bhubaneswar.

This strategic note discusses a broad program idea of offering barrier-free open access to resources in various underrepresented languages in India.

Languages spoken in the Republic of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians. Languages spoken by the remaining 2.31% of the population belong to the Austroasiatic, Sino–Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, and a few other minor language families and isolates. According to the People's Linguistic Survey of India, India has the second highest number of languages (780), after Papua New Guinea (840). Ethnologue lists a lower number of 456.

The UNESCO endangerment classification is as follows:

Vulnerable: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home
Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
Extinct: there are no speakers left

North-East India is home to more than 200 languages, out of which 82 are listed as Vulnerable, 63 as Definitely Endangered, 6 as Severely Endangered, 46 as Critically Endangered and 6 as Extinct (The Guardian Dataset). Arunachal Pradesh is the state with the highest number of languages, with as many as 66 languages spoken there, while West Bengal has the highest number of scripts, nine, and around 38 languages.

The state of Odisha has 62 Scheduled Tribes who speak as many as 74 dialects. Their ethos, ideology, worldview, value orientations and cultural heritage are rich and varied. Odisha has the unique distinction of having 93 different Scheduled Caste communities spread over 30 districts and 314 blocks of the state having different dialects. Apart from the languages of the North-East and the state of Odisha, there are several other languages all over India that deserve better representation on the Internet. While a handful of these languages enjoy status and visibility as official languages of the states and thereby hold some currency as widely spoken languages in their linguistic territories, there are many more languages that do not have speakers counting beyond a few hundred. Examples include the Bellari language (Spoken in Karnataka by 1000 speakers), the Toda language (Spoken in Tamil Nadu by 1600 speakers) and the Naiki language (Spoken in Maharashtra by 1500 speakers). What these languages do share in common with the languages of the North-East mentioned earlier is that they all lack free and open source knowledge and data.

Some of these languages are the official languages of the states and are widely spoken in this region. On the other hand, some of the languages have a few hundred native speakers. However, irrespective of the size of the native population or official status of the language, they all lack free and open source knowledge & data.

These languages show a range of marked cross-linguistic features which pose several interesting questions to Linguistic theories and speech processing research. Moreover, the close geographical proximity of these languages makes them vulnerable to changes in multiple linguistic levels, making these languages an excellent resource to study language change. Despite this, these languages severely lack digital preservation. One of the major reasons that contribute to the lack of resources is the difficulty in human access to some of the areas in these regions. Moreover, with English and Hindi being used as a lingua franca in these regions, the actual number of speakers proficient in their native language is much fewer than the number shown in the census reports. This makes it more important than ever to initiate a preservation process which does not primarily depend on fieldwork while also increasing the presence of the language in the digital sphere.

As language technologies advance and more sophisticated tools are built using Artificial Intelligence, the divide between low resource languages and others is likely to get even larger as a common prerequisite of these advanced systems is the existence of a large amount of digital data. Low resource languages are at a risk of being left behind.

Research on these languages by researchers are mostly conducted by collecting data personally, which causes a huge hindrance to the research process, as most of it remains as a private collection or published in closed journals. Moreover, data collection through fieldwork is particularly challenging in this region due to the restricted access to most of the disturbed areas.

The goal of this program is to facilitate the study of these languages by making existing resources discoverable and building open-source structured datasets and tools using the Wikimedia sphere to enrich the language research landscape of small and underrepresented Indian languages.

Role of CIS-A2K

To design and commission relevant research studies in collaboration with language communities to define the premises of the program. The plan is to work with languages which are being written in single or multiple scripts in the pilot phase.
To develop strategies regarding the integration of language datasets with Wikimedia projects
Skill building of volunteers and community leaders in Wikimedia projects
Structure of local knowledge to be compiled for contribution
To identify the specific Wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Lingua Libre etc to build the archives of these languages
Designing outreach and knowledge dissemination processes
To develop partnerships with other academic, social, cultural and research institutions in the language sector for the sustainability of the project
Material support - Sound recorders, microphones, hard discs, laptop, scanner, internet hardware
Financial support - Remuneration of intern/fellow, internet data recharge

Specific objectives

Empowering the communities by enhancing digital literacy and connecting them with the world of knowledge and people outside.
Revitalizing/enriching the languages by increasing their use, coverage and depth using technological interventions.
Creating an ecosystem for developing language learning resources and tools; particularly, in the context of the New Education Policy.
Enabling scholars and researchers to overcome the challenge of finding appropriate data and expanding the knowledge on these languages.
By using the Wikimedia sphere, the infrastructural and technological support is secured, so that these languages are able to function in the digital world.

It is important to realise that these objectives can introduce new dynamics into other spheres of activity, such as education and the development of language.

Methodology

Our target languages broadly belong to two sets:

Languages which are primarily spoken in various states of India and have some or no digital presence on the internet.
Endangered languages which have extremely limited or no digital presence.

Survey of ongoing work

Several individuals and institutions are working on languages across the globe. There are significant initiatives in India also to revitalise the small languages in the digital sphere. Some of these are listed in the reference section at the end. An exhaustive survey of all such efforts will be done to map the present status as well as a listing of stakeholders. The target languages for A2K’s future work and the potential collaborators will also be identified through these exercises.

Digital Dictionary Making

A dictionary is a vital resource for any language learning. The idea of collaborative dictionaries using platforms like Wiktionary or Wikidata Lexemes eliminates the need for expert lexicographers and terminologists and rather follows the method in which the users enter data as new entries, definitions, and so on, and the same is reviewed by editors, once published. An offline e-dictionary application using this dataset could be developed to overcome the problem of sparse internet connectivity where the user is only expected to download & install the application once and use the dictionary offline at any moment.

Data Acquisition Strategies

Leveraging Crowdsourcing using LinguaLibre for the creation of Speech CorporaGiven the scarcity of text and speech corpora for these low-resource languages, the main potential source for dataset creation is by crowdsourcing.
Using Optical Character Recognition techniques -

The digitisation of texts in the public domain would be done and made available freely by uploading them on Wikimedia projects. The digital copy will be made machine-readable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Processing the acquired data

Preprocess
Processing Speech Corpora
Processing Bilingual Parallel text Corpora

Housing datasets

Wiki Commons for media files
Wikidata for Lexemes
Wikisource for texts

Capacity Building workshops

Promoting the language among the young speakers of the community, since they are the future of the language and if it survives, it will belong to them.

Help language speakers possess up-to-date digital competencies and feel confident about them to actively participate in the digital world and increase content in their own native language.

Promoting contributions on platforms like Storyweaver, Pratham Books, Eklavya etc.

Promote the upskilling of native speakers and other disseminators

Facilitate knowledge exchange through participatory mechanisms both virtually and face-to-face.

The potential communities would be introduced to Incubator for building new Wikimedia projects

Educational development

Applying Open access philosophy to advance language pedagogy.

Develop language learning resources and tools, particularly, in the context of the New Education Policy.

References

Wikipedia articles
SCSTRTI, Odisha - https://www.scstrti.in/index.php/resources/mle-initiative/bilingual-dictionaries
Most populous languages of Odisha - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Languages_of_Odisha.svg
People’s Linguistic Survey of India - https://www.peopleslinguisticsurvey.org/
The state and fate of linguistic diversity and inclusion in the NLP world - https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.560/
Bhasha India - https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/bhashaindia
Omniglot - https://www.omniglot.com/index.htm
Bharatavani - https://bharatavani.in/
Storyweaver - https://storyweaver.org.in/
Dimasa Thairili - https://www.dimasathairili.com/
SIL International - https://www.sil.org/
Ethnologue - https://www.ethnologue.com/
Global Recordings Network - https://globalrecordings.net/en/
Glottolog - https://glottolog.org/
Endangered Languages Project - https://endangeredlanguages.com/

This is a report by Subodh Kulkarni with editorial oversight and support by Tanveer Hasan and Soni Wadhwa. Click to download the PDF here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/using-wikimedia-sphere-for-revitalization-of-small-and-underrepresented-languages-in-india

Using technology to address issues

praskrishna — 2016-08-15T04:26:21Z

Can technology help the visually-disabled, who have no access to books and reading resources in their schools?

The article was published in the Hindu on August 14, 2016. Nirmita Narasimhan was quoted.

Currently, they are provided Braille books, most of which do not cover the schooling syllabus or are provided late in an academic year. This forces them to depend on scribes or someone to read out textbooks — something most cannot afford.

It is here that technology can provide some semblance of independence, believes Nirmita Narasimhan, policy director at The Centre for Internet and Society. “Open source screen readers are available in over 10 languages. During the time of publishing of textbooks, all that needs to be done is to prepare a digital copy. Within no time, audio for the blind will be available,” she said, adding that this was one of the demands put for inclusion in the National Education Policy.

Teachers can be trained to use these readers. They can guide students, she said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/news/the-hindu-august-14-2016-using-technology-to-address-issues

Use of Open Access Journals for Publishing Findings

praskrishna — 2013-06-04T10:25:00Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-of-open-access-journals-for-publishing-findings

Use of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers

praskrishna — 2013-06-04T04:32:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers

Use of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers

Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2013-07-04T04:50:49Z

Indian researchers have published more than 43,400 papers in over 4,600 journals in 2009 as seen from Science Citation Index (SCI) – Expanded. Of these, over 6,900 (or one in six) papers are published in 445 open access (OA) journals. The proportion of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals is considerably higher than the world average, which is estimated to be 8.5–10.0%. Although India publishes well over a thousand journals, including about 360 OA journals, SCI Expanded indexed in 2009 only 101 Indian S&T journals including 46 OA journals. It is likely that the percentage of Indian papers in OA journals as seen from SCI will be higher if more Indian journals are indexed in SCI Expanded.

Subbiah Gunasekharan and Subbiah Arunachalam (2011) Use of open access journals by Indian researchers. Current Science, 101 (10). pp. 1287-1295. Download the full research paper

In a recent paper, Madhan and Arunachalam looked at the use made by Indian researchers of selected high impact open access (OA) journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E. In this article, we report the use made by Indian scientists of OA journals that are indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) Expanded. Web of Science (WoS) – SCI Expanded, indexes 8,368 journals, of which 836 are OA. We obtained the list of 836 OA journals from Thomson Reuters (Scientific).

Since 1989–1990 when the first four OA journals – Bryn Mawr Classical Review (http://bmcr.brynmawr. edu/), Postmodern Culture, Psycholoquy (http://www.ils.unc.edu/~arnsj/inls180-01/harnard.htm), and Public-Access Computer Systems Review – started publication, thousands of OA journals have been published. The number of OA journals as well as those indexed in WoS, are increasing steadily. Heather Morrison has been following the growth of OA journals over the past decade (Figure 1). Informatics India Ltd, publisher of Open J-Gate, has also started following the growth of OA journals (Figure 2). Currently (as on 30 September 2011), there are 7,070 OA journals according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and over 9,300 OA journals (including more than 6,200 peer-reviewed) from over 5,000 publishers, according to Open J-Gate. Indeed, the growth rate has accelerated in the past few years, and currently it stands at four new titles per day. OA not only plays a crucial role in disseminating scientific knowledge at a low cost, making it more accessible and more visible locally and globally, but also plays an important role in preserving indigenous knowledge to enrich the new generations, says Iryna Kuchma.

New publishing models are emerging too. While PLoS publishes only seven OA journals and BMC publishes 221 peer-reviewed OA journals (as on 1 October 2011), SciELO publishes 875 OA journals from ten countries (as on 2 October 2011), and J-STAGE provides a portal for over 757 Japanese journals (as on 1 October 2011), most of them OA.

Earlier studies have shown that the greater accessibility and visibility of research papers published in OA journals have improved their impact and citations.

Evans and Reimer have shown that the openly available articles, especially from developing countries, are cited much more often by peers than articles behind a toll barrier. It is important to know how aware Indian researchers are of OA.

In this article, we have studied the contribution of Indian researchers to OA journals indexed in SCI Expanded in the calendar year 2009. There is another multidisciplinary abstract and citation database of research literature, viz. Scopus published by the Reed Elsevier group. Even though it indexes a larger number of journals and has citation data and other features available in WoS, it has some limitations when one wants to download and analyse large amounts of data. For instances, at any given time Scopus allows downloading only a limited number, viz. 2000 records. WoS does not impose any restrictions on the number of records downloaded. One can download metadata for the downloaded data, 500 records at a time and go on adding in steps of 500 using the ‘marked list’ facility. WoS has a history of about half a century and as its founder Eugene Garfield was interested in scientometric research of all kinds, his team shaped the database to lend itself not only to perform its primary function, viz. searching the literature, but also to provide a source for a variety of other tasks such as building science indicators and carrying out scientometric studies with ease. Surely

Scopus will offer such features as more and more researchers and science analysts start using it for such applications. Another database, viz. Open J.-Gate also indexes a large number of OA journals, but it does not provide citation information and hence could not be used in this study.

Methodology

We collected bibliographic data of research papers published by Indian researchers in the calendar year 2009 from the SCI Expanded section of WoS. Papers were included if at least one author had given an address in India. The data were downloaded in comma-separatedvalues (CSV) format and imported into MS Access. We wrote a few SQL scripts for analysing the data. We separated the list of the 836 OA journals indexed in SCI for our analysis. Apart from the list of 836 OA journals provided by the Thomson Reuters, there are nine other journals registered as OA in the Scopus source list (e.g. Chem. Pharm. Bull., Japan, ISSN 0009-2363, IF 1.507) which have been considered as OA journals in our study. The countries of publication of journals were collected from the source data indexed in Scopus. We preferred Scopus over the SCI database, because occasionally the country assigned to a journal in the source data of SCI differs from the individual entry for the paper in the set of records downloaded for our analysis. For example, Chinese Chemical Letters, published by the Chinese Chemical Society, Beijing, China, is also attributed to Elsevier Science Inc., New York, USA; the Chinese Journal of Chemistry, published by the Chinese Chemical Society, Shanghai, China, is attributed to Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany in the data downloaded and also attributed to Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, USA in the list of journals indexed in SCI Expanded and Eur. Phys. J. – Appl. Phys., published by the Cambridge University Press, New York, is also attributed to EDP Sciences, France. Impact factor (IF) values of journals were assigned from Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2010. Some journals are shown as having an IF value of zero; it means that either they were not indexed in JCR, or indexed recently but not yet assigned an IF. When assigning IF values from JCR 2010 by matching the ISSN using SQL script in MS Access, we found that 150 journals in our dataset did not match with the ISSN given in JCR 2010 (same title, but different ISSN – maybe of on-line and print version). For these 150 journals, we checked the journal titles manually and assigned IF values. Only 19 journals had IF and the rest (131) did not, and we assigned a value of zero. Some titles also had different abbreviations; for example, An. Stiint. U. Al. I-Mat. (in JCR) is rendered as Analele Stiint Univ. in SCI, and Probl. Atom. Sci. Tech. (in JCR) is rendered as Probl. At. Sci. Tech. in SCI. Thomson Reuters will do well if they take care of such discrepancies in journal title abbreviations and assignment of publishing countries.

Results

Indian researchers have used 4,603 journals to publish 43,481 research papers in 2009. They used 445 OA journals to publish 6,904 papers, which accounted for 15.88%, and 4,158 non-OA journals to publish 36,577 papers (Table 1). Of the 445 OA journals, 15 are published by MedKnow, Mumbai, India, and these carried 1,282 papers (http://www.medknow.com/). Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories. A subsequent study commissioned by the European Commission called the SOAP project survey, the largest to touch issues in OA publishing so far reports that approximately 10% of papers published currently appeared in OA journals. Thus, contrary to the prevailing perceptions, Indian researchers are publishing a substantially larger percentage of their papers in OA journals than the rest of the world.

Table 2 shows the distribution of the papers by document type. About 83% of papers in all journals and 78.7% of papers in OA journals are articles, and 2.38% of papers in all journals and 0.54% of papers in OA journals are papers from proceedings. A little over 2% of papers in all journals and about 4.5% of papers in OA journals are editorial material.

Journal country
The 4,603 journals used by Indian researchers are published from 64 countries, but a substantial number of papers, more than 88%, have appeared in journals from five countries. These include 1,351 US journals publishing 10,284 (or 23.65% of all) Indian papers, 775 journals from The Netherlands publishing 9,202 (or 21%) of all Indian papers and 1,119 UK-based journals publishing 8,710 papers (accounting for 20%). Indian researchers used 101 Indian journals to publish 8,258 papers (18.99%) and 361 German journals to publish 2,195 papers. Table 3 gives a list of country of origin of journals, number of journals, number of OA journals and the total number of papers published in journals from each country. Out of the 1,351 US journals, 59 are OA; of the 1,119 UK journals, 71 are OA; of the 101 Indian journals 46 are OA and of the 361 German journals, 11 are OA; but only one of the 775 journals from the Netherlands is OA. This is largely because The Netherlands is the home of the world’s leading journal publishing companies and unlike in the USA, UK and India, there is hardly any journal in The Netherlands published by non-commercial publishers of scholarly journals. Indeed one of the companies has made a contribution to the election fund of an American Senator who brought up amendments to stall the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Many of these commercial publishers had even hired a public relations consultant ‘to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available’.

One may wonder at the small number of Indian journals. In fact, Indian scientists publish in many more Indian journals, but they are not indexed in SCI Expanded or JCR. The distribution of OA journals indexed in SCI Expanded by country is revealing (Table 4). While countries like England and USA have 115 and 102 OA titles, The Netherlands has just 3 OA journals.

OA journals used
OA journals used by Indian researchers in 2009 are listed in Table 5. Only the 24 journals with at least 70 papers from India are shown. Of these 24 journals, only five have an IF of greater than 1.000, and only 18 have at least 100 papers from India and these 18 journals together accounted for 50.69% of India’s total OA journal output. Of these 18 OA journals, 16 are from India and one each from United Kingdom and Kenya. Of the 445 OA journals, Current Science (IF = 0.897) published by the Current Science Association in association with the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, tops the list with 597 papers, followed by Acta Crystallogr. Sect. E-Struct. Rep. (IF = 0.413) published from the United Kingdom, with 440 papers. The journal Indian J. Pharm. Sci. (IF = 0.455) has 326 papers. The overall average citation per paper (CPP) in OA journals is 1.27, a rather small number, and smaller than CPP for Indian papers published in all journals (including non-OA journals; 2.62). This is contrary to expectations and needs to be probed further;several studies have shown the citation advantage of OA.

Is there a difference in citability of papers published in OA journals by authors from developing and developed countries? Our results are for papers published in 2009 and the CPP is likely to improve with the passage of time.

But there are certain OA journals which have recorded high CPP for Indian papers. Notably, the UK-based journal Mol. Syst. Biol. (IF = 9.667) has one paper which received 23 citations. Similarly, Nucl. Acids Res. (IF = 7.836) has 17 papers from India which together received 321 citations for a CPP of 18.88. Five papers published in Molecules (IF = 1.988) received 69 citations. Three papers that appeared in PLoS Genet. (IF = 9.543) received 39 citations. Two review articles that were published in Biogeosciences (IF = 3.587) received 25 citations. Similarly, nine papers that appeared in PLoS Med. (IF = 15.617) received 101 citations for a CPP of 11.22. The Int. J. Electrochem. Sci. (IF = 2.808), being published by the Electrochemical Science Group, Serbia, since 2006, and indexed in JCR only from 2009, has 33 Indian papers that have received 227 citations, with an average citation per paper of 6.88.

The 4,603 journals in which Indian researchers have published have been classified by IF of journals as seen from JCR 2010 (Table 6). We notice that the ratio of OA journals to the total number of journals decreases with an increase in IF. This is to be expected, as many of the toll access journals with high IF have been around for a long time and most OA journals are less than 10 years old. About 2.5% of papers from India have appeared in 131 journals (including 26 OA journals), which are either not indexed in JCR 2010 or recently indexed but not assigned IF values. We have assigned their IF as zero. A little over 34% of all papers published by Indian researchers appeared in 1,471 journals, which include 235 OA journals with IF less than 1. About 56.5% of papers have appeared in 2,645 journals with IF in the range 1–4.499. Only 357 papers appeared in 66 journals, including three OA journals, with IF > 10. Of the 6,904 papers in OA journals, less than 4% of papers appeared in journals with IF = 0 and over 73% of papers published in 235 journals with IF less than 1. An item classified as ‘editorial material’ appeared in the OA journal CA-A Cancer J. Clin. (IF = 94.262) which has received three citations. Among the 445 OA journals, the high IF journals, e.g. PLoS Med. (IF = 15.617) has nine papers, viz. five articles, three editorial materials and one review which together received 101 citations; and PLoS Biol. (IF = 12.469), Mol. Syst. Biol. (IF = 9.667) and PLoS Pathog. (IF = 9.079) have one paper each and they have received 9, 23 and 6 citations respectively.

We notice that the average CPP correlates well with the IF of journals. For journals with IF up to 1.5, CPP is less than 2.0 and for journals with IF in the range 7–20, CPP is higher than 9.0. Indian papers published in 37 OA journals have CPP of 5 or greater. In contrast, Indian papers published in 149 non-OA journals have CPP of 10 or above.

Non-OA journals
Table 7 presents the use of non-OA journals by Indian researchers in 2009. They used 4,158 non-OA journals to publish 36,577 papers in 2009. Of the 101 Indian journals used, 55 are non-OA and they had carried 4,000 papers. Two Indian journals have been used to publish more than 300 papers, viz. Asian J. Chem. (IF = 0.247, 481 papers) and Indian J. Anim. Sci. (IF = 0.147, 312 papers). Other frequently used non-OA journals are from the US, The Netherlands and UK. Some non-OA journals have decent CPP values [e.g. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. (IF = 15.199) and Nat. Rev. Neurosci. (IF = 29.510) have each one paper from India with CPP of 505 and 112 respectively; other notable non-OA journals are Rep. Prog. Phys. (2 Indian papers, CPP 91.00), Chem. Rev. (4 papers, CPP 60.00), Nano Today (1 paper, CPP 59.00), N. Engl. J. Med. (20 papers, CPP 55.90), Phys. Rev. Lett. (82 papers, CPP 11.68), J. Org. Chem. (73 papers, CPP 10.22), Tetrahedron Lett. (264 papers, CPP 6.44), J. Hazard Matter (225 papers, CPP 8.02), Eur. J. Med. Chem. (156 papers, CPP 6.74) and Phys. Rev. D (165 papers, CPP 7.58)]. The 170 papers Indian researchers have published in the Swiss journal Ann. Nutr. Metab. (IF = 2.173) have not received any citation during the period. Of these 170 papers, 169 are meeting abstracts. Similarly, 102 meeting abstracts published in Abstr. Pap. Am. Chem. Soc. have not received any citations.

Distribution of Indian papers by subject
SCI provides a broad classification of journals by subjects and sub-fields. The classification is at the level of journals and not individual articles. In Table 8, we provide information on the distribution of Indian papers published in toll-access and OA journals by journal subfields. Chemistry (4,593 papers in 162 journals) and physics (2,694 papers in 104 journals) lead the list if we consider all journals. [Apart from chemistry we have ‘materials science: chemistry’ journals, polymer science, etc. and apart from physics, we have crystallography, ‘materials science: physics’, astrophysics, etc. That is to say the classification is not into water-tight compartments.] But if we consider only OA journals, then general science periodicals top the list (711 papers in eight journals, of which Current Science alone accounts for 597 papers, Def. Sci. J. accounts for 65 papers, Arab. J. Sci. Eng. accounts for 16 papers, Int. J. Phys. Sci. accounts for 12 papers, Sci. Res. Essays and Scienceasia have six papers each, and Maejo. Int. J. Sci. Technol. and S. Afr. J. Sci. have eight and one paper respectively). Chemistry journals come next (697 papers in 21 OA journals, of which the two sections of Indian J. Chem. account for 226 papers, E-J. Chem. accounts for 188 papers, J. Chem. Sci. accounts for 78 papers and Arkivoc accounts for 52 papers), followed by pharmacology and pharmacy (592 papers in 21 journals, of which Indian J. Pharm. Sci. accounts for 326 papers, Indian J. Pharmacol. accounts for 61 papers and Pharmacogn. Mag. accounts for 54 papers) and crystallography (440 papers from one journal – Acta
Crystallogr. Sect. E – Struct. Rep. Online).

Distribution of Indian OA papers by institution and cost of publication
We did not attempt to find out the distribution of all Indian papers (or just the papers published in OA journals) by institution, as the only way it could be done was to download each record and check the author affiliation manually. Considering the large number of records we are dealing with we thought the results would not be commensurate with the effort. Nor have we attempted to evaluate the costs to India of publishing in OA journals. In 2009, Indian researchers had published 2,646 papers in 399 OA journals published from outside India. Many of these journals may charge a fee from the author; some of them charge about US$ 3,000. However, many of these journals are ready to waive the charges for authors from the developing countries. But still some authors may have paid the fees. Gathering such data (how much Indian authors have spent in 2009 for publishing their papers in OA journals) is not an easy task. One has to contact each author.

Incidentally, no Indian OA journal charges an author side fee. Most Indian OA journals still sell subscription to their print versions; many of them carry advertisements; some of them are supported by grants from the government (Department of Science and Technology and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi).

Conclusion

OA to research findings can be provided by two ways: by publishing the papers in OA journals (the gold route) and or by placing the full text of the papers along with metadata in interoperable OA archives (the green route). At least three leading publishers of S&T journals in India have opted to go the OA way. MedKnow publishes more than 150 OA journals. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, adopted OA for all its journals more than ten years ago. Indeed, Pramana, its physics journal, was made open access in July 1998. More recently, CSIR made all 16 research journals published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources OA. A few years ago the Indian Council of Medical Research made the Indian Journal of Medical Research OA. While these moves are certainly welcome, we believe that the OA archives route is the ideal solution, especially for developing countries. No matter whether they publish their papers in OA or toll-access journals, Indian researchers will do well to place the full text of their papers in institutional repositories. Stevan Harnad, founder of Psycoloquy stopped publishing the journal in 2001, as it became clear to him by then that author self-archiving in interoperable institutional repositories was the best route to ensure 100% OA to the world’s scholarly literature.

In November 2009, 41 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the US Congress expressing their support to OA to research. They believed that the open availability of research ‘will make it easier for scientists worldwide to better and more swiftly address the complex scientific challenges that we face today and expand shared knowledge across disciplines to accelerate breakthrough and spur innovation’. P. Balaram told SciDev.Net; ‘I think every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at the start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it’.

In a recent blog posting, Giridhar said ‘The best way to make the work open access in India is not necessarily by publishing it in open access journals but by depositing the article in an institutional repository’. The Indian Academy of Sciences has recently set up a repository for papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. As of 7 October 2011, more than 60,500 papers/documents were deposited, but a vast majority of them do not provide access to the full text. One has to be content with metadata and abstracts. CSIR has decided to set up repositories in each one of its more than 35 laboratories.

Note: Subbiah Gunasekaran is in the Knowledge Resource Centre, CSIR – Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi 630 006, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India. *For correspondence. (e-mail: guna1970@gmail.com).

[]. Madhan, M. and Arunachalam, S., Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings. Curr. Sci., 2011, 100, 1297–1306.

[]. McVeigh, M. E., Open access journals in the ISI citation databases: analysis of impact factors and citation patterns. A citation study from Thomson Scientific, October 2004; available at http:// scientific.thomsonreuters.com/m/pdfs/openaccesscitations2.pdf

[].Morrison, H., Dramatic growth of open access: Open Data Edition – Full Data, 30 September 2011; http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/09/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html

[]. Jothy, S., Bridging the knowledge gap through open access. J. Gate Newslett., 2011, 3; http://www.informaticsglobal.com/iil_newsletter_openaccess.asp

[]. Kuchma, I., The state of open access publishing and open access repositories in Africa. Presented at Africa Day for Librarians, Nordic Africa Institute Library, Uppsala, Sweden, 9 November
2010.

[]. Lawrence, S., Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact. Nature, 2001, 411, 521

[]. Swan, A., The open access citation advantage: studies and results to date. Technical Report, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, 2010; http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/2/Citation_advantage_paper.pdf

[]. Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T. and Harnad, S., Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS One, 2010, 5(10), e13636.

[]. Wagner, A. B., Open access citation advantage: an annotated bibliography.Iss. Sci. Technol. Librarianship, 2010, Winter; http:// www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html

[]. Evans, J. A. and Reimer, J., Open access and global participation in science. Science, 2009, 323, 1025.

[]. Björk, B.-C., Welling, P., Laakso, M., Majlender, P., Hedlund, T. and Guðnason, G., Open access to the scientific journal literature: situation 2009. PLoS One, 2010, 5(6), e11273.

[]. Dallmeier-Tiessen, S. et al., Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What scientists think about open access publishing, 20 January 2011; http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1101/1101.5260.pdf

[]. Giles, J., PR’s ‘pit bull’ takes on open access. Nature, 2007, 445, 347.

[]. An open letter to the US Congress signed by 41 Nobel Prize winners (10 November 2009); http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/ issues/frpaa/frpaa_supporters/nobelists_2009.shtm

[]. Jayaraman, K. S., Open archives – the alternative to open access, interview with P. Balaram, SciDev.Net, 9 July 2008; http://www.scidev.net/en/features/q-a-open-archives-thealternative-to-openaccess.html

[]. Madras, G., Impact factor and journals, 15 May 2011; http://giridharmadras.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

Acknowledgement: We thank Thomson Reuters for providing the list of OA journals indexed in the Web of Science (SCI Expanded), and Ms S. Jothy, Informatics India Ltd, Bangalore, for providing Figure 2.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/current-science-vol-101-10-1287-s-gunasekharan-s-arunachalam-use-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers

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

Madhan Muthu and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2013-07-04T04:45:39Z

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.

Muthu, Madhan and Subbiah, Arunachalam (2011) Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings. Current Science, 100 (9). pp. 1297-1306. Download the full research paper

How aware are Indian researchers of open access (OA) and its advantages 10 years after Stevan Harnad visited India and spoke about the need for adopting OA archiving? To answer this question, we looked at India’s participation in both OA institutional archiving and Indian researchers using OA journals to publish their findings. In this article, our emphasis is on the use made of selected high impact OA journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E, the three leading publishers of open access papers in terms of number of papers published annually.

The Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR) lists 2,047 repositories (data gathered on 17 December) of which 59 are from India. Included in the 59 repositories are the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) journals repository, the Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology Journal repository and repetitive entries of five institutional repositories, viz. EPrints@CMFRI, EPrints@IIMK, EPrints@MKU, repository of INFLIBNET and the repository at the Cochin University of Science and Technology. Many Indian repositories listed in ROAR are inactive. There are at least five other Indian repositories not listed in ROAR, viz. Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, and Vidyanidhi, Mysore, both repositories of theses; International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Ministry of Earth Sciences and SARAI. In all, there are 33 OA repositories in India which include 24 institutional repositories, 4 subject repositories and 5 dedicated theses and dissertation repositories. The quality of tese repositories varies widely as well as their maintenance. Considering that there are more than 450 universities and several hundred research laboratories in the government, corporate and the non-government sectors, one would expect a very large number of institutional repositories in India. Furthermore, many of these repositories are not filling fast enough.

Out of the 5,897 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or DOAJ (data accessed on 17 December 2010) 276 are from India. Another database, Open J-Gate 5 , developed by the Bangalore-based Informatics India, lists 7,967 OA periodicals worldwide which include 4,773 peer-reviewed journals including 339 peer-reviewed Indian journals (Figure 1). There are a few other Indian OA journals which are yet to be listed in DOAJ and indexed in Open J-Gate. For example, two journals published by the Indian National Science Academy (Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy) and two journals published by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences) are neither indexed in Open J-Gate nor listed in DOAJ. DOAJ does not index Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources (formerly known as Natural Product Radiance), published by NISCAIR. In all, there are more than 360 Indian OA journals. Needless to say a vast majority of papers, published in the Indian OA journals, are mostly written by Indian researchers. Incidentally, two Indian journal publishers, viz. Indian Academy of Sciences and MedKnow Publications figure in the top 14 OA journal publishers in the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) survey. Our focus here is papers published by Indian researchers in high-impact OA journals published outside India. We chose all seven journals published by PLoS, 10 BMC journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. We gathered data from the Science Citation Index – Expanded section of Web of Science between 11 and 29 December 2010. Countries were assigned to papers based on addresses in the by-line. If three authors then the paper was assigned to all three countries. Therefore, the sum of papers from different countries will be far more than the actual number of papers indexed in Web of Science.

Results

BioMed Central Journals
BioMed Central, established in May 2000, is the world’s leading OA publisher in the fields of medical research and biology and publishes 208 OA journals as noted on 28 December 2010. Not all of them commenced publication at the same time, not even the same year. Different journals started publication in different years. So far these journals together have published 99,717 articles, including 83,893 original research papers and 15,824 other types of articles (Table 1). Indian researchers have published 1,872 original research papers and 92 other types of articles (such as review articles) in these 208 journals. To see India’s record in perspective, we have provided data for 11 other countries. These include the other three BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China), South Korea and Israel, both of which have scientific enterprises comparable in size to that of India, and six advanced countries. USA stands out with close to 29,300 papers, followed by Great Britain (9,464 papers) and Germany (9,340 papers). China is way ahead of other BASIC countries, and India is ahead of Israel, Korea and South Africa in the number of papers published. Brazil is ahead of India in total number of papers but falls behind in the number of original research papers. It will be interesting to see why researchers from Brazil publish such a large number of review articles.

Of these 208 journals, only 77 have been listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2009 and assigned an impact factor. (For a journal to get indexed in JCR it should have been in existence for longer than two years). We list in Table 2 those journals with impact factor greater than 4.000. Among BMC journals, Genome Biology has the highest impact factor (6.626). Other high impact factor journals are Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases (5.825), BMC Biology (5.636) and Breast Cancer Research (5.326). The following nine journals have published more than 2,000 papers so far (since they became OA journals): BMC Bioinformatics (4,078), BMC Genomics (3,204), Critical Care (2,787), BMC Public Health (2,580), Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica (2,575), BMC Cancer (2,344), Arthritis Research and Therapy (2,286), Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research (2,255) and Genome Biology (2,069). Ten journals have published more than 1000 papers but less than 2000. Four journals have published less than 100 papers. Five journals have citations per paper (CPP) higher than 10. These are Genome Biology (18.35), Veterinary Research (12.27), Genetics Selection Evolution (11.71), Respiratory Research (11.03) and Breast Cancer Research (10.33).

The number of papers published by authors in India in 10 BMC journals during 2003–2010 (data gathered on 13December 2010), the number of citations to these papers and cites/papers are provided in Table 3. To see the Indian papers in perspective, we have also given the total number of papers published in these 10 journals during the same period, number of citations received by them and the average number of citations per paper (CPP) as well as similar data for 11 other selected countries including five scientifically middle-level countries and six advanced countries. A quick look at the table reveals that there is a perceptible difference between the middle-level countries and the advanced countries.

Indian researchers have published 4.53% of the papers that have appeared in Malaria Journal, 2.49% of papers appearing in BMC Genomics, 1.77% of papers appearing BMC Public Health, 1.7% of papers appearing in BMC Bioinformatics, and 1.61% of papers appearing in BMC Evolutionary Biology. India’s participation in the other five journals is rather meagre. Looking at CPP, Indian contributions in nine of the ten journals have a lower CPP than the world papers. Year after year, Thomson Reuters’s ScienceWatch has shown that Indian research papers on an average have been cited less often than world papers in every field

But Indian papers in BMC Public Health have been cited on average 7.45 times compared to the world average of 5.59 CPP. This is rare and the researchers responsible for this deserve to be congratulated. It will be worth examining if India’s performance in public health research is of a higher class overall than research in other areas of medicine. The number of papers from China in BMC journals accounts for a much larger per cent than papers from India. For example, papers from China account for 10.0% in BMC Cancer, 7.75% in BMC Genomics, 5.74% in BMC Bioinformatics and 5.41% in BMC Evolutionary Biology. This is to be expected, as China is second only to USA in the number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and publishes more than three times the number of papers as India. Except in Breast Cancer Research, in which journal China publishes about 1% of papers, in all other journals, China’s CPP value is less than the journal average.

Although Brazil publishes fewer papers than India, it has an enviable CPP record in at least five journals considered here: Arthritis Research and Therapy (15.88; journal average 8.64), Genome Biology (23.43; journal average 22.50), Critical Care (11.96; journal average 8.23), Breast Cancer Research (10.71; journal average 8.52) and BMC Public Health (6.54; journal average 5.59). Israel, a small country with only a few research institutions and universities, has published fewer papers, but has a CPP higher than the journal average in seven of the ten journals. South Korea has a higher CPP for its papers in Arthritis Research and Therapy than the journal average.

Except for BMC Public Health, in all the other journals USA accounts for not less than 25% of papers and in some well over 40%. Also, in each of the 10 journals, USA has recorded higher CPP than the journal average. Great Britain is a distant second, but its share of papers in BMC Public Health and Malaria Journal is even higher than that of USA. Britain’s interest in public health and malaria research could be explained by over two centuries of her colonial connections. Also, in both these journals, Britain’s CPP is greater than the journal average. In fact, in both BMC Genomics and Malaria Journal, the CPP is highest for Britain.

Germany has published a larger number of papers in BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Cancer than Britain and France and these have been cited more often as well. Germany has published close to 10% of the papers in Genome Biology and these papers have recorded the highest CPP (33.08 compared to 25.78 for USA).

Acta Crystallographica
The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) publishes Acta Crystallographica in six sections. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online is the IUCr’s first electronic-only journal It is a rapid communication journal for the publication of concise reports on inorganic, metal-organic and organic structures. Unlike other fee-based OA journals published in the western world, this journal charges a modest USD 150 per article and it also offers a fee waiver for authors from developing countries.

During the seven years 2003–2009, this journal published 22,887 papers which were cited 35,078 times (Table 4). China accounted for more than 47% of these papers, followed by India (9.1%). However, papers from India averaged a higher CPP (2.13) than Germany, Britain and USA. Crystallography is a known area of strength in India. The earliest Indian paper in this field by Banerjee of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science appeared in 1930. Today, chemical crystallography is arguably stronger than all other aspects of crystallography in India, although in the early years physicists dominated the field. Work in biological crystallography started when G. N. Ramachandran, a physicist, started his work at the University of Madras in the 1950s. It will be interesting to look at the historical evolution of crystallography in India.

PLoS journals
We will now turn our attention to the PLoS journal There are seven journals in all. PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is somewhat different from the other six PLoS journals. It is an international, peer-reviewed, OA, online publication that accepts reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. In-house PLoS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards ensure fast, fair, and professional peer review. In Table 5, we provide data on the number of papers published each year by authors from the 12 countries during 2006–2010. The USA has published the largest number of papers, viz. 6,501, which is more than four times that of Britain, its nearest rival. India has published 262 papers and has the least CPP, viz. 2.34, whereas all the other countries have a CPP of above 3.0. Britain has the highest, viz. 4.76, closely followed by Germany (4.73). The values for other countries are: USA (4.36), France (4.23), Canada (4.29), Israel (3.98), Japan (3.86), South Korea (3.82), South Africa (3.46), China (3.24) and Brazil (3.01). The journal has published during this period 14,071 papers at a CPP of 3.99. The number of papers published by the other six journals, number of times they are cited and impact factors of these journals are given in Table 6. In these journals, India has published 120 papers and these have been cited 1,022 times for an average of 8.52 CPP. The corresponding figures for other middle-level countries are: China (212 papers and 11.39 CPP), South Korea (62 papers and 17.47 CPP), Brazil (131 papers and 10.21 CPP), South Africa (137 papers and 18.42 CPP) and Israel (184 papers and 15.46 CPP).

Looking at individual journals (Table 7), one sees that in general the middle-level countries have published very few papers compared to the advanced countries. There are exceptions though. Israel has published 73 papers in PLoS Computational Biology, comparable to France’s 92 and higher than Canada’s 55 and Japan’s 46. In this journal Israel’s CPP (8.5) is comparable to the world average (9.1) and the CPP of Britain and higher than the CPP of Japan. In PLoS Medicine, India’s 38 papers have a CPP of 6.92, far below the journal average of 14.12, and less than that of the other 11 countries considered. In PloS Biology, India has a CPP of 15.77, far below the journal average of 31.69, whereas South Korea (54.78) and China (32.12) have a CPP higher than the journal average. In PLoS Genetics, Brazil, South Africa and Israel have a higher CPP than the journal average. Authors from USA publish the largest number of papers in each of the six PLoS speciality journals, followed by Britain. But USA leads in CPP in only two of them, viz. PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Computational Biology. Britain has the highest CPP for PLoS Genetics followed by USA. Japan has the highest CPP for PLoS Medicine followed by France. Canada has the highest CPP for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS Biology, the first of the PLoS journals.

Discussion

There has been a perceptible increase in the number of OA papers published in journals. Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories. A recent forecast by Springer based on Web of Science data has shown that at the current rate of growth journal articles which are OA will likely grow from 8.7% in 2010 to 27% by 2020 assuming a constant annual growth rate of 20% as against 3% growth rate of papers indexed in Web of Science. It will be interesting to see if the number of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals also increase year after year. Sathyanarayana of Informatics India tells us that the per cent of OA papers published by Indian researchers as revealed by Open J-Gate is higher than the world average (private communication), but we need a proper scientometric study to confirm this. Evans and Reimar have shown that for authors from developing countries free-access articles are cited much higher when they make them freely accessible over the Internet and that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists’ investigation.An analysis of many MedKnow journals has shown that OA journals do not lose subscribers to print editions; on the contrary, the number of subscribers is increasing in most cases. Again, OA has helped MedKnow journals attract a larger number of paper submissions, hits and downloads, win more citations and improve impact factors.The Indian Academy of Sciences has also seen similar trends for their journals (G. Chandramohan, pers.commun). Data in Table 5 show that the number of papers published by each one of the 12 countries in PLoS ONE has increased over the years dramatically. We found similar trends for all PLoS journals (except PLoS Medicine) and several BMC journals including BMC Public Health, BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Genomics

Both BMC and PLoS charge article processing fees as do many other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $ 1450 and $ 1640, PLoS ONE charges $ 1350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $ 2900 and other PLoS journals $ 2250. This could be a deterrent to most Indian and other developing country researchers. However, these journals waive the processing fees if authors request before submitting their papers. But not all Indian scientists would like to request such waivers. Here is what Balarama leading Indian molecular biophysicist, says: ‘As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds to be subsidising Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals or any other non-Indian open access journal. Some journals waive these charges for authors from developing countries. But I do not think we should go begging for waivers.’

Conclusion

Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting.

Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad and Balram One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.

Muthu Madhan is in the ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No.194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India.
*For correspondence. (e-mail: subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com)

[]. Arunachalam, S., Advances in information access and science communication. Curr. Sci., 2001, 80, 493–494.

[]. Dallmeier-Tiessen, S., First results of the SOAP project. Open access publishing in 2010; http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0506v11

[]. Registry of Open Access Repositories; http://roar.eprints.org

[]. Directory of Open Access Journals; http://www.doaj.org

[]. Open J-Gate; http://www. openj-gate.com

[]. BioMed Central: The Open Access Publisher; http://www.biomedcentral.com/

[]. Science in India 2004-2008, Scib ytes 2010, ScienceWatch.com; http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/10/jan10-10_2/

[]. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online;http://journals.iucr.org/e/

[]. Banerjee, K., Structure of anthracene and naphthalene. Nature, 1930, 125, 456.

[]. Public Library of Science Journals; http://www.plos.org/journals/

[]. Björk, B.-C., Roos, A. and Lauri, M., Scientific journal publishing – yearly volume and open access availability.
Inform. Res., 2009, 14, Paper 391; http://InformationR.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html

[]. Björk, B.-C., Welling, P., Laakso, M., Majlender, P., Hedlund, T.and Guðnason, G., Open access to the scientific journal literature: Situation 2009.PLoS One, 2010, 5 (6), e11273; http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273

[]. Hendriks, P., Open Access Publishing at Springer, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8_OA_Conference_PH_v1.pdf

[]. Evans, J. A. and Reimer, J., Open access and global participation in science. Science, 2009, 323, 1025.

[]. Sahu, D. K., MEDKNOW: Open Access Publishing for Learned Societies and Associations, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8.pdf

[]. Comparison of BioMed Central’s article processing charges with those of other publishers; http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison

[]. Jayaraman, K. S., Open archives – the alternative to open access, interview with Prof. P. Balaram, SciDev.Net, 9 July 2008; http://www.scidev.net/en/features/q-a-open-archives-the-alternative-to-open-access.html

[]. Harnad, S., How India can provide immediate open access now? Curr. Sci., 2008, 94, 1232.

[]. Joshi, N. V., Institutional E-print archives: liberalizing access to scientific research. Curr. Sci., 2005, 89, 421–422.

[]. Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute; http://eprints.cmfri.org.in

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings

US pressure threatens to weaken data - localisation mandate in India's landmark data-protection bill

Sandhya Sharma — 2019-08-22T01:41:21Z

Sources say the bill may have to concede vital ground to technology companies.

The article by Sandhya Sharma was published by ET Prime on August 19, 2019. Arindrajit Basu was quoted.

Indian law-enforcement agencies have repeatedly expressed their unhappiness with America’s reticence on the sharing of critical data — whether it was around the 26/11 Mumbai attacks or procuring electronic evidence under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) from technology companies.

Top cybersecurity sources in the government tell ET prime that India’s own Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill 2019 is in response to this. Cabinet nod to the bill is expected anytime, and it is likely to be tabled in the next session of Parliament. However, thanks to diplomatic pulls and pressures, a vital provision of the bill could end up markedly diluted. Sources in the Indian government say the US has conveyed it does not want the bill at all.

“We expect it will be a better mechanism than MLAT” for procuring data from technology companies, says a person aware of the development, while adding that the thorny question of data localisation is now a very small part of the bill. Across key bilateral engagements — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s June visit to India, G20 meetings between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump, and a US trade representative delegation visiting India for talks — American unease with the growing “protectionism” in Indian policy has remained a key talking point.

"Forum members oppose data localisation policies, and we look forward to sharing our concerns when the data protection bill gets introduced in Parliament,” says Susan Ritchie, vice-president of technology, media, and telecommunications at lobby group U.S. India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF).

“An environment where regulatory coherence is a governmental priority provides industry with greater predictability and stability resulting in increased investment." A toothless treaty? According to policy experts, MLATs have been the most widely used method for cross-border data sharing. India has signed MLATs with 39 countries, including the US. These treaties give India access to data stored on the cloud and call for data stored by multinational service providers within the jurisdiction of the partner country. However, MLATs are time consuming and have failed in their basic function in the past, sources say, and hence the government was keen to hold the data of Indians back in India, including data pertaining to e-commerce transactions, banking, healthcare, etc.

According to the Justice Srikrishna Committee report, eight of the 10 most accessed websites by Indians are owned by US entities. If data is exclusively processed in India, it will potentially cut off foreign surveillance, the report also notes, while highlighting a three-pronged approach to Indian data to reduce dependence on MLATs.

Talking exclusively to ET Prime, Justice BN Srikrishna says, “MLAT is a long-drawn process and hence the process goes through several diplomatic and judicial channels. It takes anywhere between 18 months to two years to get the information from the foreign technology companies for any investigation [and] much more time for extracting information on taxation and other financial matters…. Once the data of Indian citizens is in India, it will be much easier for law enforcement agencies to take the data for investigation purposes. In the past, the technology companies have dilly-dallied on the information requests of Indian law enforcement agencies.” To be sure, the report does not claim "perfect compliance" through data localisation and it clarifies that for data owned by companies like Google a "conflict of law" might arise if the country of registration — in this case the US — also asserts jurisdiction.

According to the report, between January and June 2017, Google received 3,843 user data-disclosure requests by Indian governmental agencies. Google refused to provide data in 46% of the cases. Now with the PDP Bill, Indian officials can easily get their hands on the data of Indian citizens not residing in India, says Justice Srikrishna. US resistance US tech-industry insiders tell ET Prime on condition of anonymity that no law-enforcement agency should be allowed 100% unfettered access to information. They claim MLATs have been successful in most cases of intelligence sharing around terrorism and national security.

“National security” is a very wide concept in India, unlike in the US where it generally refers to international activities, they say. Jacob Gullish, senior director for digital economy at the lobby group US India Business Council (USIBC), says the term MLAT is often used incorrectly as a catch-all. MLATs are designed for a very narrow and a specific purpose: where the transmitted information is admissible in the foreign country’s judicial system, he says. “In these cases, information has to be handled carefully to ensure the request complies with domestic laws and the transmission is certified for authenticity and a chain of custody, as well as packaged to allow its use as evidence in a foreign court. This process takes time, and the business community supports MLAT reform.

“Just like in the physical world, due process rights for the citizens of the world’s largest and the world’s oldest democracies must be respected in the digital domain. Companies also need legal certainty when operating between different jurisdictions. The bottom line is that law enforcement agencies (LEAs) on both sides need to develop clear processes and procedures, as well as trusted relationships, which will facilitate information exchange during an investigation.” A Google spokesperson echoes Gullish. “On urging from us and other Internet companies, MLAT processes have improved and in most cases responses are provided in a week or two,” the spokesperson says.

“In addition, we are also advocating for MLAT reform, including supporting calls to invest over [USD20 million] to address insufficient staffing, and helping investigators around the world better understand the MLAT process, to help expedite requests.” Other industry insiders claim that US companies field a high volume of requests and respond quickly for the most part, and that ultimately all of this goes back to trust. In December 2011, a Delhi court had issued summons to 21 companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube, to face trial for allegedly hosting objectionable content promoting hatred or communal disharmony.

The then IT Minister Kapil Sibal had asked Google and Facebook to ensure prompt removal of offensive material, complaining that the companies had not cooperated in the past. Concerns with data-localisation norms in the present state 1. Diplomatic and political: Data-localisation mandates could impact India’s trade relationships with partners like the US. 2. Security risks (“Regulatory stretching of the attack surface”): Storing data in multiple physical centres increases the exposure to exploitation by malicious actors. 3. Economic impact: Restrictions on cross-border data flow may harm economic growth by increasing compliance costs and entry barriers for foreign service providers, thereby reducing investment or forcing businesses to pass on these costs to the consumers. The major cost pertains to setting up data centres in India.

Further, for startups looking to attain global stature, reciprocal restrictions slapped by other countries can be a serious hurdle. “Data localisation would be most effective if it is — (a) done after India updates its privacy and security standards by passing the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019; (b) done sectorally, after considering how critical it is to store the data in India; (c) done conditionally in (i) the country where data is transferred having equivalent privacy and security safeguards, both de jure and de facto and (ii) the presence of an executive data sharing agreement,” says Arindrajit Basu, senior policy officer at New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Internet and Society. This is essentially what the international community describes as “free flow of data with trust” — the G20 mandate which India recently rejected. Can the US CLOUD Act solve for the lack of information access? A section of policy experts argues that the localisation mandate proposed in India’s new bill does not solve an important problem: What happens when law-enforcement agencies need access to data relating to a foreigner stored in a server located in another jurisdiction by a company incorporated in the US? Will the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act) passed in the US last year help?

The US has recently amended the CLOUD Act after a dispute between Microsoft and the US government. The law now ensures two things: American law-enforcement agencies will get access to data held by US cloud service providers (CSPs) regardless of jurisdiction, and allow “qualified foreign governments” to access data stored by US CSPs. This has given rise to a view that the CLOUD Act could be the silver bullet countries like India need to push US tech companies to share data in a timely fashion. Basu of the Centre for Internet and Society says, “India should use the threat of data localisation to negotiate an executive arrangement under the CLOUD Act. India would fare better if it were to use the language of international law to articulate its position in the MLAT reform process, or to propel itself to a better position under the CLOUD Act (which requires countries to demonstrate a commitment to a free and open Internet) or potentially pursue negotiations for a multilateral data sharing treaty.” Siddharth Jain, assistant commissioner in Delhi Police and an expert in investigating cyber-crime issues, says Indian technology firms do provide adequate and timely information about suspicious transactions; however, US firms are lax in sharing information.

Telangana IPS officer Rema Rajeshwari concurs that it’s a problem for law-enforcement agencies to cull out information from some US technology companies. Data-protection bill already diluted? ET Prime has learned that the net result of the pulls and pressures exerted by US commercial and diplomatic interests is that data localisation now remains just a small part of India’s data-protection bill. The Ministry of External Affairs maintains that the US-India relationship is “extremely important”. After President Trump’s controversial comments on offering mediation on the Kashmir issue, ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said, “We are very strong strategic partners and we have brought in deep convergences across a range of issues.

We have excellent trade and investment linkages and are moving toward high defence and technology tie-up.” It’s not just political posturing by India to maintain the tricky relationship at a time when the Trump administration is coming up with reports one after the other criticising the country’s proposed data-protection policies. The PDP Bill was listed to be tabled in Parliament in the first session of the Modi 2.0 government but is yet to see the light of the day. If India tables the draft bill without making concessions that ease the demands on US technology companies, it will severely harm the India-US technology relationship, according to some US policy lobbyists. However, government sources tell ET Prime that the bill now has “data localisation as a very small part”, meaning that it is already likely diluted due to US pressure tactics. Sources say the non-critical data of an individual like height, weight, bank-account number, etc., will not need to be mandatorily stored in India. However, biometric data will have to be stored locally.

Top policymakers who were consulted for the Justice Srikrishna Committee report say should the bill be diluted under duress, it will be a sorry statement for India’s data-protection regime. Meanwhile, with nationalistic sentiments in full flourish during the new Modi government’s first Parliament session, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a note that “the bill being prepared will address India’s sovereign data concerns and provide a framework to boost innovation in India while complying with the directives contained in the judgment of [the Honourable Supreme Court]”.

India and EU: a potential template In contrast to the Indo-US friction, India’s understanding with the European Union (EU) on the issue of data protection offers a potential template. India is looking at dialing EU to seek ‘adequacy’ status with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) once it passes the PDP Bill. Tomasz Kozlowski, EU Ambassador to India, said at the recent ET 5G Congress, “Data protection is an important element of EU-India cooperation.

With such a law in place, India will be joining the global trend of global convergence toward a modern data-protection law, and take a leadership role in the region and globally, at a time when the need to address challenges to data privacy and security requires a common approach.” Kozlowski added that the “adoption of strong data protection law will also pave way for EU-India discussions and further facilitate data flows.” Top cybersecurity sources in the Indian government point out that the US has agreed to GDPR, which is far more stringent than the Indian Bill. If so, why make noise about India’s data-localisation demands?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/et-prime-sandhya-sharma-august-19-2019-us-pressure-threatens-to-weaken-data-localisation-mandate-in-indias-landmark-data-protection-bill

US Copyright law faces constitutional challenge

sinha — 2016-08-11T13:28:13Z

In a major international development, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to strike down the provisions on Digital Rights Management(DRM) in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this post, I discuss DRMs, the EFF lawsuit, and then draw upon the differences between the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.

Originally published by Spicy IP on August 5, 2016. You may read EFF’s lawsuit here.

Decoding DRM

If you own a Netflix account and travel a lot, you may have been denied access to some TV shows depending on the country you logged in from. While that restriction can perhaps be gotten around by using VPNs, there exist other technological measures that prevent you from fixing your own automobile to sharing/making copies of an e-book that you supposedly bought. Such technological protection measures are commonly known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). These go back twenty years, and it was in 1996 when the first DRM appeared in the form of geo-access restrictions on DVD play.

Soon thereafter, it became de rigeur for businesses dealing in IP to apply all kinds of DRMs to their products. It was largely an embarrassing and a pointless saga of implementing software embedded restrictions to stem piracy (remember the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco?), given how blatantly they were discovered and circumvented. And now since technology is beginning to dwell even in our shoes, DRMs have been slapped onto these as well. So if you discover a bug causing a miscalculation in your step count, you are not only prohibited under law from probing the code and fixing it yourself, but you also may get jailed for doing so. Imagine such how such prohibition impacts and limits our daily lives and the work of professional researchers.

Clearly, DRM is not just a mere trifle to be brushed aside via smarter code– its ramifications go much farther. DRMs come with the problem of masking vulnerabilities, compromised security of the device and us er-privacy, and trampled consumer rights, fair use and free speech. Further, the poor design of DRMs makes them unable to distinguish between illegal use and fair-use. Progressive cutting down of users’ rights to store, reproduce, distribute media has become especially problematic for developing countries because of our greater dependence on free-er terms for sale, lending and donation. On the other hand, DRMs continue to become more ubiquitous(could be incorporated in the HTML 5 standard soon).

However, in an exciting development, the first major legal battle to kill DRM has begun!

Because finally in an unprecedented move, a constitutional challenge has been lodged in the US against DRM provisions, on the grounds that they restrict free speech and fair-use of copyright materials (the fair-use doctrine allows copyright law to co-exist with the first amendment). The complaint has been filed by EFF on behalf of Matthew Green (a security researcher) and Andrew “bunnie” Huang (a technologist)

The rejection that prompted a legal challenge..

Sections 1201-1205 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) lay down provisions relating to circumvention of DRM. Uniquely, the DMCA vests power in the Librarian of Congress to periodically enact rules granting exemption from the anti-circumvention provisions to legitimate non-infringing use of works (known as DMCA Rulemaking). It was under this particular instance of rulemaking in 2015, wherein the Librarian failed to grant an exemption for “…speech using clips of motion pictures, for the shifting of lawfully-acquired media to different formats and devices, and for certain forms of security research.” The rejection triggered the challenge against ‘Rulemaking’, ‘anti-circumvention’ and ‘anti-trafficking’ provisions of the DMCA, namely sections 1201(a), 1203, and 1204 . (This exemption was applied for by EFF, which has been seeking (and been granted) exemptions since 2003.)

In fact, universally, DRM provisions pose questions of free speech, consumer rights, privacy and copyright law. In the following section I will examine and compare the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.

WCT and DMCA were used to push DRM protection into Indian Copyright Act

The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 provisions on DRM are based in sections 2(xa), 65A and 65B, which were introduced through the Copyright Amendment Act, 2012. The sections define ‘Rights Management Information’, provide for ‘Protection of technological measures’ and ‘Protection of Rights Management Information’, respectively. It must be noted that the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) was the first instrument to conceive rules on DRM protection (Articles 11, 12). US was the first country to import WCT provisions into its copyright law via DMCA, which even went above the WCT standards. Soon, Hollywood-backed USTR wanted India to follow suit, and the provisions were queued up for an amendment to India’s copyright law. Please note that India is NOT a party to the WCT, and was under no obligation to enact laws on DRMs. Nevertheless, the Indian provisions with some changes and added limitations were loosely lifted from the equivalent WCT articles.

It is worth noting that the Indian DRM provisions have better safeguards than the DMCA provisions:

1) The Indian provisions (s. 65A+ 65B) do not make building and distribution of circumvention tools illegal. Only the act of circumvention attracts criminal liability. However, there is a duty on the person facilitating circumvention for another person to maintain a record of the same, including the purpose for which the facilitation occurred. The purpose should not be expressly prohibited under the Copyright Act, 1957.

Regardless, being criminally liable for circumventing DRM is a major threat to small businesses and developers. In one instance, when some Indian developers had built an open source software “PlayFair” to bypass Apple’s FairPlay DRM, they were threatened with legal action under the US’ DMCA. Despite the DMCA having no jurisdiction in India, the developers shut shop.

2) Clauses 65A(1) and 65A(2)(a) confine violation of technological protection measures to rights enumerated in the act, only. This means that the section does not restrict circumventions which attempt to get access to the underlying work.

While India has not seen major challenges to this provision, in 2013 the Delhi High Court injuncted persons from jailbreaking into Sony Playstations. Amlan analysed the order and questioned it in terms of the Court finding the act of ‘modifying the playstation without Sony’s consent’ illegal. Because, if you read section 65A (emphasis supplied is mine):

65A. Protection of Technological Measures

(1) Any person who circumvents an effective technological measure applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act, with the intention of infringing such rights, shall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to two years and shall also be liable to fine.

(2) Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from:

(a) doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act:

Provided that any person facilitating circumvention by another person of a technological measure for such a purpose shall maintain a complete record of such other person including his name, address and all relevant particulars necessary to identify him and the purpose for which he has been facilitated; or

(b) doing anything necessary to conduct encryption research using a lawfully obtained encrypted copy; or

(c) conducting any lawful investigation; or

(d) doing anything necessary for the purpose of testing the security of a computer system or a computer network with the authorisation of its owner; or

(e) operator; or [sic]

(f) doing anything necessary to circumvent technological measures intended for identification or surveillance of a user; or

(g) taking measures necessary in the interest of national security.

Clause (1) clearly states that the law is only applicable to such technological protection measures applied to protect any of the rights conferred by the copyright act. Which raises the questions of which rights are affected when OS of the playstation is modified, and how does the modification amount to copyright infringement? One may perhaps draw that the Court in this order placed the ‘consent’ of Sony above the law.

3) S. 65A(2) safeguards certain acts which also exist as exceptions granted in the Copyright Act. These enumerated acts may be performed without attracting liability: for instance, circumventions for purposes of encryption research, security testing, lawful investigation, evading surveillance by DRM are kosher. Note that s. 65A(2)(g) permits circumvention in the interest of national security.

(For a detailed exegesis of these provisions, please read this piece.)

A look at the draconian DMCA provisions

As I mentioned earlier, the DMCA provisions on DRMs are much stricter compared to the Indian copyright act. Both circumvention(s. 1201(a)(1)), and building and distribution of circumvention tools(s. 1201(a)(2)) are illegal and punishable. The DMCA also meticulously defines circumvention, in terms of “circumventing a technological measure” and “circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure.”

More alarmingly, these provisions envisage access controls as well as use controls. So a person decrypting a DVD to gain access to the work would be held liable for infringement (unlike in India where only the act of copying or modifying the work would trigger infringement). It is also worth noting that there is no clause stating that circumvention (and tools) of only those DRMs is illegal when the DRMs protect rights conferred under the DMCA.

While s. 1201(c) states that the section shall not affect “…rights, remedies, limitations or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair-use…” Further, there do exist exemptions to clauses(a)(1) and (2):

Exemption for nonprofit libraries, archives and educational institutions; and
Exemption for the purposes of law enforcement, intelligence and other government activities, reverse engineering (solely for the purposes of achieving interoperability), restricting internet access to minors, protecting personally identifiable information, security testing, encryption research, etc.

While the list seems to permit circumvention for a wide range of purposes and fair-use, the vague and narrow language has failed the implementation of these exemptions. EFF lists a bunch of these instances where the DRM provisions have been not necessarily used against pirates, but also scientists, consumers and legit competitors.

Further, the DMCA left it entirely to the US copyright agencies to carve exemptions for non-infringing uses of works on a triennial basis. This rulemaking procedure has received heavy criticism, and as a result of the 2015 rejection the Library of the Congress finds itself in a legal soup.

Finally, the EFF lawsuit also illustrates the violations of the plaintiffs rights to free speech and fair-use, as a direct result of the provisions and the Rulemaking process. Armed with a strong case, and as Cory Doctorow puts it, we may witness the eradication of DRM in our lifetime. And I will be following the developments closely and keep our readers updated.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/us-copyright-law-faces-constitutional-challenge

Updated Aadhaar Report

praskrishna — 2017-05-16T16:37:30Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/updated-aadhaar-report.pdf