Centre for Internet and Society

Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication

Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan — 2016-10-28T16:28:49Z

ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.

The research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan was published on the eprints@IISc repository on October 28, 2016. The article was originally published in the National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016.

It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. Funding agencies in Austria, Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden and the UK, and the world’s leading scholarly publishers and associations have integrated their systems with ORCID registry. Among the BRICS countries, China and South Africa are adopting ORCID avidly. India is yet to make a beginning. If research councils and funding agencies in India require researchers to adopt ORCID and link ORCID iDs to funding as well as tracking performance, it will help them keep track of the workflow. Journal editors can also keep track of contributions made by different authors and work assigned to different reviewers through their ORCID iDs.

INTRODUCTION

Names in scholarly publishing are not all that simple. Names here mean both names of authors of papers and names of researchers referred to in those papers. They can cause much confusion to researchers, editors of journals, database producers, librarians and bibliometricists, but if we handle them correctly we can overcome most of the problems.

SCHOLARLY LITERATURE: DISAMBIGUATION OF NAMES AND AGGREGATING ONE’S WORKS

As early as 1969, Eugene Garfield had expressed his dismay at the ‘needless ambiguity and confusion’ caused by authors who omit parts of their names and initials in their published works, and recommended that ‘scientists who are just now embarking on their careers would be well advised to measure the information content on their names as they appear in indexes such as Index Medicus, Physics Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and Science Citation Index.[1] Some 12 years later, he wrote a detailed paper on the problems the scholarly world faces on account of mere names of people.[2] He had reasons to worry more than anyone else; as the publisher of Science Citation Index, Current Contents and several other search and indexing tools for the world’s scientists and scholars, he had the unenviable task of processing millions of papers and author names not only in the byline of these papers but also in the references cited in them and rendering these author names accurately and attributing research papers to the right authors and institutions within a few weeks of publication.

People hail from all parts of the world and from different cultures, each having its own peculiarities in naming their people so much so people from one culture may find names of another strange. Added to that are the ways names from different cultures and languages are transliterated into the Roman script. The names in most parts of the western world have three parts, viz. the first name (or given name), middle name and last name (also called the family name or surname). Often the last name may have more than one word, e.g. Duncan Smith, von Braun, van der Waals, de Solla Price. The prefix ‘van’ in some names may be spelt with a capital V, albeit rarely, e.g. Van de Graaff (of generator fame). In some cultures there are a very large number of people having the same surname. For example, close to 85% of China’s population have one of only 129 surnames, and three names in particular, viz. Wang, Li and Chen, are predominant among authors publishing currently. Also there are two Chinese surnames that can be spelt as Wang when publishing in English language, says Jane Qiu.[3] Eight Chinese names transliterate in Roman script into Wei Wang and to avoid ambiguity in such cases journals may allow authors the option to include their names in their own language in parentheses after the transliterated name.[4] Among Korean authors, Kim and Park account for a large percentage. In India there are many Agarwals, Guptas, Mukherjees, Raos, Sharmas and Singhs among publishing authors. While some Indians have two-part surnames, e.g. Ghosh Dastidar, Guha Thakurta and Sen Sharma, a few drop their initials altogether, e.g. Karmeshu.

Some have hyphenated names, e.g. Noel-Baker, Szent-Györgyi, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, all three Nobel laureates. Curiously, Noel-Baker was born Philip Baker, but took Noel as his second surname on marriage to Irene Noel and subsequently started hyphenating his surname. But in the majority of cases hyphenated names are those of women who add their husband’s family name to their own, e.g. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Rita Levi-Montalcini, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for medicine, and Irene JoliotCurie, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. In a variation, Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, used her husband’s name ahead of her maiden name: Marie Curie, née Sklodowska. Some examples from among Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy: mathematician Rajinder Jeet HansGill, photochemist Krishna Kamini Rohatgi-Mukherjee, plant physiologist Renu Khanna-Chopra, condensed matter physicist Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta, development biologist Professor Priyambada Mohanty-Hejmadi, conservation biologist Professor Asha Chandola-Saklani, and neurophysiologist Professor Sushil Dua-Sharma. Many of these women scientists have published papers both under their maiden names and under their hyphenated family names.

In Japan, married couples are required by a 1898 law, which is valid till date, to have the same surname, even though giving up one’s maiden name does disadvantage women in certain ways, including professionally.[5]

Both retaining one’s maiden name and adopting the husband’s surname have their advantages. If one achieves a lot as a young person, one would be better off retaining the name that brought her the reputation in the first place. If one achieves much after taking her husband’s name, she will have much to lose if she ever gets a divorce. Better to hold on to one’s maiden name, says Kalpana Sharma.[6] Some professionals, e.g. Bhatnagar award winner and fluid flows expert Professor Rama Govindarajan, has chosen this option. The situation is changing in India albeit slowly. A woman in Maharashtra can now use either her father’s or husband’s names in all official documents.

There are also rare instances of people changing their names midway in their career, e.g. a woman electrical engineer of Indian origin working in the University of Waterloo has over the years published under three different names, viz. K.H. Sheshakamal, Shesha Jayaram, Shesha H. Jayaram (personal communication, Muthanna J, 23 Dec 2015).

Missing middle name in the byline, spelling mistakes and problems faced in printing (or processing by computers) texts with diacritical marks can all lead to ambiguity. But with all these vagaries, it is important that contributions such as papers, patents, datasets and software are attributed to the right contributors.

Many researchers have recognized the problem of author name disambiguation. A Scopus search (on 28 June 2015) using the key words ‘author name’ and ‘disambiguation’ led to 86 papers in the 13-year period 2003–2015. Of these, 46 had the keywords in the title. Some of these papers were related to the problems faced by biomedical databases, e.g.

Author Name Disambiguation for PubMed, http://online library.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23063/pdf
Author Name Disambiguation in MEDLINE, http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805000

From 2012 onwards PubMed uses a ranking algorithm for author searches to show more relevant results by disambiguating common author names.[7] This helps pooling papers by the real A.K. Sen when there are papers by others with the same name and initials.

The name ambiguity problem can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme.

Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), UK, says that our inability to associate valuable research outputs with their right authors ‘has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced. Ineffective reporting and sharing of research impact on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.’ According to her, ‘wider adoption and use of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)’ is the solution to this problem.[8]

WHAT IS ORCID?

A person’s ORCID iD takes the form of a unique 16-digit number, e.g. 0000-0000-0000-0000. ORCID also gives each person a web page profile based on the iD, e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-00024398-4658, listing their iD number, name(s), institution(s) and publications. (Generally ORCID is used for the organization and the registry, and ORCID iD to denote the identifier itself.) Publications here go beyond research publications such as journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, reports, research techniques, software and inventions to include books, lectures/ speeches, websites, etc.

These profiles or records together comprise the ORCID registry. This registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers (http://orcid.org/node/47) is created and maintained by an open, non-profit, community-driven effort. ORCID iDs help distinguish individuals with common names, and they are not affected by changes in name or name order or alphabet in which the name is rendered. ORCID is researcher-controlled; the researcher decides what information is included in her ORCID record.

ORCID iDs can be embedded in research workflows. If included by the publisher or funding agency, they are part of the metadata associated with scholarly works and grants. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as DOIs and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.

But ORCID is not the first such attempt to associate unambiguously research papers (and other output such as datasets and software) with the right authors. Fenner has listed a number of them.[9] Some of these cover only specific fields. Some are country specific. Some are proprietary. Some are linked to specific databases while others want to cover a wide area of science and scholarship. Fenner’s list includes RePEc Author (set up by Thomas Krichel in 1999), LATTES (an information platform mandatory for researchers in Brazil, set up by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development or CNPq, in 1999), VIAF (set up by OCLC in 2003), NARCIS (set up in 2004 by the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands and mandatory for all researchers in the Netherlands), arXiv Author ID (set up in 2005 by Cornell University for researchers in physics and related disciplines), Scopus Author ID (set up in 2006 by Elsevier), Names Project Mimas (set up in 2007 by the British Library for authors and institutions in all academic disciplines), Researcher ID (set up in 2008 by Thomson Reuters) and Author Claim (set up by Thomas Krichel in 2008).

If there are many author identity services already available, why add ORCID, one may ask. The other services are not truly interoperable, whereas ORCID allows linkage to other identifiers such as Scopus ID and Researcher ID. ORCID is the only service trying to associate its identifier with other existing author identifiers, with more than publications, and to collaborate across the community to embed it at the time that a work is ‘released’ by a researcher. Also, most other services are linked to a single bibliographic database (e.g. Researcher ID is linked to Web of Science).

‘Thus, since none of the available author identifier services looked like the solution to the name ambiguity problem, the ORCID initiative was started in late 2009 and formed as a nonprofit organization in August 2010.’[10]

Why should a researcher have an ORCID iD?

This section draws on information mainly from private communication with the Executive Director and other staff of

ORCID and the Library Guide of the University of Southampton.[11]

ORCID helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It is for life, irrespective of where one chooses to live and work. Connections between the ORCID registry and other databases help one to keep one’s research profile updated and to make it visible worldwide. Authors with an ORCID iD can have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record.[12]

Often researchers waste much time in filling forms that require address, employment history, collaborator names, affiliation, etc. when applying for jobs, awards, academy fellowships or grants or submitting manuscripts to journals. One can have all such information in one’s ORCID profile and draw upon it at short notice. Researchers can save much of their productive time by linking their ORCID iDs to the grants or manuscript processing systems.

As the Caltech Library Guide points out, as one collaborates across disciplines, institutions and borders, one ‘must interact with an increasing number and diversity of research information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming, and often frustrating’ (http://libguides.caltech.edu/orcid).

To obtain the list of publications of a researcher from a database such as Web of Science, one would need to give the name (with all variants), research domains and names of organizations (with all their variants) associated with the author. With all that, one may not get the full list. But if one uses the researcher’s ORCID iD in the identifier field, the search will give the correct list instantaneously.

Anstey, editor of the 125-year-old British Journal of Dermatology, has explained lucidly why researchers, editors and funders should embrace ORCID and how through ORCID iDs one could connect to websites such as Web of Science, figshare, Impact story and others.[13]

How do researchers get an ORCID iD?

Scientists, researchers, teachers, students, clinicians, scholars, authors and anyone at all, contributing to scholarly outputs from anywhere in the world can sign up for a free ORCID iD through the ORCID website (https://orcid.org/register). It is also possible to create an ID at other websites that are integrated with ORCID, for example manuscript submission websites of journals. About 5000 journals, including those published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press, use ScholarOne developed by Thomson Reuters and whenever one submits a paper to these journals one is asked to provide an ORCID iD. And if you do not have one you can create it through the publisher’s Application Program Interface (API). Claiming an ORCID iD is not at all difficult. After claiming, researchers can associate the ORCID iDs with their education and employment details and details related to collaborators, publications and outputs.

Including one’s publications is simple. One can import bibliographic details of one’s publications having unique identifiers (e.g. DOI, ISBN) from the list of databases integrated with ORCID registry. The list includes Scopus, Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, Crossref Metadata Search, Redalyc, etc.[14]One can just log in to ORCID and choose the database from which one wants to import bibliographic data. For publications that are not indexed by the databases integrated with ORCID, one can use the template provided by ORCID to manually add details. Also ORCID has created a tool by which one can import bibliographic data from BibTeX (.bib) files into one’s ORCID record, including files exported from Google Scholar and other popular reference management tools.[15]

Is one’s ORCID private information?

Of course, one can choose which information to be assigned as public or private in one’s record except the actual iDs assigned by ORCID that are designed to be publicly available. Once researchers have claimed their ORCID iD, the settings are in their sole control. ORCID has a privacy selector option that lets one set the privacy level of all new works, education, employment and funding items. Usually, everyone makes the list of publications public.

ORCID features

ORCID offers its essential features for free to individual researchers and organizations across the world. Researchers would be able to automatically update their ORCID record with links to published manuscripts in which they have included their ORCID iD. However, ORCID charges membership fees from organizations such as publishers, funders, and academic and research institutions, in order to sustain the registry and the mission to achieve name disambiguation, and in return offers them premium API services and personalized technical support. Also, when many organizations join as a consortium, they benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support.

ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization.[16] Indeed, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Director John Willinsky considers ORCID ‘an important emerging technology with opportunities to help shape and improve the open access publishing landscape worldwide’.[17]Organizations can integrate ORCID iDs into research management systems and workflows using the free public API. ORCID releases a public data file annually under Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication) to support broad access to data that are made public by individual researchers through their ORCID records. The file contains the public information associated with each user’s ORCID record. Each record is included as a separate file in both JSON and XML formats (http://orcid.org/content/ orcid-public-data-file-2014).

ORCID helps institutions track one’s work, compile information for university-level reporting (including total funding received by its scholars), and more efficiently manage information on faculty profiles. By eliminating redundancies and automating some reporting functions, ORCID will be especially helpful in reducing time and monies spent on other assessment activities such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.[18]

Feedback from a pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organizations that have adopted ORCID were likely to see ‘measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation—especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders— with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.’[19]

Jan Jan Jan Jan

2013 2014 2015 2016

Year

FIG 1. Growth of ORCID iDs (http://support.orcid.org/ knowledgebase/articles/150557-number-of-orcid-ids)

Funders, 5%

Associations, 7%

Repositories,

10%

Publishers,

13%

Research institutes,

65%

FIG 2. Sectoral distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)

Middle East and

Africa, 2% South America, 1%

Australasia, 6%

Asia, 8%

North Europe, 53%

America,

30%

FIG 3. Geographical distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)

Uptake of ORCID

The number of live ORCID iDs grew rapidly from late 2012 (Fig. 1) and as of 29 July 2016, it exceeded 2.43 million. These are currently used by more than 200 research and workflow platforms at academic and other research institutions, at funding agencies and at publishers.

As of mid-December 2015, more than 350 organizations have opted for ORCID’s member services and are at different stages of integrating ORCID iDs into their systems and workflows (Miyairi N, personal communication, 18 Dec 2015). As of 30 September 2015, 65% of ORCID members were universities (Fig. 2) spread all over the globe (Fig. 3). A representative list of different categories of members is provided in Box 1. The large European contingent is a result of three national consortia. These proportions are expected to be fluid over the next couple of years as more consortia are formed and join ORCID (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015).

Recognizing that publishers can promote systems that would provide support to researchers and to science, commencing January 2016, eight publishers will be requiring the use of ORCID iDs by corresponding authors during the publication process. These include the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS; publishers of Science), American Geophysical Union

(AGU), eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, the Public Library of

Box 1. Uptake of ORCID Among the long list of members of ORCID are:

Publishers: AIP Publishing, Elsevier, National Academy of Sciences (USA), Oxford University Press, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Science Open, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer

Associations: American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Astronomical Society, American Chemical Society, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, American Society of Microbiology, American Society of Civil Engineers, Association of Computing Machinery, Electrochemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), IOP, Modern Language Association, Royal Society of Chemistry

Universities: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Cornell University, Lund University, Stockholm University, City University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, CINECA, Italy’s consortium of 70 universities and four research institutes

Academies: African Academy of Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Royal Society

Funding agencies: National Institutes of Health (USA), Department of Energy (USA), Wellcome Trust (UK), National Institute for Health Research (UK), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)

Intergovernmental bodies: CABI, CERN, International Food Policy Research Institute, International Water Management Institute

Libraries: British Library, Royal Library – Denmark

Repositories: Social Science Research Network (SSRN) For the full list of members, see http://orcid.org/about/ community/members

Science (PLoS), and the Royal Society. More than 3000 journals are already collecting ORCID iDs from corresponding authors. Currently about 75% of all registrations are through journal accounts.

Similarly, six consortia too will require the use of ORCID iDs. These are: Jisc (50 universities and research councils, UK), Italy/ ANVUR (70+ universities and research institutes), Australia, via the Australian Access Federation (40 universities, research institutes, and Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council funders), and three library consortia in the US: Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) consisting of 15 universities in the US midwest, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), a consortium of 35 research libraries located in the central and western US, and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) comprising 29 core member academic research libraries and approximately 90 affiliate member academic and/or research libraries.

Jisc negotiated an ORCID consortium through which universities would benefit from premium ORCID membership at significantly reduced costs. The official launch event for the consortium took place at Imperial College in late September 2015 with the participation of more than 50 UK universities, ORCID, Jisc, GuildHE, RCUK and Current Research Information System (CRIS) vendors.[20]Since August 2015, the Wellcome Trust has required all lead applicants for grants to provide an ORCID iD.[21]From 23 September 2015, an ORCID iD has become mandatory for all new National Institute of Health Research (NIHR, UK) personal award applications.[22]

Italy has implemented ORCID on a national scale, and has signed a three-year consortium membership agreement with ORCID. Under the auspices of ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems) and CRUI (the Conference of Italian University Rectors), 70 universities and four research centres initially participate in the consortium (Cineca). ANVUR made ORCID mandatory in order to participate in the National Assessment from November 2015.[23]The Italians expect that at least 80% of Italian researchers will have an ORCID iD, with links to their research output by the end of 2016.[23]

ORCID is now included in the Danish National Open Access Strategy and the National Research Data Strategy. The Danish Council for Independent Research recommends, and the Novo Nordisk foundation requires an ORCID iD in funding applications. Currently DEFF, a library collaboration funded by several ministries, is sponsoring a national ORCID implementation project with project partners including seven of the eight Danish universities, a consortium of all Danish university colleges and a consortium of research institutions under the Ministry of Culture.[24]

In Australia, according to Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania, ‘there is an active ORCID activity, and it has been adopted (or recommended) for universal application, but this has not yet reached the status of a mandate by government’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The Australian ORCID Consortium was launched on 1 January 2016 with 38 organizations (http:// aaf.edu.au/orcid/). The Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales, and Queensland, Macquarie University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, La Trobe University and Charles Darwin University and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are all members of ORCID. ORCID Working Group of Australia comprising research councils and associations has developed a consortium model for implementing ORCID iDs across the Australian research sector.[25]Funding agencies are also keen to partner with ORCID. Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) mandated the use of ORCID in 2013. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) asks that grantees use ORCID iDs to manage information in their ScienCV system.

Many other funding agencies across the world have also adopted ORCID:[26]

The Swedish Research Council (SRC) mandated the use of ORCID in Spring 2015.
Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has mandated the use of ORCID starting in 2016.
European Commission H2020 Grantee Guidelines recommend that contributors be uniquely identifiable through identifiers which are persistent, non-proprietary, open and interoperable (e.g. through leveraging existing sustainable initiatives such as ORCID).[27]
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) will mandate the use of ORCID in the next funding cycle.
Autism Speaks, a US-based awareness, advocacy and funding body, requires all investigators and mentors to register with ORCID to obtain a unique iD. This enables Autism Speaks to update one’s funding record and to monitor one’s research progress. Autism Speaks will not consider applications without ORCID accounts for the key personnel.[28]

Publishing platforms such as Aries Editorial Manager, eJournal Press, and ScholarOne have already built-in ORCID support so authors publishing in those journals can create their ORCID iDs through them. PKP is working on developing modules for the Open Journal Systems used by more than 8600 journals.

Research information systems such as Elements, Plum Analytics, PURE, SmartSimple, InfoEd, University Office and Research Master, and the open access repository platforms DSpace, Dryad, EPrints, and VIVO have also built-in ORCID support.

Towards the end of 2015, Altmetrics integrated ORCID with its Explorer apps, and now one can search for Altmetric attention data for all the research outputs associated with one’s ORCID profile and thus scholars can get credit for all their research contributions, including journal articles and participation in social media.

SUPPORT TO ORCID

Right from the beginning, ORCID’s aim was to become completely self-sustaining based on member fees. However, they did have some sponsors and they did take some loans from their own members/stakeholders (http://orcid.org/about/community/ sponsors).

In September 2011, ORCID received an NSF Eager grant of US$ 200 000 via the University of Chicago.[29] The APIs developed with this funding and released in November 2011 could be used by third parties to integrate grant, manuscript or personnel tracking systems with ORCID. This project led to the formal launch of ORCID and its website (http://orcid.org). The philosophy and evolution of ORCID were disseminated through journals such as Nature and EduCAUSE, outreach meetings and social media channels such as twitter.

Seeing its value, a few philanthropic foundations came forward to support ORCID. An award by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to ORCID funded the pilot integration of ORCID identifiers by a group of universities and science and social science professional associations, such as Purdue University and the Society of Neurosciences. This programme supported the collaborative elicitation and documentation of ‘use cases’ and open source code, and established a collaborative venue for disseminating best practices. All projects were completed in December 2014. Partnering institutions have shared integration source code and lessons learnt with the ORCID community through ORCID’s GitHub open source repository and online ‘use cases’, and now serve as reference sites for organizations planning similar integrations.[30]

In April 2015, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded US$ 3 million to ORCID to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support international adoption and technical integration.[31]

ORCID IN EMERGING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The National Science Library (NSL) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has taken the lead in China and is taking steps to adopt ORCID nationwide.[32] China fully recognizes the importance of the unique author identifiers, especially so for Chinese authors and the NSL sees the value in an international, open, and researcherdriven person identifier. Scientists in China are willing to work with ORCID to promote it in CAS and in the country. To this purpose, the NSL is enlisting cooperation from Web of Science, the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), CAS Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) Journal Association, University STM Journal Association, and a number of major research and academic libraries. NSL has developed the iAuthor platform, as an easy Chinese front gate to register for an ORCID identifier and to interoperate with Chinese journals, CSCD and others. The NSL iAuthor service was launched in October 2014.[32]

ORCID is yet to pick up in India. As of 15 September 2015, more than 1.5 million ORCID iDs have been assigned. Of these, 14 439 have been registered with an email address that ends in ‘.in’ and 17 048 records where the country is set to India (email communication from ORCID, 29 Jun 2015). That comes to <1.14%. Many authors may be using web mail addresses and we will not be able to identify them as Indian researchers.

ORCID is just starting in Latin America, according to Dominique Babini, Open Access Program Coordinator at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) (personal communication, 1 Jan 2016). According to Abel Packer, Director of SciELO, ‘ORCID is not yet widely adopted in LA. There is an increasing awareness of it and its role and importance. But, only a few institutions adopted it as an obligatory policy to their affiliates’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). Less than 10% of the authors fill the ORCID field in the submission form in the online manuscript submission/processing services used by SciELO Brazil. But, it will be adopted if funding agencies and journals make it mandatory on their submission systems. A barrier to its wide adoption is that researchers have many options to manage their profiles (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The first to join ORCID were:[33] Redalyc, the University of the State of Mexico’s open access platform; CONCYTEC – National Council of Science and Technology in Peru; and UNESP (Sao Paulo State University) in Brazil.

Interest in ORCID has been growing in Africa for some time. In South Africa alone over 3500 researchers have registered and three universities, viz. University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science are ORCID members, as is the National Research Foundation. In all of Africa, there are >7000 registered researchers mostly from South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunis, Ghana, Kenya and Botswana. The cities in Africa that lead in ORCID use are Cairo, Tunis, Lagos, Algiers, Giza, Cape Town, Pretoria and Alexandria.[34]

In the Asia–Pacific region there were 37 members of ORCID[35]as of August 2015, including 13 in Australia, 3 in New Zealand, 6 in Hong Kong, 5 in Taiwan and 4 in Japan. There is one in India—a multinational company providing editing and publishing services—with offices in many countries and does not really qualify to be known exclusively as an Indian entity.

SOME CONCERNS

Some are critical of ORCID. One criticism is that ORCID is not open access and it appears to be a complicated, expensive, proprietary and monopolistic system, and the participation of several commercial publishers makes it a Trojan horse which could eventually lead to strengthening the stranglehold of the publishing industry over scholarly communication. We were alerted to this concern by Thomas Krichel (personal communication, 6 Jul 2015). Krichel ignores the fact that without the participation of large bibliographic databases, ORCID cannot provide the service effectively. Bringing on board Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), etc. is not only a clever move but is an absolute necessity.

Many others do not agree with this view. Bilder et al.[16] believe that ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization. Also, as Paglione[36] has put it: ‘One of the core principles of ORCID is that all software we develop will be publicly released under an open source software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. In addition to transparency, releasing our code will improve interoperability and integration with external services, lead to more robust code because more individuals are auditing and testing it, and, with an extended developer community, enable faster code iteration and evolution.’ Haak has also listed the open features of ORCID, viz. it provides free, barrier-free access, it is democratic and transparent, and it is open access.[37]

Another concern is: what if unscrupulous individuals claim authorship on papers that are not theirs, if the ORCID authorship has not been previously claimed by the true author? Is there any safeguard to prevent such a possibility? Can ORCID help prevent fraudulent reviewing?

In the early days, it is possible for someone to claim authorship of papers written by others. But, according to Laure Haak (personal communication, 10 Dec 2015), ‘ORCID is a public resource, and if someone claims erroneously this can be monitored by the community and reported and addressed using ORCID’s dispute procedures (see http://orcid.org/orcid-dispute-procedures). As universities and other employers of researchers are using ORCID to assert affiliation (and funders are asserting awardees also using ORCID), there becomes built a web of trusted data about an individual’s research activities, all with researcher consent.’ Also, as more and more publishers receive ORCID iDs of authors as part of the metadata when authors submit papers, and as Crossref updates the ORCID records, it will reduce unethical claims.

As far as peer-review fraud is concerned, there are attempts to counter it using ORCID.[38] But, these are social problems and technical solutions are not the answer. The fight between good and evil is often a see-saw. However, as the uptake of ORCID gains momentum it will become difficult for such fraudsters to lay claim on others’ works.

There are some reservations though about the costs involved in becoming a member of ORCID. Here is what J.K. Vijayakumar of King Abdullah University, Saudi Arabia, told us: ‘if an institution wants to use ORCID to integrate with their repository, research management systems, etc., the institution needs to become a member (the fees are high and one has to pay even more if ORCID integration is required for more than one system). This needs to be debated and ORCID should bring down the membership fee according to income of the country, so that developing nations can also take part’ (personal communication, 11 Jul 2015). This seems to be a good suggestion. In fact, a member can use one member API credential in many systems. ORCID also provides a substantial discount for small organizations (<US$ 200 000). In addition, affordability is partly why the consortium member model was launched. Haak says: ‘We continue to evaluate membership fees and are starting an initiative for adoption in developing countries in 2016’ (personal communication, 2015).

What we are concerned more is the fact that although the number of live ORCID iDs exceed 2.43 million (as of 29 July 2016), only about 337 000 of them have at least one work (https://orcid.org/statistics). Only about one in five iDs is actually being used.

DISCUSSION

The value of ORCID is evident even in its first 5 years. As Jonathon Kram of the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit at Wellcome Trust says, ‘the ability to uniquely identify contributors is a deceptively simple concept which, if realized, could enable forms of real-time understanding of scientific research that up to now have been extremely costly (if not impossible).’[39]

When the Modern Language Association (MLA) enabled in June 2015 retroactive assigning of ORCID iDs to the nearly two million records in its International Bibliography, which holds the key to language and literary scholarship for more than 90 years, it met an especially critical need in the humanities and arts, where publication types and venues are so diverse, needing more work to be done to create clarity and connect the parts than in the sciences. It would also bring increased recognition and validation of humanities scholarship.[40]

As early as 2012, concerned by the lack of quality, comprehensive data about biomedical researchers, the US NIH recommended the development of a simple, comprehensive tracking system for trainees, and implemented a researcher profile system called the Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae (SciENcv), and encouraged the adoption of unique, persistent ORCID identifiers for researchers.[41]

ORCID, along with open access and open educational resources, is integral to the open knowledge movement. It supports ‘the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature’.[42]

Such benefits of ORCID adoption will be fully realized only if ORCID iDs are adopted widely across the research community, and if ORCID iDs are integrated within systems of higher educational institutions, funders and publishers.[43]

If research councils such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and funding agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) mandate ORCID iDs for all researchers in all their laboratories and for all applicants for grants, India can make quick progress. Vice chancellors of universities, directors of research institutions, and the governing boards of academies and professional associations and societies could insist on all researchers in their respective institutions registering for an ORCID iD. Scholarly journals published by the science academies, CSIR-NISCAIR, ICAR, ICMR, professional associations, etc. could mandate inclusion of ORCID iDs by all authors at the time of submitting manuscripts. It would help immensely if India were to adopt a manpower tracking system based on ORCID in all areas of science, technology and innovation, similar to that used by NIH.

India has done reasonably well in the area of open educational resources (OER). In particular, the National Programme of Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL) executed by a consortium of IITs and Indian Institute of Science is highly regarded and is used well. But it took several years of voluntary effort before green open access became acceptable to a small percent of Indian researchers and research institutions, long after it became standard practice in many countries. We hope this time around things will move quickly and many researchers and institutions will adopt ORCID soon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Dr L.L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Nobuko Miyairi and Alainna Wrigley of ORCID, Rachel Bruce of Jisc, Thomas Krichel of GESIS and RePEc, Peter Suber of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Martin Fenner of DataCite, Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dominique Babini of CLACSO, Abel Packer of SciELO, for answering our questions and providing some valuable information. We are indebted to Subbiah Gunasekaran of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, for valuable discussion and for alerting us to some important developments. The comments of two referees were very helpful in rewriting and improving the original text.

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[38] Ferguson C, Marcus A, Oransky I. Publishing: The peer-review scam. Nature 2014;515:480–2.

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[40] Taylor LN. MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography launches ORCID App. 2015 Available at http://laurientaylor.org/2015/06/19/news-mlamodern-language-association-international-bibliography-launches-orcid-app/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[41] Schaffer W. The adoption of ORCID identifiers by funding organizations. Available at slideshare.net/ORCIDSlides/20140423-webinar-schaffer (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[42] Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Metrics cannot replace peer review in the next REF. Available at hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2015/ Name,104464,en.html (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[43] Research Councils UK (RCUK) Administrator. We’re now a member of ORCID. Available at http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2015/12/03/were-now-a-member-of-orcid/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication

Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation to Host Design Public

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T08:08:10Z

The conclave in its 5th edition will feature Aam Aadmi Party members Rajmohan Gandhi and Somnath Bharti along with Sunil Abraham in conversation with Dr. Aditya Sood about different approaches through citizen centric governance.

The information was posted on BusinessWire India on March 11, 2014. Source : Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation

Adianta School of Leadership and Innovation is setting up the stage for yet another conclave to establish a dialogue around innovation with ‘Design Public’. The key aspect of the conclave would be a dialogue between Raj Mohan Gandhi, Member- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) & Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi; Somnath Bharti, Former Law Minister Delhi, Member- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP); Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society and Dr. Aditya Dev Sood, Founder & CEO, CKS about different approaches through citizen centric governance.

The fifth edition of the Design Public Conclave which will be held on Friday, March 14^th, 2014 at Vihara Campus, is being produced by the Center for Knowledge Societies, the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, the Startup Tunnel, the Bihar Innovation Lab, and the Financial Innovation Alliance, in partnership and with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grameen Foundation, CGAP, UNDP's GCEPA and the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX).

Over the past three years, Design Public has emerged as the premier location for high-level conversations about the public role and social impact of design and innovation in India. It has attracted some erudite and high profile speakers and discussants across regions, society and sectors of industry. The fifth edition of Design Public will focus on “Social Innovation through Partnership with Private Sector” and “The Elements of Governance Innovation” as both are relevant in present day context. The discussions will set the stage for recommendations and suggestions around promotion of social innovation through new partnerships between the social and private sectors, promoting social enterprises and beneficial social consequences of private sector activity with specific focus on the new companies bill and how it brings centre stage new opportunities for promoting social innovation. Focus on “The Elements of Governance Innovation” will focus on the importance of distinguishing governance innovation from policy work, the key constituencies involved in governance innovation and how better collaboration can create more meaningful impact.

The conclave will see two Keynotes touching both the aspects by Esko Kilpi, Writer and Theorist of the Networked Society and Arndt Hussar, UNDP-GCPSE, Singapore, respectively. Apart from the Keynotes, there would be other speakers which include Ada Wong, Chair, SIX, Hong Kong; Nehal Sanghavi, Advisor, USAID, India; Rajesh Sawhney, Founder, Global Superangels Fund, India; Louis Pulford, Director of SIX (Social Innovation Exchange) and Prof. M.P. Ranjan, Design Chair, CEPT University.

Apart from the keynotes, the conclave will also feature two working groups and three breakout sessions followed by presentations from each breakout and a dialogue for framing conclusions and charting next steps.

The working groups will focus on designing a Social Innovation Exchange for India and building an action plan for Governance Innovation respectively. The breakouts will be explaining Open Data in the Indian context, opening out closed systems of Governance and developing start-up opportunities in Governance Innovation.

Other key participants for the fifth edition of Design Public conclave include Abhimanyu Nowhar, Founder, The Kiba Design; Ambrish Arora, Head, Lotus Design; Balasubramanian Munuswamy, Private Sector Development Advisor, Department for International Development (DIFD), British High Commission; Chakshu Roy, Heads, Outreach Initiatives, PRS Legislative Research; Chandni Ohri, CEO, Grameen Foundation, India; Daniel Radcliffe, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Gautam Gandhi, New Business Development for Emerging Markets, Google; Harsh Srivastava, Chief Operating Officer, Centre of Civil Society; Ishan Khosla, Founder, Ishan Khosla Design; Jatin Modi, Founder, FrogIdeas, India; Karan Malik, Associate, Advisory Research, Dasra; Lysander Menezes, Team Leader, Maternal Child Health & Nutrition, PATH; Namit Arora, Writer & Activist; Nehal Sanghavi, Advisor, USAID, India; Rajesh Khati, Founder & Principal Consultant, Clearway Advisors; Ramanjit Chima, Senior Policy Analyst, Google; Sanjay Rishi, President, MCS, Usha International Ltd.; Shweta Banerjee, CGAP, India; Soaib Grewal, Founder, Bold Capital, India; Somnath Bharti, Member-AAP and Former Law Minister, Government of Delhi; Suhas Mhaskar, Senior General Manager & Head, Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd.; Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Researcher, The Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Usha Alexander, Writer and Instructional Designer.

About Design Public

Over the past three years, Design Public has emerged as the premier location for high-level conversations about the public role and social impact of design and innovation in India. It has attracted speakers and discussants from all regions of the world, from all estates of society and from diverse sectors of industry. Out of the conversations held here, many new initiatives have emerged, including the Bihar Innovation Lab, the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, among others. There has been wide coverage of the themes and ideas emerging from Design Public in the media and blogosphere, including in the New York Times, Economic Times, Times of India, and Mint Newspaper. High value participants in the past have included Arun Maira (Planning Commission), Sam Pitroda (National Innovation Council), Geoff Mulgan (NESTA, UK), Ashok Alexander (BMGF), Rohini Nilekani (Arghyam), Yamini Aiyer (Accountability Initiative), Ashwin Mahesh (Lok Satta Party), Samanth Subramanaian (Writer), Vish Palekar (Mahindra Group), Jeby Cherian (IBM), Riku Makela (Tekes, FI), among many others.

About Adianta

The Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation promotes a radical and empowering educational approach that promotes Learning by Doing. It is a collaborative effort between some of the world’s leading innovation organizations, including the School of Design at the Technische Universiteit Delft (Netherlands), NESTA (UK), The Social Innovation Exchange (Global), and the Center for Knowledge Societies (India). With a distinguished team of advisors, international faculty and a global network of over 100 mentors, the Adianta School provides an unprecedented quality of international education right here in India.

For News Release background on Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation click here

Media Contact Details

Abhishek Shivam, Greyhound Neo, +919582199990 , ashivam@greyhoundgroup.com Priyanka Ahuja, Brand Manager, Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, outreach@adianta.org

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Address delivered during the IGF Closing Ceremony

radha — 2011-08-02T07:18:36Z

This address was delivered by Dr. Anja Kovacs, as a representative of civil society, to the IGF during its closing ceremony.

Good evening, Mr Chairperson and all the distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for this opportunity to address this assembly on behalf of civil society, it is a real honour. And thank you also to the organisers and to the government of Egypt, for the wonderful arrangements and for creating such a excellent environment for us to work in.

I would like to use this opportunity to celebrate, together with you, two very important achievements in particular that we have made collectively during the four days of our intensive deliberations together.

The first one is the progress we are making in terms of recognising the importance of attention for human rights in ensuring a people-centred, development-oriented, non-discriminatory information society. Thus, for example, in the main session on security, openness and privacy, speakers across stakeholder groups couched the debate not any more in terms of security vs. privacy, but in terms of security and privacy. Security or other concerns, it was consistently argued, while obviously deserving our attention, should not be used to justify curtailing longstanding gains made in terms of human rights; rather, it is an improved implementation of already agreed on human rights instruments that we need to reach our goal of an inclusive, people-centred information society. The growing recognition of this fact is an evolution that civil society welcomes with open arms.

Another very hopeful evolution during this IGF was the central attention devoted to the question of where we stand in terms of promoting a people-centred, development-oriented information society more generally. The message that came out of the main session on “Internet governance in the light of the WSIS principles” clearly confirmed the urgent need to pay greater attention to this important issue, and several suggestions were made to address this concern. These include devoting devoting a main session solely to the topic of Internet governance for development in next next year's IGF, and I sincerely hope that these suggestions will be taken up.

While we thus have important reason to celebrate, challenges of course remain. Throughout the existence of the IGF, and perhaps increasingly so, the value of the multistakeholder model has been recognised and stressed by all stakeholder groups. However, at the same time, it has also been acknowledged that we need to continue to work to further strengthen participation from currently underrepresented countries and groups. I would like to note, however, that it is important that we do not restrict our efforts in this regard to capacity building, significant as that may be. Perhaps even more crucial is that the agenda of the IGF consistently talks to the concerns of actors in the developing parts of the world as well.

The reconfirmation of the importance of a development agenda that we have seen in this IGF is thus a very important step forward indeed. At the same time, within this larger development agenda, it is crucial that we also as soon as possible start to discuss some of the specific issues that require our attention on an urgent basis. For example, within the IGF as elsewhere, it is generally acknowledged that access to knowledge is central to development processes; yet the IGF so far has not paid systematic attention to the ways in which the amazing possibilities that the Internet offers in this regard are increasingly threatened by new policies that seem to make intellectual property regimes more stringent day by day. From a developing country perspective, finding a balanced solution that can address these concerns is an urgent priority. Starting the debate on how this can be achieved here, in the IGF, is certain to attract a larger number of developing country participants, including from governments.

Going by the experience of the past years as well as this particular meeting, I have no doubt that if given the opportunity, we will measure up to the challenges before us. Without wanting to preclude the Under-Secretary General's report, the proceedings during this IGF have made clear time and again its crucial significance in Internet governance processes. I hope with all my heart that we will continue to get the opportunity to work together on addressing these important issues and on resolving tensions and contradictions as they emerge, with the support of an independent secretariat that can ensure an environment genuinely inclusive of all stakeholders. Only when such open, inclusive conditions govern our own processes, may we in turn, together be able to create a genuinely inclusive information society which will indeed create opportunities for all.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/address-igf-closing-ceremony

AdaCamp Bangalore: "Nothing could be more open and encouraging than this"

praskrishna — 2015-02-12T01:53:43Z

I can say this conference was the most truly touched feminist endeavor I have ever witnessed or thought of. An inspiration to last through. — Rupali Talwatkar.

Rohini Lakshané delivered a session on digital security. For more info see the details on Ada Initiative website

Session on Imposter Syndrome:

Impostor syndrome is a common reaction to doing publicly visible and publicly criticised work like that done in open technology and culture. Impostor Syndrome is the feeling that you aren't actually qualified for the work you are doing and will be discovered as a fraud. It is prevalent among women in open tech/culture, many of whom have been socialised to value other's opinion of their work above their own, and to do things "by the book."
http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/impostor-syndrome-training/

Session on Open Street Maps:
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/yAxa2Kwkfm

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/ada-camp-bangalore

Act now to protect yourself against future ransomware attacks

praskrishna — 2017-07-10T14:46:14Z

There was Wannacry, then Petya, and several other lesser-known ones: With ransomware attacks coming thick and fast, get proactive about protecting yourself.

The article by Sanjay Kumar Singh was published by Business Standard on July 5, 2017.

The Wannacry ransomware attack in May was followed by the Petya attack last week. This attack affected the Ukrainian government and large corporates like Maersk and Merck. In India it affected the operations of terminals at Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), operated by Maersk. According to Kaspersky Lab, the rate of ransomware attacks on businesses grew from one every 120 seconds in January 2016 to one every 40 seconds by October that year. The rate of attack on individuals' computers rose from one every 20 seconds to one every 10 seconds over this period. Today, it has become imperative for everyone, including entrepreneurs and small business owners, to learn how to defend themselves against such attacks.

A trend witnessed in 2016 was the growth of ransomware-as-a-service business model. "Code creators offer their malicious product on demand, selling uniquely modified versions to criminals who then distribute it through spam and websites, paying a commission to the creator," says Altaf Halde, managing director, Kaspersky Lab (South Asia). He adds that the growth of cashless payments in India will undoubtedly attract the attention of cyber criminals and lead to more attacks in future.

Next, let us turn to how ransomware works. An operating system (OS) is a large and complicated piece of software with millions of lines of software code. A malware exploits vulnerabilities within the OS to infiltrate it. An infiltration can happen in multiple ways: if you download a malicious email attachment, visit a code-carrying web site, via an infected pen drive, and so on.

Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts the files in a critical part of the computer, such as My Documents or Desktop, where people usually store their files. It could also encrypt specific file types, say, such .doc files. The user is then informed that his files have been encrypted along with the warning that unless he pays up within the next few hours his files will be deleted. Says Udbhav Tiwari, policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru: "You first have to first pay the attackers using anonymous money like bitcoins and then they give you the key for decrypting your files."

A ransomware attack can be dealt with in two ways: either pay the money and get the files unlocked, or find a way to circumvent the encryption. The latter option can, however, take a fair bit of time.

Safeguard measure you should adopt
Back up important files regularly. Check periodically that these files have not got damaged Enable ‘Show file extensions’ option in Windows settings. Stay away from extensions like “exe”, “vbs” and “scr”. Many familiar file types can be dangerous as scammers use multiple extensions (like hot-chics.avi.exe or doc.scr) If you discover an unknown process on your machine, cut off the Internet connection immediately If you have been infected, find the name of the ransomware. If it's an older version, your files can be restored. For restoration tools visit https://www.nomoreransom.org/

Among the safeguard measures you should adopt, first and foremost, never open a suspicious file. By being vigilant you can avoid a lot of ransomware attacks.

Most malware exploit vulnerabilities within the OS. "These vulnerabilities are frequently patched by the creators of the OS. But if people use pirated OS, or don't upgrade it regularly, they could land in trouble," says Tiwari. Soon after the Wannacry attack, Microsoft had issued a patch. People who updated their computers immediately didn't get affected by it. Also, use the latest version of an OS.

Use a quality antivirus (AV) solution, which is usually one you have to pay for. A high-quality AV can even protect you against vulnerabilities not patched by the OS manufacturer. AVs scan files. If they detect patterns indicating the presence of malware, they lock them apart from the rest of the computer, thereby preventing them from spreading.

One option is to use an OS that is less vulnerable, like Mac and Linux. Fewer malware are designed for these OS as fewer people use them.

Finally, if your files do get encrypted, don’t pay the ransom, unless instant access to those files is critical. "Each payment only fuels this unlawful business," says Halde.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-july-5-2017-sanjay-kumar-singh-act-now-to-protect-yourself-against-future-ransomware-attacks

Accessible Broadcasting in India

srividya — 2013-01-28T03:37:40Z

A report based on ITU's "Making Television Accessible Report" prepared by the Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/accessible-broadcasting-in-india.pdf

Accessibility of Political Parties Websites in India

nirmita — 2014-03-24T10:22:34Z

Given the impending elections in India across April and May 2014, a test was conducted to determine the accessibility of websites of the Election Commission of India, the Parliament and some key political parties in India. This report summarises the results of the test.

Introduction

The Internet has rapidly become a preferred medium for accessing information on various topics, ranging from politics, news, governance, recreation, business, education and carrying on social interaction. While this was initially a trend found more in urban areas, with the proliferation of the mobile phone, there is an ever expanding number of rural, elderly and illiterate persons accessing and downloading content from the Internet.

The focus shift of the government to carrying on administration and governance through electronic media and to enable G2C transactions over the Internet underscores the absolute necessity of ensuring that information and communications technologies realise their full potential as a tool for inclusion and participation. Even policymakers and parliamentarians have started using it as an effective medium to engage with the public. The Government of India has made some efforts in this direction, since it formulated Guidelines for Indian Government websites and also the recently notified National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility. Both of these require all Government websites and those of other entities such as essential service providers, research and academic institutions and other stakeholders to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, the universally accepted standard for measuring web accessibility formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Since inaccessibility of websites impedes access on all platforms, it is one of the most important domains of electronic accessibility.

Highlights

41 websites were tested
13 websites failed to open or had no official website address / URL
Most of the remaining 28 websites have some accessibility barriers, with only 2 websites having no known accessibility errors
The average number of errors per homepage across all tested websites is 91, with around 10 websites having more than 100 errors.
28.5% of homepages have over 500 cumulative errors
21.4% of websites have no alternate text for non-text objects
21.4% of the websites have no navigation-markup
Only 1 website has a colour change option
Around 50% of the web pages have form links of which only 50% were accessible

Click to download the full report below

as PDF
as Word file

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/accessibility-of-political-parties-websites-in-india

Accessibility of Government Websites in India

nirmita — 2012-09-25T05:54:58Z

This report summarises the key findings of a test conducted to measure the accessibility of 7800 websites of the Government of India and its affiliated agencies against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, which is the universally accepted standard for web accessibility.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/accessibility-of-govt-websites.pdf

Accessibility

anirudh — 2013-12-06T07:09:44Z

In the current day scenario, it would be impossible for anyone to conceive of a world without the internet. From being the easiest source of news and information to becoming the medium for communications ranging from personal to commercial, to becoming a place for social connectivity and virtual hangouts, the internet has been woven into the fabric of general society.

While the internet seems to be a one-stop shop for all solutions, persons with disabilities find themselves excluded from it due to their inability to either see the screen, use the mouse or keyboard, inability to access content or unfriendly user interface as many of the websites can still be navigated only by using a mouse, most of the audio visuals are not captioned for the use of persons with hearing impairment and web developers use graphics instead of using text, making them unreadable for screen reader users. The internet, however, is a most convenient medium for persons with disabilities as it has made it possible for them to independently access information, transactions and entertainment without having to wait for someone to provide them with the same. While discussing the reach and power of the internet, accessibility is one of the topics that need to be addressed. Even though there are many measures for accessibility currently available, they are not being addressed and worked on aggressively to bridge the gap. In the digital age where the internet is ubiquitous and a platform where more and more economic activity is happening, the lack of initiative and accessibility policy is leading to exclusion.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is a measure of the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability as effectively as it can be used by a person without that disability.[1]

For example, an elevator can be fitted with audio outputs and buttons that also have Braille notations, thus making it possible for persons with visual impairment to use it on their own. Similarly, buildings and public places can be built with ramps along with stairs, making it possible for persons using wheel chairs to access them. When a product or service is created such that it is completely usable by persons with disabilities without external support, the product or service is called accessible. In circumstances when only some of the features are usable for persons with disabilities, or when the product or service is usable by persons with certain types of disabilities, while it is not usable for persons with other types of disabilities, they are termed as partially inaccessible.

The Need for Accessibility

Over a billion of the world’s population has some form of disability. They are the world’s largest minority. This figure is on a constant increase due to increase in the population as well as the medical advances that have decreased mortality due to old age. Studies show that the world’s population is increasingly becoming older and at least one billion people belong to the older aged category. It is expected that older people may acquire certain disabilities due to age related conditions. Making resources and information accessible to persons with disabilities is of great importance in this scenario as more and more people will start requiring accessibility.

As per the World Bank estimates included in the 2011 “World Report on Disability”, 20 % of the poorest people in the world are disabled and occupy the most marginalized and disadvantaged sectors of society. Furthermore, due to discrimination or incapacity to perform certain work, people living with disabilities have a difficult time finding employment, with unemployment rates reaching 80% for disabled people in the working age group.[2]

Persons with disabilities are experiencing a lack of access to technologies due to visual, hearing, mental, and/or other impairments that make it difficult to operate various devices. Other groups facing accessibility issues are illiterate and elderly populations. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) study in 2010, there are 796 million adults in the world that are illiterate, most of whom reside in the developing world.[3] This population faces barriers to text based communication. Elderly persons are also marginalized from access to technologies much the same way as persons with disabilities due to problems of physical access and marginalization.[4]

It is these groups that would most benefit from technological innovations and solutions that can empower and enhance societal inclusion and participation through providing access to knowledge and information, a medium to make one’s voice heard, as well as access to business and administrative processes within the state.[5]

International and Regional Frameworks on Accessibility and Development

Beginning in the 1990’s, accessibility concerning people with disabilities has been prioritized within the global policy framework. The United Nations General Assembly recognized the importance of providing equal opportunities for disabled individuals in the context of development. In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted the Standard Rules on Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. Along with this measure, a five-year review and appraisal of the World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons (1982) was initiated in 1997, 2002 and 2007.

Access to ICT’s is essential for full citizen participation in all the aspects of society and is increasingly becoming essential for the achievement of many development goals. The Biwako Millennium Framework (BMF) and Biwako plus Five, which cover Asia and the Pacific region, have made ICT accessibility one of the seven priority areas as included in its regional policy frameworks adopted in 2003 and 2007 respectively. Under these frameworks, many initiatives to increase ICT accessibility and promote equitable development for persons with disabilities throughout the region have been undertaken.

The global recognition of the right of people living with disabilities to partake fully in all aspects of society, access to ICT’s being an integral part of this right, was further advanced with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. The Convention entered into force in 2008.[6]

Important Points from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Article 1 of the convention defines who is included in the UN category of persons with disabilities, stating that "Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others."[7]

The first section of Article 9, which outlines accessibility priorities of the convention, puts responsibility on the state to ensure that persons with disabilities, along with other essential services and systems, have equal access to "information, communications and other services, including electronic services and emergency services". Section 2 of the article further puts onus on private entities that offer facilities and services to the public to make them accessible to disabled members of the public. Access to information, information technologies and systems, in particular the internet, is also included in this section.[8]

Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information is covered under Article 21 of the convention. The section recognizes that the said freedoms begin with access to appropriate mediums of communication. Information intended for the general public must be accessible to persons with disabilities through accessible formats and technologies in a “timely manner and without additional cost”. The mass media, including internet content providers, have the responsibility to ensure that their services are accessible to all members of society.[9]

Accessibility Policies in India

In India, about 60 million people are disabled and 42.5% of them are women while 75% of people with disabilities come from rural areas. In India, there is a confluence of barriers to accessibility with inaccessible and unaffordable technologies, inaccessible websites and unsupportive laws.

The right to full participation in society and equality of disabled individuals in India was recognized through the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation) Act which was enacted in India in 1995. India is also a signatory to both UNCRPD (2006) and Biwako Millennium framework towards an Inclusive, Barrier-free and Rights-based Society for Persons with Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific (2002).[10]

While there is no specific legislation in India which ensures the right of disabled persons to access ICT’s, The National Telecom Policy 2011 strategizes the need to recognize "telecom and broadband connectivity as a basic necessity like education and health and work towards ‘Right to Broadband’."[11]

The need for accessibility – both in the physical environment and in the use of information technology – is accentuated by the increase in consumption among the general public. As more and more persons with disabilities start utilising public marketplaces, products and services, a demand is generated to make these accessible to be able to reach out to a group of untapped consumers.

This holds true also for the internet. The penetration of the internet has caused many businesses to offer their products and services through the online medium in order to gain a longer reach. However, a 2003 survey on the impact of disabilities on computer technology conducted by Forrester Research found that: approximately one in four (25%) computer users have a visual difficulty or impairment; nearly one in four (24%) computer users have a dexterity difficulty or impairment; one in five (20%) computer users have a hearing difficulty or impairment; and about 16% of computer users have a cognitive difficulty or impairment. It becomes imperative for organisations offering their businesses online to make their facilities accessible to persons with disabilities to be able to tap into a large base of potential consumers.

Key Concepts

While making a case for accessibility and stressing the importance of making all products and services open to the public accessible to persons with disabilities, it is of great importance to understand some of the key concepts attached to accessibility.

Universal design: It is simply a technique of designing a product or service in such a way that it is equally usable by persons with disabilities as well as persons without disabilities. Universal design eliminates the need to create multiple products or services to cater to the same requirement of people belonging to different categories. This is highly useful in not only creating accessible systems, but also curtailing expenses and reducing redundant efforts.

For example, public transport systems such as buses and trains can be modelled keeping in mind wheel chair users. Buses may be created with ramps such that a wheel chair user is able to board and alight from the bus without any inconvenience. Similarly, trains can be constructed such that the door is on the same level with the platform and the door is wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair to enable passengers using wheelchairs to be able to enjoy the public services on par with other passengers.

Reasonable Accommodation: This is defined as the changes and modifications that can be made to a place, system or a process so as to enable persons with disabilities to enjoy the facilities provided without causing undue hardship to the provider of the facilities or to the other users. This could be in the form of changes to the physical environment to accommodate the independent mobility needs of persons with disabilities, or modification in the procedure of performing a task to ensure that a person with disability is able to enjoy equal opportunities.

An example of this would be an organisation employing persons with visual impairment providing them with screen reader software to enable them to work productively. Likewise, employees with disabilities could be granted extra leave in addition to their regular days of leave for attending health care sessions or training camps related to managing their disabilities.

Accessibility to the Physical Environment

One of the major requirements of physical accessibility is the availability of a barrier free environment for persons with disabilities to experience equal opportunities. This includes constructing new buildings and modifying old buildings and other public places with ramps, lifts and accessible signages for persons with disabilities. Accessible physical environment also includes transports and transport systems as well as roads being made accessible for persons with disabilities. This could be done by constructing roads with properly defined sidewalks, ramps at proper intervals for wheelchair users, engraved zebra crossings, beeps at traffic signals and accessible signages at road directions. Public transports such as buses, trains and other applicable options could be modified to allow persons with disabilities including wheelchair users to enter and exit them comfortably through ramps, broad doorways, etc. Places such as railway stations, airports and bus stations should be made accessible by provision of ramps, lifts, accessible signages and accessible enquiry services.

E-accessibility

For the ease of understanding, Persons with Disabilities (PWD) are broadly categorized as:

Persons with visual impairment – includes people with blindness, low vision and colour blindness
Persons with hearing impaired – includes persons with deafness and various degrees of hardness of hearing
Persons with motor disabilities – includes inability to use a mouse, slow response time and limited fine motor control
Persons with cognitive disabilities – includes learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information.

Contrary to common belief, adapting the user interface, content or designing of the internet to suit the needs of users with disabilities is a fairly uncomplicated process that can be managed even while retaining the look and feel of a regular webpage. Also, adaptations benefit not just persons with disabilities but other users also as everyone enjoys well organised content, easy navigation and clear illustrations. Videos with captions benefit not just people with hearing impairments but can also be beneficial to those watching the video without audio or those who find it difficult to follow the accent or voice of the narrator.

Assistive Technology to Aid Accessibility

Assistive Technology has made it possible for persons with disabilities to operate and utilise products and services along with other users without disabilities. To enable universal accessibility, it is important to recognise the key role played by assistive technology and create products and services such that persons using assistive technology are able to make equal use of the facilities provided.

Briefly explained below are some of the technological and non technological solutions that are being utilised by users with disabilities to access the web.[12]

Vision

Problem: For blind and visually impaired people, visual data is not accessible. Therefore, they require audio based solutions, high contrast, magnification and the like. These technologies come in the form of hardware and software.

Hardware
Refreshable Braille Display: This is an electro-mechanical device that displays text outputs while using a computer. It can be used along with speech synthesizers or on its own.

Mobile Features
Screen Readers: These are used by persons with visual impairment. Screen readers are softwares that convert text into synthesized speech, enabling users to listen to the web content. They make it possible for users to access information and navigate through the web by listening and responding to the audio signals. Some of the popular screen readers are JAWS, NVDA, Window Eyes and Home Page Reader.

Software
Screen Magnifiers: These are used by persons who have low vision. This technology enables users with low vision to zoom in on a small portion of the screen and magnify the content so as to be able to read it clearly. Some of the popular screen magnifiers are ZoomText and Magic.

Mobile Features
Tactile Markers: These markers allow the users to orient themselves on the keypad which includes things like a raised dot on number 5 for navigation.

Audible cues: These are specific sounds that indicate things like low battery, caller waiting or missed calls.

Apps
Look Tell Money Reader: This app immediately recognises the currency and speaks the denomination enabling persons with visual impairment to use money quickly. The app supports 21 currencies including the US Dollar, Australian Dollar, Bahraini Dinar, Brazilian Real, Belarusian Ruble, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro, Hungarian Forint, Israeli Shekel, Indian Rupee, Japanese Yen, Kuwaiti Dinar, Mexican Peso, New Zealand Dollar, Polish Zloty, Russian Ruble, Saudi Arabian Riyal, Singapore Dollar, and United Arab Emirates Dirham. The app does not require an internet connection and is available for IPhone 5, 4S, 4, 3GS, IPod Touch 4th Gen, IPad 2 & 3 and Mac OS X.[14]

Hearing

Problem: Those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can’t communicate via telephone or hear automated electronic messages.

Technologies:

Assistive listening devices (ALD): They amplify audio output from other devices like the TV or radio to hear clearly in environments.
Teletext: This offers a range of text based information.
Hearing loop systems: This uses electromagnetic energy to transmit sound. It can be worn on the head like a headpiece.
Mobile Features:
Vibrating Alerts[15]
Visual or tactile indicators on the keypad: Lights or vibrations after actions have been performed or buttons being pushed is a useful indicator.
Captioning: Some phones support closed captioning, open captioning and subtitles for videos.
Apps:
MobileSign: This is a British sign language lexicon that provides information on more than 4000 signs. It is available on both Google Play and Apple Store and is a very useful tool for communication for persons with hearing impairment.[16]
ASL Dictionary: This is an American Sign Language dictionary with more than 4800 signs. The app allows the videos to be slowed down and looped for easier learning. It also has signs for common phrases, idioms and symbols.
My Smart Hands – Baby sign language dictionary: This app has been designed for parents of children with hearing impairment. This app has more than 300 videos of the most common signs for children with verbal description of the motion to ensure that the parent is signing correctly.
Tap Tap: This app is designed to vibrate and flash whenever there is any sound. It has been particularly created for persons with hearing impairment as it would alert them to important sounds in their surrounding such as sudden screaming and shouting or the buzz of the smoke alarm.[17]

Motor Disability

Problem:[18] People who have no or diminished motor capacity will not be able to press buttons or physically navigate through most technology.

Technologies:

Mouth Stick: Though not a technological device, a mouth stick is one of the most popular devices used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating a keyboard. A mouth stick is a hard stick that is held in the mouth by the user and used to type on a keyboard. Some users who have better control on their mouth sticks can also use it to manipulate a track ball mouse.
Head Wand: This device is similar to the mouth stick and is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating keyboard or mouse. The head wand is strapped to the head and the person moves his or her head to type on the keyboard or navigate through web documents.
Single Switch Access: People who have very limited mobility use this type of device. If a person can move only the head, for example, a switch could be placed to the side of the head that would allow the person to click it with head movements. This clicking action is usually interpreted by special software on the computer, allowing the user to navigate through the operating system, web pages, and other environments. Some software facilitates the typing of words by using an auto-complete feature that tries to guess what the person is typing, and allowing the person to choose between the words that it guesses.
Sip and Puff Switch: Similar in functionality to the single switch described above, sip and puff switches are able to interpret the user's breath actions as on/off signals, and can be used for a variety of purposes, from controlling a wheelchair to navigating a computer. The hardware can be combined with software that extends the functionality of this simple device for more sophisticated applications.
Oversized Trackball Mouse: A trackball mouse is not necessarily an assistive technology—some people without disabilities simply prefer it to the standard mouse—but it is often easier for a person with a motor disability to operate than a standard mouse. Someone may, for example, use a trackball mouse in conjunction with a head wand or mouth stick. It is relatively easy to manipulate a trackball with these devices and much harder to manipulate a standard mouse. Someone with tremors in the hands may also find this kind of mouse more useful because once the person moves the mouse cursor to the right location, there is less danger of accidentally moving the cursor while trying to click on the mouse button. A person with tremors in the hands could also manipulate the trackball mouse with a foot, if there is enough motor control in the feet.
Adaptive Keyboard: In cases where a person does not have reliable muscle control in the hands for precision movements, an adaptive keyboard can be useful. Some adaptive keyboards have raised areas in between the keys, rather than lowered areas, to allow the person to first place the hand down on the keyboard, then slide the finger into the correct key. A person with tremors, or spastic movements could benefit from this type of keyboard. Keyboard overlays are also available as an adaptation to standard keyboards, which achieve the same results. In some cases, adaptive keyboards come with specialized software with word-completion technology, allowing the person to type with fewer keystrokes, since typing can be rather laborious and slow otherwise.
Eye Tracking: Eye tracking devices can be a powerful alternative for individuals with no control, or only limited control, over their hand movements. The device follows the movement of the eyes and allows the person to navigate through the web with only eye movements. Special software allows the person to type, and may include word-completion technology to speed up the process. These systems can be expensive—usually in the thousands of US dollars—so they are less common than the less sophisticated devices, such as mouth sticks and head wands.
Voice Recognition: This software is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands to type or navigate through the web using a keyboard. This software allows a person to control a computer through speech.
Apps:
Wheelcrowd: This application helps in searching for wheelchair accessible places such as restaurants, facilities etc. around a neighbourhood. This application is available for both IPhone and Android users. This application is currently developed to provide information in Germany.[19]
City Rollers: This free app is specifically made for wheelchair users to assist in navigating through cities on wheels. It allows users to locate, add and rate important places such as rest rooms, public transportation, restaurants and wheelchair supply and repair shops. Version 1.0 of this app provides support for select American cities. It is compatible with IPhone.
Fast Mall: This free app provides directions to wheelchair accessible routes in malls especially to elevators and rest rooms in malls and shopping districts. It functions even while offline. It is optimised for IPhone 3 and above.
Local Eats: Upon keying in the location, this free app provides information on the local restaurants and indicates whether they are wheelchair accessible. This is optimised for IPhone.[20]

Cognition

Problem: People with cognitive disabilities find it difficult to navigate through normal functions of technologies and hence need technologies that are simpler to compensate for things like diminished analytical skills, reading skills etc.

Technologies:[21]

Predictive text: This makes it easier to compose messages.
Prompting: External cueing systems are useful for people with memory and organization problems as it prompts the next steps of a task and send reminders as in the case of built-in schedule reminders

E-Governance

In 2007, India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). The convention says that “State Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities, access on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including ICTs and systems and to other facilities and services open or provided to the public.” When a party to a convention ratifies it, it means that they have to have domestic legislation or policy passed by the legislative body making it law within the country. Many countries who are signatories to the UNCRPD have also ratified it to ensure equality for those with disabilities. The Indian government as well has recognized that electronics and ICTs are important enabling mechanisms to mitigate the barriers faced by disabled people. In October 2013, the Union cabinet approved the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility[22] that among other things mainly recognizes the need to eradicate discrimination against the disabled and to foster equal access to electronics and ICTs. Various stakeholders including NGOs commented on it and the policy was prepared after incorporating them. The policy attempts to facilitate access to physically and mentally disabled persons as well as local language support thought universal access to electronics and ICT products. The plan of action for this policy is:

Creating awareness on universal electronics accessibility and universal design.
Capacity building and infrastructure development.
Setting up of model electronics and ICTs centres for providing training and demonstration to special educators and physically as well as mentally challenged persons.
Conducting research and development, use of innovation, ideas, technology etc. whether indigenous or outsourced from abroad.
Developing programme and schemes with greater emphasis for differently abled women/children.
Developing procurement guidelines for electronics and ICTs for accessibility and assistive needs.

Under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, there is a Department of Disability Affairs. In 1995, the Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation Act[23] (a.k.a The Persons with Disability Act) was passed as one of the Acts under this department. The Act calls for the education, employment, creation of a barrier free environment, social security and other areas of discrimination for the disabled.

It provides for the evolution of policy in that directly benefits people with disabilities.
It calls for the implementation of the laws and policies of the Act.
It also calls for monitoring the implementation process and the redressal of grievances.

As we can see, there is a dearth of Acts and legislations relating to accessibility in India when compared to other countries in the west and even Asia. It is an even more unfortunate state of affairs that the Acts that are already in place are still not being implemented to the full effect. Even the participation of industries is lacking in terms of web accessibility. On a scale of 10, with 10 being the high quality accessibility, the following chart shows examples of industrial efforts in this matter.


Above: Participation from some prominent companies like TCS, Infosys, Yahoo, etc.

[24]

Websites

The age of the internet has had many unintended consequences in the field of accessibility and most of them have been in terms of information dissemination. There have also been intentional consequences in terms of web based services that help serve the disabled communities. In terms of general services, the internet opens windows for people in professional, educational, consumer, economic and government service aspects. In the social sphere, there is the ability to do social networking, form interest groups, video and text communication. In order for these avenues of living to be accessible to disabled people at the same level changes have to be made in various ICTs so that they accessible when they are released. The guiding principle is that if every ICT or service is made inherently accessible, then no changes need to be made specifically for PWDs. When this isn’t possible, then reasonable accommodation has to be made. When adaptations are required, there are third party accessibility softwares that have to be used. According to the ITU, websites, as the theatres of accessibility have a greater socio-economic and educational impact than any other ICT with the exception of mobile phones for independent living.[25] It is also easy to make websites inherently accessible so there is a great potential for accessibility here.

The different disabilities require different technologies to facilitate access to the internet. People with visual impairments could use a range of technologies from a screen reader, screen magnifier to glasses. People with motor impairments use one handed key boards and the deaf can use cochlear implants. However, the main space for accessible design has to be the websites themselves.

User Interface and Design Considerations for Better Accessibility

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) brought out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) covers a wide range of recommendations to make the web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movements, speech disabilities, photo sensitivity and combinations of these.[26]

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines can be broadly categorised as:

Perceivable:

Provide text alternatives for any non text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, Braille, speech, symbols or simpler language
Provide alternatives for time-based media
Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout) without losing information or structure
Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.
Operable:
Make all functionality available from a keyboard
Provide users enough time to read and use content
Do not design content in a way known to cause seizures
Provide ways to help users navigate, find content and determine where they are understandable:
Make text content readable and understandable
Make web pages appear and operate in predictable ways
Help users avoid and correct mistakes
Robust:
Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents including assistive technologies.

Here is an example of how the WCAG standards of accessible websites has been applied in various countries:

Criteria	US	EU	Korea	Philippines	Australia	Thailand
Type of Policy	Legislation	Council Resolution + Action Plan	Legislation	Working group currently formulating policy	Legislation + Advisory Notes	Policy + guidelines
Effective From	1998, 2010	2002	2007	N/A	1992, 2002, 2010	Not available
Scope of Coverage	Web and other infrastructure as well	Includes other electronic infrastructure	Web and other infrastructure as well	N/A	General legislation with web specific advisory notes	Web accessibility guidelines
Compliance with WCAG	Partly	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	Partially compliant with WCAG 1.0s
Applicability	Only Federal Department and related agencies	Public Sector Websites of the Member States	Both private and public sector gradually by 2015 as per the current roadmap	N/A	Any individual/ organization creating a web page (Government & Private)	Guidelines targeted at both the private and public sectors
Signatory to UNCRPD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, signed and ratified	Yes and also signed and ratified the optional protocol	Yes, signed and ratified

Accessibility of Content

Accessible content is the most vital aspect of e-accessibility. Content that is present directly on the web and that is shared electronically need to be accessible to persons with various disabilities and thus with varying accessibility requirements.

Screen reader users, for example, would not be able to access content in graphical or image format. This is also true for documents in pdf formats as not all content in pdf is accessible through screen readers. While pdf documents that are tagged are accessible through screen readers, those documents that are structured, unstructured or secured are still inaccessible. Document formats that are accessible are listed below:

HTML
MS Word Document
Text Document
Daisy
Epub
Pdf

Content in audio format is inaccessible to persons with hearing impaired. This applies to not only audio files, but also to videos as they usually are accompanied by audio outputs. Additionally, videos are also inaccessible to persons with visual impairment. In order to make audio files and videos universally accessible, videos should be accompanied with narration while both audio files and videos should have captions and sub titles.

A critical step that needs to be taken to make content accessible is to formulate a binding policy that would require all web content developers to ensure accessibility of their content. A good example of this would be the enactment of the Copyright Act, as the various provisions under it made it possible for printed books to be converted into accessible format for persons with print impairment. This in turn made it possible for millions of people to be able to access information that had remained inaccessible before. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) agreed on a Treaty for the Visually Impaired that aims at making millions of printed books and other material available to persons with print impairment by converting them to alternate accessible formats.

In order to make it compulsory for web developers in India to design websites that comply with the requirements for e-accessibility, there is a need to put in place a policy that would mandate strict adherence to norms. The Government of India, through the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, set up a process to formulate a national policy to ensure accessibility of websites and ICT products and services In August 2009. This policy requires that all government websites comply with WCAG 2.0 and with other international accessibility standards for all electronic information and products and services delivery. However, a study conducted by CIS in August 2012 in which 7800 websites were tested, it was found that close to 25% of the websites did not open. Almost all the remaining websites had accessibility issues. The study also highlighted shortcomings of many websites to meet the set accessibility requirements.

Access to physical environment and information is not a privilege but a right. The national policy is the need of the hour, one that is likely to make adherence to accessibility standards a compulsory requirement and in turn make the internet more accessible for persons with disabilities.

As we have seen, accessibility stretches out like a universe and for the purpose of brevity; we will be concentrating on accessibility in the context of ICTs. More specifically, we will be looking at the electronic infrastructure that is most ubiquitous and hence automatically become the objects of accessibility concerns. This will include websites from various interfaces like mobile phones and computers and television. Before we begin looking at the particular technologies, let us look at the administrators and ministries that are responsible for helping the disabled.

Government Websites

Policies like the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 coming forth from the government are attempting to completely transition from manual to electronic delivery of services. In the implementation of all the e-governance goals of the Indian government, website inaccessibility is one of the biggest barriers. In India, there are many groups that don’t are usually marginalized in the mainstream of websites like the illiterate, rural, only fluent in vernacular or the many disabled and website design by the government becomes crucial in the actuation of its services and a marker for the efficacy of its governance. Being an essential interface between the government and its citizenry, websites thus become the lowest hanging fruit in attaining a better democracy. It is rather unfortunate, therefore that when a study was conducted testing 7800 government websites, 1985 of them didn’t even open. [28] Most of the remaining 5815 websites has some accessibility problem. This shows that the government has a long way to go before it can claim to provide services online because even if the services are being shifted, they are not being used by many marginalized demographics in the country due to accessibility issues with the websites themselves.

Mobile Devices

In the gallery of ICTs we have discussed mobile phones are the most crucial to persons with disabilities for independent living, which is the cornerstone of accessibility. At a basic level, the ability to make phone calls and send SMSs ensures that emergency services, personal aides and family members are merely a few buttons away. Added to this, the pervasiveness of mobile phones has made it the most ubiquitous ICT platform in the world with more than 4 billion subscribers. The potential of mobiles goes deeper with the advent of smart phones which can be used to aid the physical, sensory and cognitive needs of the disabled. Hearing aid compatibility is starting to become a mandate in many countries in smart phones like the FCC HAC mandate in the U.S.[29] There are screen readers built into mobile phones along with adjustable font settings, predictive text and voice recognizers that can make mobile phones more accessible.[30] The main feature of a mobile phone that increases independence is the fact that it is small and portable unlike a laptop and can be accessed quickly and from anywhere in the network. Many accessibility technologies are high cost and cumbersome to handle physically but mobile phones are often operator-subsidized, easily customizable and much cheaper than computers. In the current app market, many phones come with built-in accessibility systems and easily downloadable apps. The W3C has a set of standards called Mobile Web Application Best Practices.[31] The goal of these standards is to aid in the development of rich and dynamic mobile web applications by listing out the relevant engineering practices that enable a better user experience and warn against some practices that may be counterproductive or even harmful.

In the evolution of mobile accessibility consciousness, there have been three major factors:

The increased processing power coupled with creative software has lead to useful user interfaces with features like voice recognition or text to speech.
An increased effort on the part of regulators, activists and users to rectify hearing aid compatibility and visually inaccessible handsets.
In many wireless markets that are saturated, the realization has dawned on operators that the disabled and elderly represent an untapped market.

Television and Radio

In the past two decades, the newer ICTs like mobiles and computers have become the primary means of social inclusion and accessibility. However, the older ICTs like TV and radio are not yet obsolete and can play an important role in accessibility. Traditionally, the radio has been an indispensible source of information for the visually impaired and now, the digital radio remains relevant in keeping the visually impaired informed. Whatever the type of radio being used, the listener has to navigate through a range of hardware (displays, dials and buttons) and software (menus, schedule guides, etc) which makes it challenging to use for persons with disabilities. People with visual impairments will probably need labelled buttons that can be read through touch, display settings that can increase the size and different brightness options. People who use internet or mobile radio will need the applications or websites to be compatible with the other assistive hardware and software that they use for along with their computers or mobile devices.[32] The Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, UK (RICA) conducted a consumer study and identified the radio model ‘Roberts RD-8BW Duet’ as user friendly for blind and partially sighted persons.[33]

It has a good reception; it has separate rotary dials, 5 large illuminated presser buttons and a large display.

Even the TV and traditional broadcasting remains relevant as they provide visual, audio and textual information through closed captioning. Digital TV allows for the option of sign language interpretation and voice over audio channels in the signals that are broadcasted. The internet is, however, usurping many of the functions of the TV and the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is an example of that. This is a system through which traditional television services are delivered using the internet instead of the old terrestrial, satellite signal or cable television formats. Time shifted television (catch up TV) and video on demand (VOD) are examples of IPTVs. To make this clear, for cable, satellite/ terrestrial television, the equipments involved are televisions, a separate receiver called ‘set-top box’ is used sometimes and a remote control. For internet or mobile television, the equipments involved are PCs or mobiles with internet access. Here as well, like in the case of radios, regardless of the type of television being used, there needs to be a constant engagement with hardware ( screens, buttons, cables) and software (menus, programme guides, pause/rewind function etc) which can prove difficult for people with sensory and physical disabilities. Accessible equipment is required to use the television itself which is a huge barrier. The second layer of accessibility comes from the content of the television programmes which remain opaque to the visually or hearing impaired. Captions, audio descriptions of video content and sign language are necessary in order to make the content accessible. The ITU-T has been spearheading the standardization in IPTV and has worked out some standards for IPTV accessibility.

Secure
Reliable
Accessible
Open
Green
Global
Interoperable

Additional Reading

Mobile Web Application Best Practices: http://www.w3.org/TR/mwabp/

[1]. http://bit.ly/19kYbjc

[2]. http://bit.ly/1cprnKn

[3]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Adult and Youth Literacy: Global Trends In Gender Parity, UIS Fact Sheet, September 2010, No. 3.

[4]. http://bit.ly/ITXg3i

[5]. Accessibility in Policy Making-need for an International Perspective by Nirmita Narasimhan, see http://bit.ly/1hBBujb

[6]. http://bit.ly/1bLI9VG

[7]. http://bit.ly/1d0wrCY

[8]. http://bit.ly/1gJ1aXZ

[9]. http://bit.ly/ITXTtM

[10]. See note 5 above.

[11]. http://bit.ly/18H95p6

[12]. http://bit.ly/IH4sif

[13]. See more at http://bit.ly/1gJ1rKI

[14]. See more at http://bit.ly/1hBBVKi

[15]. See reference 13.

[16]. See more at http://bit.ly/1f1Knih

[17]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBoHt

[18]. See reference 13.

[19]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYI5C

[20]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb27F

[21]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYRpU

[22]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLJ8VT

[23]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBGOG

[24]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUpvZP

[25]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[26]. http://bit.ly/1bkLuov

[27]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUqh91

[28]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLaVP

[29]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[30]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLKD1

[31]. See more at http://bit.ly/19l18R0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/accessibility

Access to Rare Books Made Easy

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T01:56:57Z

Rare Odia books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet, will now be available at the click of the mouse. In a bid to make them available online, the Odia Wikipedia community last week launched WikiSource, an Odia e-library and a sister project of Odia Wikipedia that has been trying to popularise use of Odia language on the Internet since 2002.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on December 5, 2014

The online library has 69 books by authors Jagannath Mohanty, Upendra Bhanja, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopabandhu Das, Baladeva Rath and Ram Das. Besides, the complete volume of Bhagwad Gita in Odia language is available on WikiSource.

The project has been implemented by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to knowledge programme. Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi, also a programme officer of the Centre for Internet and Society, said work on digitisation of the books was started in April this year by a team of 12 Wikipedians, comprising mostly students and working professionals.

Apart from them, 50 tribal students and nine faculty members of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) helped them with the digitisation job. As most of the books were typed in Akruti font - a proprietary Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) compliant font - the font was converted to Unicode text type to make the books searchable and accessible universally in all mobile and web platforms.

In the first phase, 11 books focusing on children’s literature, travelogue and biographies of noted people from Odisha by eminent Odia author Jagannath Mohanty were digitised. Subsequently, works of other authors were added to the e-library and made available on the internet with open access through free licence.

Subhashish said the WikiSource project was started in 2013 as an incubator project. It went through a tough process of being accessed by the Wikimedia Language Committee and Wikimedia Foundation’s board before being released last week. “There are several precious books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet. So we thought of digitising them and taking them to the masses. Apart from the 69 books, 81 of seven Odia authors that were already scanned and digitised by Bhubaneswar-based voluntary organisation, Srujanika, have been re-licensed and added to the library,” he said. Srujanika has digitised 740 old Odia magazines and books so far.

Generally a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used for digitising scanned books, which currently is in testing phase in Odia. “Faculty member of ITER in Bhubaneswar Ajit Nayak along with his students have rectified the bugs and made character recognition more accurate.

But because of problems with OCR, the books had to be re-typed by the students of KISS on Odia Wikisource, Subashish added. Old books apart, books by contemporary authors like Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Ramakrushna Nanda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and Nirmala Kumari Mohapata, and many other authors have been taken up for digitisation by Odia WikiSource team. Odia WikiSource is now live at or.wikisource.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/new-indian-express-december-5-2014-diana-sahu-access-to-rare-books-made-easy

Access to online information and knowledge – advancing human rights and democracy

radha — 2011-08-04T04:34:31Z

An article by Achal Prabhala in GISW 2009 (Global Information Society Watch, 2009)

Information and knowledge are crucial factors in human development. We are reminded of this constantly, from the “knowledge economy” we live in, to the emotional and financial power that information and communications technologies (ICTs) have over our lives. In the words of philosopher Francis Bacon, “Scientia potentia est” – knowledge itself is power. Present-day movements for access to knowledge and the right to information have their origins in this simple and arguably ancient idea. Despite a rich history and wide intellectual acceptance, the right to know is not universally granted, and the right to know on the internet is a particularly bitter struggle in many parts of the world.[1]

Information, knowledge and access are terms with a multiplicity of meaning. Even as they constitute an ambitious goal that disparate global actors work towards, it is worth considering how these terms are construed in relation to each other.[2]

“Information” in this context usually refers to government and institutionally held records. Legislation that mandates greater transparency is critical. The earliest example of this kind of legislation was implemented in Sweden as far back as the late 18th century, while countries such as South Africa and India have had theirs enacted as recently as 2000 and 2005 respectively. Freedom of information and the resulting power to make informed decisions are bedrocks of liberal democracy, essential tools for active citizen participation – and the foundation of dominant ideas of the better life, such as that of an open society.

“Knowledge” in its most instrumental sense usually refers to the elements of learning; to scholarly and artistic work and its tools. The access to knowledge movement [3] for instance, works on copyright law reform and the promulgation of open access. Access to knowledge in its present incarnation is a relatively new frame of reference compared to the right to information, which has been demanded for a longer period of time. But it is worth bearing in mind that the underlying theme has always existed and even been expressed, most notably in the hope and anxiety surrounding every disruptive technological shift, from the printing press to the internet.

The most frequently misunderstood term in this troika is, perhaps, “access”. The common interpretation of the term is its strict dictionary meaning, which is to use, to consume, to be allowed entry into or contact with. In relation to information and knowledge, however, and especially since the advent of the internet, access is just as much about production as it is about consumption. Knowledge is not something that Northern countries produce and Southern countries consume; it is a vast and porous domain that consists of formal and as yet unrecognised realms, all of which are growing and evolving. To read is a necessary precondition to being able to write; access, by analogy, implies entry not just into the world of knowledge consumption but also knowledge creation.

One manifestation of this fusion is Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia that is collaboratively produced online. Granted, many more people read Wikipedia than edit it. Nevertheless, for a growing global volunteer base, it is simultaneously a place to read and consume as well as edit and produce. In a similar vein, it is access to information that propels people around the world to intervene in public processes and change laws; without the information, there could be no change.

With regards to government information, it is important that not only are there mechanisms put in place that facilitate access to it, but also that these mechanisms work. The history of events leading up to the enactment of the Right to Information Act in India provides valuable lessons as to what the scope of government information should be, in how punitive measures can be implemented to guarantee that the process works, and, above all, as to how marginalised citizens can gain the space and the means to use the law to their advantage [4] To a large extent, the rich genealogy of the right to information has naturalised it as an obvious, just and urgent issue. Furthermore, it is an umbrella concern, covering as much as specific local contexts demand.

In contrast, the movement for access to knowledge works primarily on one crucial barrier, namely, intellectual property. For some, this focus is problematic. If, for instance, knowledge is imparted by education, then isn’t access just as much hampered by the lack of skilled teachers as restrictive intellectual property laws? This is certainly true, and yet, there are at least three good reasons why this narrow focus makes strategic sense.
One: education is a long-standing priority of societies and governments the world over, and there is an inestimably large group of individuals and institutions who work in the area. However, relatively few people are aware of the impact of intellectual property on access to educational material, and even fewer research it.
Two: the advent of the internet has created hitherto unprecedented opportunities in the knowledge domain, opportunities that could turn into unrealised potential if the application of intellectual property online is decided by copyright industries alone.
Three: knowledge is more than just formal education, and the internet provides limitless ways in which it can be redefined and multiplied. The overzealous application of intellectual property significantly limits the manner in which knowledge operates online.

A chain of events that unfolded in France over the last two years dramatically illustrates the level of threat faced by those seeking information and knowledge online. In 2008, at the insistence of the domestic recording industry, the French government began considering the enactment of a law designed to thwart online piracy. As industry forces pressed on and Nicholas Sarkozy added his support, the effort culminated in a bill that would be popularly known as HADOPI [5] after the enforcement agency it intended to create. HADOPI employed the three strikes principle. If an internet user was found to have committed an act of piracy, the copyright holder in question was entitled to warn the user through HADOPI. No details as to the exact nature of the copyright violation were required to be provided other than that a violation had occurred. After three such warnings, internet service providers (ISPs) in France would be mandated under HADOPI to bar the user from being allowed access to the internet for a period of up to one year.

The prospect of HADOPI had people up in arms. A broad coalition of internet users, consumers and their allies quickly assembled in France and elsewhere in the world. To users in France, it represented an immediate threat; to users elsewhere in the world, it represented the extent to which their online freedoms could be restricted in the future. Apart from the draconian nature of the punishment meted out by this bill, users were outraged that every kind of misdemeanour – whether deliberate, inadvertent, supposed or even mistaken – would be treated the same, with the benefit of doubt given to the copyright holder. [6]

Throughout 2009, the bill faced several setbacks, including a complete rejection by the French National Assembly. But its backers pushed on, eventually winning approval after modifications; until 10 June 2009, when the Constitutional Council of France struck down HADOPI on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the country’s Constitution – for going against freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence.

To involve infrastructure providers (ISPs) in enforcing private copyright disputes and suspend user privileges in the wake of alleged copyright violations, as HADOPI wished to do, was admittedly an extreme step. But there are other, less visibly harmful ways by which access to online information and knowledge is threatened and thwarted, and the problem is that some of these ways appear innocuous – though in fact any investigation of them would provide cause for serious alarm. Of the many concerns that exist, at least a few deserve our immediate attention:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Technological Protection Measures (TPMs);
copyright law provisions that affect online education, whether by distance or in a physical classroom setting, or in a library;
the lack of provisions that would meaningfully allow disabled learners and users (particularly the visually disabled) to access information and knowledge online; and
the extent to which users can usefully integrate online copyrighted material into their lives in a manner that would be considered fair.

A primary anxiety around copyrighted material in the online environment has been, on the part of copyright industries, how to regulate the flow of exchange. Previous to the advent of mass use of the internet, a song or a book was limited in its capacity for exchange by the physical, tangible form it came in. With the proliferation of digital material and peer-to-peer systems, however, the possibility for exchange is virtually boundless, and this makes content industries nervous – for it signals the end of an already outdated business model and the beginning of another. In return, industry retaliation has consisted of a strategy of lockdown. The tools of this strategy are DRM and TPMs – software that regulates what one can do with a digital file, or rather cannot do – and the vehicles by which these are legislated and proliferated around the world are a set of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) agreements collectively known as the WIPO Internet Treaties.[7]

DRM is oblivious of the specific circumstances of the user, and is therefore unaware of both the user’s individual needs as well as her rights – for example, the nuances of copyright law in the country of the user’s residence. It doesn’t matter therefore that a user may be blind, or work for a public library, and that national copyright law in the country might specifically extend provisions to visually disabled people and libraries (for instance, by enabling permission-free format changes and reproductions for research). DRM will still operate on a one-size-fits-all model that supersedes national law. In some countries, fair dealing – or fair use – might allow for ways of personal consumption of copyrighted material that the DRM withdraws, resulting in a situation where the whims of a multinational industry render national law meaningless.

DRM is software that can be hacked – up to an extent. In this way, it is still possible for users to legitimately exercise their rights with and upon DRM-protected material. Yet, following the model of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – the United States’ (US) interpretation of the WIPO Internet Treaties – many countries have legislated that such circumvention constitutes a copyright violation. In some cases this renders sections of their own copyright law redundant, and in effect, casts an unnecessarily heavy shroud over certain copyrighted material merely because it happens to be online. More worryingly, the WIPO Internet Treaties themselves do not ask of countries that anti-circumvention provisions apply even when a user is exercising a legitimate right such as fair use, and yet countries around the world have allowed their laws to imply so [8] because of bilateral persuasion, often from the US or the European Union, without a clear understanding of how this can stunt the potential of the internet within their borders.

It must be noted that copyright law in general – in most countries around the world [9] – generally does not do enough for access to knowledge. To the extent that the majority of the world learns not online but from the printed and spoken word, copyright law in its general application matters tremendously. When considering the potentially limiting aspects of copyright regulation online, one must keep in mind that many countries around the world do not have the kind of provisions that could be limited by new regulation of online material. In fact, most countries do not expressly facilitate distance learning, nor make all the provisions they can for access for the visually disabled, or freedom of information, or even education in general. [10] In part, this is because ever since the globalisation of intellectual property rights, including as recently as the founding of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1996 and the instituting of its Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), [11] there has been a distinct shift away from the minimum copyright protection demanded by this trade rule to a maximally protectionist approach.

In the majority of national circumstances today, copyright law is what is referred to as TRIPS-plus, which is to say, excessively protective of copyright-holders’ interests. The excess is overwhelmingly in favour of copyright industries and at the expense of users of copyrighted material. In such a situation, when copyright as it applies offline is already imbalanced, it is even harder to demand a balanced interpretation of copyright in the online space.

Finally, it hardly needs repeating that without a strong sovereign commitment to freedom of speech and information – in effect, a guarantee against censorship – any gains made in access rights stand to be nullified. And this commitment, worryingly, is by no means universally evident.

For one understanding of the right to know, see Stiglitz, J. (2009) On Liberty, the Right to Know, and Public Discourse: The Role of Transparency in Public Life, Oxford Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, UK, 27 January. siteresources. worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/oxford-amnesty.pdf
For an understanding of how countries restrict access to the full potential of the internet, see Reporters Without Borders’ list of “Internet Enemies”: www.rsf.org/List-of-the-13-Internet-enemies.html
Naturally, all three words offer a wide scope of understanding. The descriptions that follow are only an attempt at clarifying a functional definition, not at fixing definitive meaning.
The movement for access to knowledge (sometimes abbreviated as A2K) refers to a loose grouping of individuals and institutions who work locally as well as on a potential international treaty on access to knowledge; an early draft is available at: www.cptech.org/a2k/a2k_treaty_may9.pdf
For an understanding of the concerns of a key Indian social movement, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), in the years leading up to the enactment of India’s Right to Information Act, see Sampat, P. and Dey, N. (2005) Bare Acts and Collective Explorations, in Narula, M. et al. (eds.) Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Sarai, New Delhi. www.sarai.net/publications/readers/05-bare-acts/02_preeti.pdf
HADOPI: Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des OEuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet (High Authority for the Diffusion of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet).
For one account of the story of HADOPI, see O’Brien, D. (2008) The Struggles of France’s Three Strikes Law, Electronic Frontier Foundation. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/struggles-frances-three-strikes-law
The WIPO Internet Treaties consist of the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT).
For instance, in a recent eight-country study in Africa, it was found that Morocco, Kenya and Egypt all have anti-circumvention provisions enacted into law. See the ACA2K Briefing Paper for the WIPO Development Agenda meetings, April 2009: www.aca2k.org/attachments/180_ACA2K%20Briefing%20Paper1_WIPODevtAgenda-042009.pdf
Among several country studies, regional and international reports, one recent survey that confirms this finding is the Consumers International IP Watch List report for 2009, in which it is reported that in relation to access to knowledge, “no countries adequately took account of consumers’ interests.”
See:a2knetwork.org/sites/default/files/ip-watchlist09.pdf
Ibid.
TRIPs is currently the overarching international trade rule that governs the global sovereign application of intellectual property; for the full text of the TRIPs agreement, see: www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/access-to-online-information-and-knowledge

Access To Knowledge Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014)

T Vishnu Vardhan — 2013-06-10T14:20:06Z

This page is created to share CIS-A2K's Annual Work Plan (2013-2014) for Indian language Wikimedia projects. The main objective of this document is to present a detailed plan with projection of outcomes and expected impact of the A2K programme activities. The document has been made in consultation with various stakeholders and keeping in mind the objectives, opportunities and challenges faced by each of the Indian language Wikimedia projects. Feel free to share any feedback.

Language Area Work Plans

Telegu

Odia

Kannada

GOM (Konkani)

Bengali

Overall Support Across Indian Language Communities

Pilot Project - Performing Arts in India

Learning and Evaluation

Introductory note

Context

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore to expand their Access to Knowledge (A2K) program in India; of this, ₹11,000,000 has been released. The purpose of the grant is to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand on Wikimedia’s Indic-language free-knowledge projects. In addition, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

Objective

The main objective of this document is to present a detailed Annual Work Plan for 2013–14, setting out the expected outcomes and impact of the A2K program activities. The overall objectives of the A2K Team are here.

Methodology

In putting together this Work Plan the A2K team has, over the last two months extensively engaged with various stakeholders. These include a) some Wikimedia India Community members across various Indian-language Wikimedia projects; b) some English-language Wikimedia community members from India; c) Wikimedia India chapter executive committee; d) some potential institutional partners; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) A2K Program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

A draft of each of the language plan will be shared with the particular language community through respective language Wikipedia village pumps, mailing lists; feedback will be collected in finalizing the plan.

A2K’s method of work

A2K principally sees itself as working hand-in-hand with the Indian Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia India chapter, and with all formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement in India. A2K will mostly engage in catalytic kind of work; however, depending on the requirements of each language-area, the A2K team may also undertake the hands-on implementation of some activities that would otherwise be done by the community. The planned A2K program activities are mostly in the south and south-east of India, and it makes better programmatic sense to have the A2K team located in Bangalore. This will not only save the A2K program from relatively larger overhead spending for the project (which could be productively used for programmatic work) but will enable the A2K team to be more in touch with the Wikimedia India community and in proactively undertaking collaborative activities with the community on the ground. Thus the entire A2K team will relocate to Bangalore and work out of the existing CIS office. Please kindly note that the A2K team will hire a new space in Bangalore, once the work plan is finalized, and the intention is that this space will be open to free use by the WM India community and chapter alike.

How to read this Annual Work Plan

This plan is not set in stone and will be periodically (right now quarterly) reviewed and revised. The intention of this Work Plan is to continually ensure better design and better engagement. The broader aspects of the plan have been outlined here. Thus this document is more towards evolving a sense of granularity of the A2K team’s work along with micro level outcome and impact metrics.

We have worked towards developing an Annual Work Plan that is language-specific. The A2K team has not adopted ONE single model, because we believe that each language area has a) specific strengths that we need to build on; b) particular needs for support that we could offer; and c) specific challenges that require localized solutions. Thus there are chances that you might see repetitions in the strategies mentioned across language areas.

Please note that the A2K team has some language area plans worked out in greater detail than others. This is mainly because we intend to prioritize working on five language areas during the coming year. This does not mean that we will not support other language areas/communities, but our engagement will be activity/project-specific, based on requests made to the A2K team by the community. The A2K team will continue its efforts in actively exploring to include a few more language areas, and will share such plans after they reach a certain stage.

Risk and mitigation

The message that comes across, after a cursory glance at Indian-language Wikipedias, is that there is a huge potential to increase the number of editors, especially active editors, along with the expansion of article entries. On one hand, unfortunately there is no fool-proof formula or plan that either the Wikimedia India community, Wikimedia India chapter or A2K can immediately bank on. This does not mean, on the other hand, that there are no ideas, experiences, learnings and failures, that can inform a strategy. An important point is that what we (the community, WMI chapter, WMF and A2K) all are attempting to do is to achieve something that sounds very simple (increase the number of editors, increase the articles, and build article quality) but yet complex to achieve. In addition to this, improving the Indian-language Wikipedias becomes even more complex for some the following reasons:

Lack of reference material available online in Indian languages.
Typing in Indian languages is a major challenge.
Relative dearth of quality content available in digital format.
Relative lack of research/academic standards, which is transferred on to Indian language Wikipedias.
Various technical issues like input, browser compatibility, font display, which deter new users.

Thus it should be noted that we should extend our work beyond Wikipedia, if we are to grow Indian-language Wikipedias. We need to think of a holistic intervention that would also involve enabling, facilitating and forming localized language-based virtual communities. That this has never been done before, and Indian language Wikipedias have a huge potential to do so.[1] This is also the significance of Indian-language Wikipedias, which are a potential (often the only) medium/platform for migrating Indian languages into the digital era. Also Wikipedia can be leveraged to further the much-needed active research culture in India and Indian culture. As a collective, we are doing something cutting edge and have too much of a risk of failure, time and again. This kind of work has failure fore-written. The only mitigation by which we can aim to be successful is by being open to learning, working as a collective, being supportive of each other, picking ourselves up whenever we fall down, and celebrating the little successes.

Language area work plans

As indicated above, the A2K team has prioritized the five languages and developed a detailed plan. We had initially set out to work with a different set of languages. The language set has slightly changed during the past two months.

Telugu
Odia
Kannada
(GOM) Konkani
Bengali

Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas have included:

Networking of institutions and groups. The A2K team has put together a list of knowledge institutions, groups and individuals with whom it has some connections and believes that it can bring them into the Wikimedia movement. These collaborations will not only result in significant quality-content contributions, but will lead to the diversification and increase in that particular language Wikimedia community.
Willingness of that particular language community to interact and engage with the A2K team. Though we tried approaching other language communities, we were given to understand that they would like to consider engaging with us at a later point. We have respected the community's decision and are open to work with a couple of language areas later in time.
Work on one incubation project. During our interaction with Wikimedia India Chapter EC about the A2K plans, they have actively encouraged the A2K team to take up at least one project under incubation. Based on their suggestion we have taken up Konkani as we have some institutional contacts that could be leveraged to build the Konkani Wikipedia. The A2K team has also conducted some outreach work in Goa over the past 3–4 months that could be built on.
Familiarity of the A2K team members with the language. Each of us are editors/can edit in most of the above language Wikipedias. This will give us an insider's perspective of what is happening in that particular language community and the Wikimedia projects.

As mentioned earlier, A2K team's prioritization of working actively with these five language projects does not mean that A2K team will not support other language areas/communities. The A2K team will continue to provide overall support to all Wikipedia Communities in India. Our engagement will be activity/project-specific, based on the requests made to the A2K team by community members.

Overall A2K support to all Wikipedia communities in India

Besides the specific programs mentioned under individual language area plans, A2K team will provide overall support to all Indian-language Wikipedia communities. Please see this page for more details.

Pilot Project – Performing Arts in India

India has a wide range of performing arts. A lot of work is done on performing arts by various individuals and institutions, which offers rich knowledge about the aesthetics, artists, institutions, performance spaces/infrastructure, and policies, across various geographies and languages. This pilot is premised on a theme and seeks to create a multilingual repository of knowledge on Indian performing arts that is interdisciplinary, dynamic and ever evolving. Please go here to read more about the plan.

Learning and evaluation

Based on discussions with the Wikimedia India Chapter EC and with some members of the Community, the A2K team has arrived at some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work. Please see this page for more details.

Giving feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.
- For Telugu plan here.
- For Odia plan here.
- For Kannada plan here.
- For Konkani plan here.
- For Bengali plan here.
For feedback on Pilot Project plan go here.
For feedback on Overall Support Across Indian language Communities you can write here.
Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at vishnucis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please call +919845207308 from 08:00 to 21:00 hours IST (Indian Standard Time).

List of contributors

[1] Many of the challenges that we see vis-à-vis Indian-language Wikipedias are somewhat akin to the challenges print technology faced during the 19th century in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/resources/access-to-knowledge-work-plan

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:14:30Z

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, a movement in which Open Society Foundations have played a key role. It maps the vast terrain of legal, cultural, and technical issues that activists and thinkers aligned to the movement negotiate every day.

Produced with the support of the Open Society Information Program, the book aims to make accessible a diverse range of subject matter, including access to medicines, software patents, food security and access to agricultural biotechnology, the public domain, remix culture, free expression, and semiotic democracy.

It features over 60 essays from leaders in the A2K movement, including influential thinkers and doers like Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos, Lawrence Liang and James Love. The book also contains a chapter by Senior Information Program Manager Vera Franz, exploring the potential to redress the copyright balance of a new international instrument to mandate a minimum set of limitations and exceptions.

An electronic copy of the book has been made available for free download under a specially crafted Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) license which additionally allows for translations.

Date: November 2010
Source: Zone Books
Author: Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds.

Contents include:

The Emergence of the Politics of A2K
The Conceptual Terrain of A2K
Strategies and Tactics of A2K
A2K in the Future: Visions and Scenarios

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Download the CC-licensed electronic copy of the book. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (PDF Document - 7041K)

Link to the original here

NEW

The end of the twentieth century saw an explosive intrusion of intellectual property law into everyday life. Expansive copyright laws have been used to attack new forms of sharing and remixing facilitated by the Internet. International laws extending the patent rights of pharmaceutical companies have threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries. Recently, a multitude of groups around the world have emerged to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counterpolitics of “access to knowledge” or “A2K.” They include software programmers who take to the streets to attack software patents, AIDS activists who fight for generic medicines in poor countries, subsistence farmers who defend their right to food security and seeds, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to defend the digital commons. In this volume, Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have created the first anthology of the A2K movement, mapping this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. Intellectual property law has become not only a site of new forms of transnational activism, but also a locus for profound new debates and struggles over politics, economics, and freedom. This collection vividly brings these debates into view and makes the terms of intellectual property law legible in their political implications around the world.

“It’s hard to believe that the ‘definitive’ book has already been written about a movement as new as A2K. It’s even more unusual for an edited collection of essays to have the power of a monograph. But this collection of essays is both the definitive explanation of the access to knowledge movement and a beautifully constructed conversation about the various ideas, conceptual, political and organizational, that make it up. From Amy Kapczynski’s superb overview, to Yochai Benkler’s brilliant meditation on the commons, to Lawrence Liang’s superbly titled ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book,’ the central ideas of A2K are laid out with a freshness and power that is remarkable. And the rest of the contributors in the essays gathered here are just as strong. This is a must-have for university libraries, but it is also something that will be read intently, tactically, and sometimes uneasily, in venues ranging from WIPO to the university classroom. Highly recommended.”

James Boyle, Duke University, author of The Public Domain

“This is the first book of its kind. It comprehensively describes the intellectual contours of a powerful and emerging social movement and serves as a handbook for activism. The A2K movement is disparate and diverse. So assembling a volume that takes account of its various strands and influences is no small task. Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have selected works from the most influential writers and practitioners of this new distributed politics. I will certainly assign this book to my survey course next year.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, author of The Googlization of Everything

See the news in Zone Books

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/access-to-knowledge

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — September 2013

praskrishna — 2013-12-09T06:37:43Z

The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) newsletter for the month of September 2013:

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Goa University re-released Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0. To celebrate and further the movement of open knowledge and open access Goa University in collaboration with Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) organised an event on September 26, 2013 at 10 a.m. at the Goa University Conference Hall. Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume encyclopedia published by Goa University. It encompasses all the world information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography, etc. By releasing Vishwakosh under Creative Commons license, Goa University is making it freely available to public and giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. For more on Konkani Vishwakosh re-release see

Announcements

CIS Signs MoU with Goa University: The A2K team at CIS has signed an MoU with the Goa University to digitize the “Konkani Vishwakosh” under the Creative Commons license and build a digital knowledge partnership to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language.

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project: The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the University of Goa is doing a two-month project on digitization of Konkani Vishwakosh.

Video

Wikipedians Speak: Piotr Konieczny: This episode brings you a conversation with Piotr Konieczny, a veteran Wikipedian from Poland. He has contributed to over 514 DYK articles on Wikipedia.

Columns and Blog Entries

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Startup Goa Blog, September 9, 2013).

ଅବସର ପରର ଦ୍ବିତୀୟ ଜୀବନ, ଅବସର ପରେ ସକ୍ରିୟ ଭାବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖାଲେଖି ଜାରୀ ରଖିଥିବା ଜଣେ ଡାକ୍ତରଙ୍କ ସ‌ହ ଭାବାଲୋଚନା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odiapua, September 10, 2013).

Selection of Programme Officer — Pilot Projects, CIS-A2K (by Nitika Tandon, September 10, 2013).

Wikipedia reaches Classrooms in Hyderabad (by Syed Muzammiluddin, September 20, 2013).

Events Organised

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mysore (University of Mysore, August 6, 2013): This is a report of the workshop conducted last month. Dr. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Indian Language Wikipedia Training Workshop (TISS, Mumbai, August 16, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was the trainer at this workshop. This workshop was organized as part of the CIS-A2K MoU with TISS. This is also part of the Indian Language Mela being organized by Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, TISS.
Indian Language Wikipedia Training Workshop (TISS, Tuljapur, August 24, 2013). Abhishek Suryavanshi was the trainer for this workshop.
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Goa, September 28, 2013). Nitika Tandon conducted this workshop. The details will be posted soon.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Training Workshop in Bangalore (organised by CIS-A2K, Bangalore, October 3 – 6, 2013).

Events Co-organised

Digital Resources in Telugu: A Workshop for Research Scholars (co-organised by CIS-A2K and the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and CILHE, TISS on September 13, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan curated and conducted this day-long event for M.Phil and Ph.D students of the EFL University.
Re-releasing Konkani Vishwakosh & Building Konkani Wikipedia (organised by CIS-A2K and the University of Goa, Conference Hall, Goa University, Taleigao, September 26, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (co-organised by CIS-A2K and wikipedians John Noronha and Supriya Kankumbikar, September 27, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop.
Odisha: Wikipedia workshop at IIMC, Dhenkanal (co-organised by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia community, September 30, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi coordinated the entire event along with members of Odia Wikipedia, Dr Subas Chandra Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar and Sasanka Sekhar Das. This was covered by Odisha Diary (http://bit.ly/1bna9zd), and eOdisha Samachar (http://bit.ly/1aNJvv4).

Events Participated In

Workshop on e-Content Development (organised by Centre for Staff Training and Development, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad, September 4 – 6, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan gave guest lectures on Open Source to Open Knowledge; Building Knowledge Bases and Platforms via Mass Collaboration on the Internet; e-Content in Indian languages – History, Challenges and Opportunities; Wikipedia Users to Wikipedia Authors – Exploring Wikipedia as an OER Tool; and e-Content, e-Student, e-Faculty – Reimagining classroom in the digital Age.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, SDM College, Ujire, September 15, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was the trainer at this workshop.
T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on Building Knowledge Bases and Platforms via Mass Collaboration on the Internet (organised by Jadavpur University, School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, and Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University on September 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/163oEpz.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (organised by St. Aloysius College, AIMIT, St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Beeri, Mangalore, September 13, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was the trainer at this workshop.
Indian Languages Mela (organised by Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, TISS, Mumbai, September 20-21, 2013). Tejaswini Niranjana, T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in this event.
'Digital Humanities and Higher Education' (organised by School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, September 2013). Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana gave a talk.

Media Coverage

'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation' (Deccan Herald, September 13, 2013): The article talks about the relative lack of content in Konkani Wikipedia. “To get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for Wikipedia,” Dr. Pavanaja was quoted as having said.
Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow (The Hindu, September 26, 2013). A coverage of the re-release of the Konkani encyclopaedia under Creative Commons license.
Goa University re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26 (The Times of India, September 24, 2013): Goa University and CIS-A2K re-released the four volume 3632 page Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopaedia) in Goa.
Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia (Navhind Times, September 27, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months (The Times of India, September 27, 2013): Goa University becomes the first varsity in India to allow data produced and copyrighted by an Indian university to be used by internet users. Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help with the project for which training will be provided, says Vishnu Vardhan.
Konkani Wikipedia in the making (by Prakash Kamat, The Hindu, September 29, 2013): Goa University re-launched a four-volume Konkani encyclopaedia and will upload it on Wikipedia. The process will be completed in six months times, says Vishnu Vardhan.
For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, September 29, 2013): Konkani has 24 lakh speakers as per the Census Department of India 2001 but online documentation is limited. CIS-A2K wants to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia, says Nitika Tandon.
Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months (by Jagran Josh, September 30, 2013).
Goa University Partners CIS India to Build Konkani Wikipedia (by Apurva Chaudhary, Medianama, September 30, 2013).

Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of six members, four based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi and Muzammiluddin Syed, one member Nitika Tandon in Delhi and one Advisor Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here (http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters). Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications at http://bit.ly/TOcXId.

About CIS

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

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K

CIS group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cis.india

Visit us at: https://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-september-2013

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — October 2013

praskrishna — 2014-01-04T12:04:56Z

The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) newsletter for the month of October 2013:

Train the Trainer Program
Wikipedians, about 20 of them, from 10 different cities, speaking 8 different languages, joined together for the first ever four days "Train the Trainer Program" organised by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team in Bangalore from October 3 to 6, 2013. CIS-A2K organised the residency training program to build capacities amongst different language Wikimedia communities. A good diversity of Wikipedians from various language communities such as Bengali, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Odia, came over for the event. Two prominent reasons identified for organizing the event were the limitations of a virtual sphere and the limited number of Wikipedians leading outreach activities. Seventeen people participated in the event: http://bit.ly/18hjw0n

► Events Organised
Workshop on Wikipedia in the Indian Undergraduate Language Classrooms (October 1, 203, Christ University, Bangalore). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop: http://bit.ly/HIiC30.
వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/బెంగుళూరు/అక్టోబర్ (UTC, Bangalore, October 12, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1hpmXrt.
Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization (Goa University, October 19-20, 2013). CIS-A2K team conducted the workshop. Thirty-seven people participated in the event: http://bit.ly/1a9m8N2. Nitika Tandon shares a detailed blog post on the re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC License: http://bit.ly/1cm9wBH.
► Event Participated In
Re-sourcing Indian Cinema: Humanities Research, New Archives and Collaborative Knowledge Production (organised by the Centre for Contemporary Studies and the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, October 29, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on “Let Cinephiles Collaborate: Pleasures and Perils of Indian Film History on Wikipedia”: http://bit.ly/18Obr2P.
► Media Coverage
CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Mangalore: Konkani writers resolve to form all-India forum at JKS conference (Daijiworld, October 1, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ek8AzW.
Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones (by Megha Prakash, Sci Dev Net, October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/Hfh7sI.
कोंकणी विश्‍वकोश ‘विकिपीडिया’वर (Navprabha Daily, October 22, 2013). A detailed article about the digitalization of Konkani Vishwakosh: http://bit.ly/18J3YlB.

About CIS

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
CIS group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cis.india
Visit us at: https://cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-october-2013