Centre for Internet and Society

South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013

divij — 2014-05-05T06:59:51Z

As the rapid spread of technology in developing countries allows exponentially increasing availability of and access to personal data through automatic data processing, governments are beginning to recognize the necessity to evolve policies addressing data security and privacy concerns.

The source of pressure for strict legal regulations addressing data protection are both the growing recognition of the importance of privacy rights, as well as the risk of falling behind on international standards on data protection, which would hamper the potential of developing countries as destinations for outsourcing industries which depend largely on processing of information.[1] The Protection of Personal Information Act enacted by South Africa is an example of a policy which enables a comprehensive framework for data security and privacy and is a model for other developing nations which are weighing the costs and benefits of establishing a secure data protection regime.

The South African law traces the right to protection of personal information back to Section 14 of the South African Constitution, which provides for a right against the unlawful collection, retention, dissemination and use of personal information. The law establishes strict restrictions and regulations on the processing of personal information, which includes information including relating to race, gender, sexual orientation, medical information, biometric information and personal opinion. The processing of personal information under the Act must comply with 8 principles, namely - accountability, lawful purpose for processing and processing limitation, purpose specification, information quality, openness and notice of collection, openness, reasonable security safeguards and subject participation, in line with the international standards for fair information practices.[2] The Act also recognizes ‘special personal information’, including religious or political beliefs, race, sexual orientation and trade union membership, as well as any personal information of children below the age of 18, which require stricter safeguards for processing,. Similar to the draft Indian legislation on privacy, the Act contemplates an independent regulatory mechanism, the information regulator, which would have all the necessary powers to effectively monitor compliance under the Act, including the power for punishing offences under the Act.

The Protection of Personal Information Act contains 115 Sections and is meant to be an exhaustive and heavily detailed policy to bring South Africa’s laws in line with EU and international regulations on data protection.[3] Though such progressive policies should be a model for policy changes in other developing nations, one aspect in which the law fails is to address increasing privacy concerns arising from widespread government-enabled surveillance and data retention. The POPI excludes from its application the processing of information related to national security, terrorist related activities and public safety, combating of money laundering, investigation of proof of offences, the prosecution of offenders, execution of sentences or other security measures, subject to adequate safeguards being established by the legislature for protection of personal information. Unfortunately, the ambiguous wording of the exclusions, especially in determining “adequate safeguards”, leaves its interpretation and application open for governments to engage in mass surveillance in the name of public security. Over the past few years, governments have taken to using technology and information, particularly through mass surveillance, to collect comprehensive information on their citizens and violate their liberties and privacy. In India, particularly with programs like the Central Monitoring System being implemented, any policy which purportedly aims at the protection of privacy must not only seek bare minimal compliances with the current international standards for data protection, but should also address the mass, unrestricted surveillance and data retention which is taking place in the name of public security.

Developing nations like South Africa and India face significant challenges in ensuring individual privacy, particularly the lack of sufficient legal safeguards for the protection of privacy. The right to privacy is often dismissed as an elitist or western concept, which does not have value in the context of developing nations, without engaging with the realities and the nuances of the right. Further, the costs of expensive technical safeguards means private and public bodies are required to spend significant resources in maintaining data security and these factors often outweigh privacy considerations in policy debates. The South African Act, hence, serves both as an important model for legislation and as an indication that the right to privacy is valuable to recognize in developing countries as well.

[1]. Article 25 of the European Union Directive on the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of such data (Directive 95/46/EC) prohibits the transfer of data to non-member states which do not comply with adequate data protection norms.

[2]. http://oecdprivacy.org/

[3]. Link to Act: www.gov.za/documents/download.php?f=204368

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/south-african-protection-personal-information-act-2013

Sources of CIS Funding

pranesh — 2018-07-07T01:19:19Z

CIS's donors' names and the amount of the grants they've provided are being published in an effort to be absolutely transparent and to make it clear that our donors do not dictate the policy and research positions we espouse.

To access the latest information on CIS funding click here

According to some news reports, the Centre for Internet and Society's criticisms of some government policies are being seen as being motivated by our funding. To set the record clear, we are publishing the names of all our donors, and the amounts received from them. It is to be noted that this list does not include donors (such as Privacy International) with whom we have agreements, but from whom we have not yet received any funding.

	Name of Donor	2008–2009	2009–2010	2010–2011	2011–2012	2012–2013	Total
1	Kusuma Trust	र14,473,000	र21,226,199	र22,190,787	र10,000,000	र2,32,99,038	र9,11,89,024
2	Hans Foundation					र1,40,85,662	र1,40,85,662
3	Wikimedia Foundation					र1,11,41,246	र1,11,41,246
4	Hivos		र6,49,635	र47,68,347	र22,82,939		र77,00,921
5	Ford Foundation				र45,01,370		र45,01,370
6	Privacy International					र25,05122	र25,05,122
7	Estudios para la Democracia Social			र24,32,877			र24,32,877
8	LexUM		र13,49,137	र7,11,716			र20,60,853
9	Open Society Institute, London			र900,000			र9,00,000
10	National Internet Exchange of India		र535,000	र100,000			र6,35,000
11	International Telecommunications Union			र616,487			र6,16,487
12	Rohini Nilekani		र5,00,000				र5,00,000
13	UNESCO			र2,63,480			र2,63,480
14	iCommons			र2,22,300			र2,22,300
15	Centre for the Study of Culture and Society			र1,61,100			र1,61,100
16	National Institute for the Visually Handicapped		र50,000				र50,000
Total		र1,44,73,000	र2,43,09,971	र3,23,67,094	र1,22,82,939	र5,10,31,068	र13,89,65,320

While CIS is not opposed to corporate funding (and is not opposed to corporations), we do not adopt policy positions on the basis of our funding. We adopt policy positions based on what we consider is in the public interest, specifically in the interest of consumers and developing countries such as India, as that would give effect to CIS's vision statement. While these interests may sometimes align themselves with the interests of multi-national corporations, it often does not.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/sources-cis-funding

SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet

praskrishna — 2011-11-18T07:26:30Z

As the US government’s House Judiciary Committee begins hearings on the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA), both supporters and opponents are ramping up their campaigning, with big names getting involved. And so they should. SOPA’s stakes are no less than the future of the Internet itself.

The key problem with SOPA is that it seeks to allow any copyright holder to sever any website’s relationship with online advertising networks or credit card processing services, simply by pointing the finger. As Ars Technica explains:

Calling its plan a “market-based system to protect US customers and prevent US funding of sites dedicated to theft of US property,” the new bill gives broad powers to private actors. Any holder of intellectual property rights could simply send a letter to ad network operators like Google and to payment processors like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal, demanding these companies cut off access to any site the IP holder names as an infringer.

[…] So long as the intellectual property holders include some “specific facts” supporting their infringement claim, ad networks and payment processors will have five days to cut off contact with the website in question.

The bill also gives the government the power to get an injunction against foreign sites which would force ISPs to, within five days, ”prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site.” Essentially, it obliges ISPs to break their own DNS servers by filtering or redirecting users who try to access an accused site. It would also ban any tools which allow circumvention of such blocks.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this could be abused: An aggrieved party accuses a site of infringement, with or without reliable evidence, and suddenly that site can no longer accept credit cards or PayPal payments and its advertising revenue dries up completely. And we know that the IP industry isn’t above false accusations of copyright infringement. It’s not just business websites that could be affected, but open source projects too.

Opponents currently include businesses such as Google, Facebook, Zynga, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, AOL, and LinkedIn who, together, sent a letter; advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch; as well as eleven members of the House of Representatives who have also written a letter to the House Judiciary Committee. Another letter from human rights groups includes India’s Centre for Internet and Society as well as the Church of Sweden.

There are also complaints that the House Judiciary Committee is trying to push the legislation through with undue haste. Says PCWorld:

Critics of the legislation also complained that the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee appears to be fast-tracking the bill before opposition can build. At a 10 am hearing Wednesday, five of six witnesses are likely to speak in favor of SOPA, with only Google opposed. Witnesses the Motion Picture Association of America, trade union the AFL-CIO and pharmaceutical company Pfizer have all voiced support for the bill.

No public interest groups, Internet engineers or human rights groups have been invited to the hearing, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights group. “This is really being railroaded, without a full public debate,” she said.

Indeed, the tone of the Committee’s so-called fact sheet, which lays out a series of ‘myths’ and ‘facts’, gives cause for concern, implying as it does that they have already decided which side of the fence they will land on. What is also disturbing is that the US Copyright Office — which as a part of the Library of Congress, one would expect to be impartial and evidence-led — will be offering an “unqualified endorsement“:

“It is my view that if Congress does not continue to provide serious responses to online piracy, the US copyright system will ultimately fail,” [Copyright Office director Maria] Pallante’s testimony says.

Pallante and representatives from Pfizer, the Motion Picture Association of America, the AFL-CIO, and Mastercard, all of whom support the bill, will be testifying tomorrow before the House Judiciary committee.

For Americans who are unimpressed by this latest move from the content industries to control the Internet, there is a letter writing campaign encouraging people to contact their congressperson. For non-Americans, Avaaz has set up a Save the Internet petition which currently has 70,000 signatures and is racking up hundreds of new signatures every minute.

There’s no doubt that tech journalists, free software advocates and digital rights campaigners and internet businesses worldwide will be glued to coverage of today’s Judiciary hearing. But, given the power of the copyright industry’s lobbying arms, it is hard to expect discussions to conclude satisfactorily. It may just be that the entire Internet will have to rely on the strength of the US Constitution, which SOPA may contravene, to save it.

This article by Suw Charman-Anderson was published in Firspost.Technology on November 16, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bill-could-kill-internet

Soon, all 14 volumes of Kannada encyclopaedia to be online

praskrishna — 2014-07-16T11:06:56Z

Four volumes have been uploaded so far on a pilot basis.

The article by R.Krishna Kumar was published in the Hindu on July 15, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave his inputs.

All 14 volumes of the Kannada Vishwakosha published by the University of Mysore along with five volumes of subject encyclopaedia — also published in Kannada by the varsity — may soon be available on the internet.

This will not only enrich Kannada content on the Internet, but will give the multi-volume publications that are available only in a few libraries and research institutions a new lease of life.

While four volumes of the Vishwakosha published by the Prasaranga wing of the varsity have already been uploaded on Wikisource, talks are on to upload other volumes along with the subject encyclopaedias.

“We are in discussion with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, in this regard and may soon decide on making the other volumes available on the Internet through Creative Commons (CC) licence to coincide with the centenary of the university in 2016,” said K.S. Rangappa, Vice-Chancellor, University of Mysore.

Speaking at the Open Knowledge Day organised in collaboration with the CIS here on Tuesday, Prof. Rangappa said four volumes of the Vishwakosha have been uploaded as part of a pilot project. “This has helped people access the contents and hence its popularity has grown,” he said.

The university is in talks with the authors and editors concerned at Prasaranga to take the project forward and was also considering digitising the subject encyclopaedia and migrate them to the CC licence platform for public sharing, he added.

The CIS and the varsity signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to re-release the first six volumes of the Vishwakosha under the CC licence, of which four volumes have been released, and the Open Knowledge Day was organised to mark the occasion. The CIS said it also coincided with the Open Knowledge Festival being held in Berlin (July 15 to 17).

U.B. Pavanaja of the CIS said it was imperative to make the latest developments in the world available in Kannada so that people can keep themselves updated. “But for books prescribed in the syllabus, there is not much available on the Internet in Kannada and this project will help bridge the gap,” he said.

Students of Christ University, Bangalore, who worked to upload the Vishwakosha, were felicitated on the occasion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-15-2014-r-krishna-kumar-soon-all-14-volumes-of-kannada-encyclopaedia-to-be-online

Some ISPs block Wordpress domain across India

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T15:16:30Z

Latest reports confirm that Tata Photon has blocked access to the Wordpress.com domain across India, following a government order to block web pages containing offensive content.

Published in tech 2 on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Apparently, the ISP has resorted to a blanket ban, blocking access to the entire site instead of clamping down on specific web pages carrying unacceptable content. Wordpress is accessible through other ISPs such as Airtel and Reliance. However, there is no clarity yet about any other ISP blocking out Wordpress entirely, and we are in the process of verifying this.

We find that the domain can be accessed through means such as free proxy websites when using a Tata Photon connection, which could indicate that the problem does not lie with the Wordpress server. Despite the inability to view Wordpress websites and blogs, those with registered accounts on Wordpress are able to log in to the website. Certain portions of the Dashboard or website backend are known to have been blocked, and what remains accessible is functioning very slowly for Tata Photon users. Users cannot edit or post new content at the moment, but can view sections such as the website's stats. However, this all-encompassing block seems to be affecting only the Wordpress.com platform and not Wordpress.org.

The error message that most users are coming to

A blogger by the name 'Anon and on' has written, “I can’t access any WordPress.com blog from home. Neither can I open up the window for a new post or access any support forums. I’ve cleared the cache and tried different browsers, but no luck. All I can do is log in. If I try to see any WordPress.com blog or access my Dashboard or hit “New Post”, the notification I get is that the server couldn’t be contacted and that I should check my connection. Which I would do if it wasn’t for the fact that I can open any and every other website”.

We tried to contact Tata Photon to get a clear idea, but it was unavailable for comment. We also contacted Tata Photon users, who run their websites and blogs on the Wordpress platform. They said they have been unable to access the service since Monday. Many users tweeted out their puzzlement and frustration after discovering that they were suddenly unable to view their own blogs and sites.

"Tata simply blocked 25 MILLION wordpress blogs @cis_india highlight this"

"Not able to open http://Wordpress.com blogs on Tata Photon Plus."

"all wordpress blogs blocked in Tata photon plus"

"It's some Tata Photon bug. Wordpress working fine with Reliance."

"There is a known issue with Tata Photon and Wordpress. Found 5 people who have the same."

In protest, some bloggers from across the country have formed a group called the Indian Bloggers' Forum. The forum plans to approach the Supreme Court with a PIL seeking immediate unblocking of their blogs and websites.

Earlier this week, a list containing 309 URLs sought to be banned by the government in light of the Assam violence and the subsequent exodus in northeast India was leaked online. The URLs comprising Twitter accounts, HTML img tags, blog posts, entire blogs, and a handful of websites, were blocked between August 18 and 21. In an analysis of the leaked information, Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) wrote, "It is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care". The list included Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org among other domains. However, only select entries - 3 from Wordpress.org and 8 from Wordpress.com- were meant to be blocked out.

The clampdown on websites with content deemed to be offensive and disruptive led to the Indian government ordering the blocking of around 310 web pages. The Centre began to come down heavily on the channels it believed were playing a role in triggering fear, and leading to violence and the mass displacement of Indians from the northeast. It has been reported that morphed images and videos were uploaded to these websites with the intention of inciting the Muslim community in the country.

If your access to Wordpress has been blocked, let us know in your comments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tech2-in-com-som-isps-block-wordpress-domain-across-india

SoI’s Open Series Maps Fails to Implement Public Sharing of Govt Data

sumandro — 2017-05-04T12:19:01Z

Although it has made the topographic maps or the Open Series Maps available to general public, Survey of India’s (SoI) Nakshe portal will have to go through a variety of litmus test, as the initiative fails to implement the mandates of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012, says Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society. This interview was published by Geospatial World on May 02, 2017.

Cross-posted from Geospatial World.

What are your views on the Nakshe Portal initiative from Survey of India?

It is a most welcome initiative by the Survey of India to realize the mandate of the National Map Policy (NMP) 2005 to publicly distribute “Open Series Maps of scales larger than 1:1 million”. The Survey of India has also drawn from and implemented the mandate of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) 2012 to make available the shareable and non-sensitive Open Series Maps documents without any necessary fees to access and use them.

The initiative, however, fails to achieve the goal of of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. This substantively raises the barrier to access the Open Series Maps data and reduces its possibilities of reuse, especially for commercial innovation, in a very serious way. This undermining of the open data agenda is not only a concern for the Nakshe portal in particular, but also sets a dangerous precedent for future open government data initiatives in India.

What is your view on the data provided and its usability?

The Nakshe portal has created several barriers to access and use of the Open Series Maps data, all of which are in violation of the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012:

NDSAP 2012 mandates that shareable and non-sensitive government data (such as Open Series Maps) are made public through the data.gov.in portal created under the guidance of the NDSAP 2012. Survey of India may of course decide to publish the Open Series Maps data on the Nakshe portal along with on the data.gov.in portal. Publishing of the data only through the Nakshe portal not only violates the mandate of NDSAP 2012, they make such data much less discoverable.
NDSAP 2012 allows for “registered access” to open government data. That is, it allows for data to be shared only with users who have registered with the data publishing portal. Making registration only possible via Aadhaar number, however, significantly limits the number of users who can access this data. For example, non-Indian researchers form an important potential sub-section of users of Open Series Maps but they will not be able to access the data. The website neither has a privacy policy that clarifies how these submitted Aadhaar numbers will be stored, protected, and shared (if at all) by the Survey of India.
NMP 2005 instructs Survey of India to “allow a user to add value to the maps obtained (either in analogue or digital formats) and prepare his own value-added maps”. The Government Open Data License has been recently notified under NDSAP 2012 to guide permitted uses of open government data in India.

The very restricted approach to permitted end-uses of Open Series Maps by the Survey of India neither follow the NMP instruction, nor adopt the Government Open Data License. Data available from Nakshe portal cannot be exported (which is technically an absurd demand due to globally distributed nature of servers), commercialized, or altered. This creates a most serious barrier to using the Open Series Maps data available via the Nakshe portal.
The Nakshe portal has published geospatial data in PDF format. This is a clear violation of open data practices globally and the NDSAP Implementation Guidelines more specifically, which states that open geospatial data standards, like GML and KML, should be used).

Does this fall in line with the larger government aim of having open and accessible data? If not why?

In a nutshell, the Open Series Maps data being published on the Nakshe portal is neither open (as it does not use open standards to share the data and does not share the data under an open licenses) nor universally accessible (due to the requirement for registration via Aadhaar number).

What improvements do you suggest in the approach of SoI about the portal?

I have listed four major conflicts that the Nakshe portal has with the directives and guidelines offered by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. I sincerely hope that the Survey of India and the Department of Science and Technology will address them soon, as they significantly limit the ability of users to access and use the Open Series Maps data.

These changes will make the Open Series Maps data open, and ensure that the data can be accessed and innovated with by various stakeholders.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/survey-of-india-open-series-maps-fails-to-implement-public-sharing-of-govt-data

Software Freedom Pledge

pranesh — 2015-09-25T12:26:09Z

On September 19, 2015, celebrated globally as Software Freedom Day, a number of enthusiasts got together and collectively took a pledge.

We, who have gathered together for Software Freedom Day 2015, believe that software freedom is both a matter of ethical principle as well as a matter of pragmatism, and is necessary for a democratic, open society.

We believe that it is desirable that all people, but especially governments, use, contribute to, and spread open standards, free/libre/open source software, open APIs, openly-licensed content (including open data, open access, and open education resources), leading to a vibrant public domain, and ensure that all of the above are accessible for all, including persons with disabilities and other marginalised sections of society.

Given that, we pledge to:

use and spread free software amongst our family, friends, and neighbours, both in person and virtually.
demand that services we use in turn use open standards and open APIs, and thus be available for all using free/libre/open source software, without the payment of any royalties.
raise the issue of software freedom with our democratic representatives, to seek that they in turn respect and promote these principles.
as far as possible, making our own work openly available, and seek to convince our employers, publishers, producers, and other persons who might be in a position to restrict
work against any laws, policies — corporate or governmental — or technical restrictions that seek to prevent people from full exercise of their rights, and which are contrary to the above principles.

Signed by:

Abhaya Agarwal
Ananth Subray
Asutosha Sarangi
Chirag Sarthi J
Prakash Hebballi
Pranesh Prakash
Ralph Andrade
Subhashish Panigrahi
Tito Dutta
Veethika Mishra

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/software-freedom-pledge-2015

Software Freedom Day: The Importance of Free and Open Source Software

subha — 2016-09-18T03:46:29Z

Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 celebrates the liberty that free and open software and the philosophy of freedom brings into people’s lives. When SFD was started in 2004, only 12 teams from different places joined. It grew to a whooping 1000 by 2010 across the world. Explaining the aim of the celebration, SFD’s official website says,

The article was published by DNA on September 17, 2016.

Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit organisation Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organise the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?

Free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both Free software and open source software. Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, the free software has many names — libre software, freedom-respecting software and software libre are some of them. As defined by the Free Software Foundation, one of the early advocates of software freedom, free software allows users not just to use the software with complete freedom, but to study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form however depends on the particular license the software is released under. The Creative Commons licenses have recommendations for a wide array of free licenses that one can choose for software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are several different open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “Open Source” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by educational-advocacy organisation Open Source Initiative. Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

Supported by several global organisations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost, but it provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD encourages everyone to gather in their own cities, educate people around them about free software, promote on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2016 this year), even hacking with free software, organising hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software!

From South Asia, there are 13 celebratory events in India, 8 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh and 4 in Sri Lanka.

South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organisational level and by the government. The Free Software Movement of India was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has launched an open data portal at data.gov.in portal, initiated a new policy to adopt open source software, and asked vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals. Similarly, several free and open source communities and organisations like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India in India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh in Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal in Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan in Pakistan, Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka, that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software.

We promote open source and open Web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organisations.

“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from Mozilla India wiki)

Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a research paper that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money spent in purchasing proprietary software.

A large amount of money of the government can be saved if it uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, because government is providing computers to all educational institutes from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/dna-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-software-freedom-day-importance-of-free-and-open-source-software

Social Media Monitoring

sumandro — 2017-01-16T14:22:20Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/social-media-monitoring

So Much to Lose

nishant — 2012-12-07T16:39:09Z

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have been a witness to the maelstrom of events that accompanied the death of the political leader Bal Thackeray.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on December 2, 2012.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have been a witness to the maelstrom of events that accompanied the death of the political leader Bal Thackeray. For me, the brouhaha was elbowed out by the case of the police arresting two women for critiquing the events on Facebook. The person who wondered about the nature of the enforced mourning and the state of our public life, and her friend who “liked” the comment on Facebook, were booked and arrested under charges that can only be considered preposterous.

I will not repeat these arguments because it is needless to say that I am on the side of the women and think of this as yet another manifestation of the stringent measures which are being evolved as an older broadcast way of thinking meets the decentralised realities of digital technologies.

In the midst of this the idea of internet freedom needs to be revisited. The global Press Freedom Index 2011-12 report compiled by Reporters Without Borders, ranks India at 131, or as a “partly free” country, marking us as a country where the notion of internet freedom is not to be taken for granted, and possibly also one where the concept is not properly understood.

Citing various instances from the central government’s plans to censor the social web to the authoritarian crackdown on activists and cultural producers involved in online civic protests, from the traditional media industry’s stronghold over intellectual property regimes to the arrest of individuals for voicing their independent critiques online, the report shows that we not only have an infrastructure deficit (with only 10 per cent of the people in the country connected), but also a huge social and political deficit, which is being exposed by our actions and reactions to the Web.

Take the case of professor Ambikesh Mahapatra dean of the chemistry department of Jadavpur University, who was picked up by the police and lodged in the lock up for almost 40 hours for forwarding an e-mail that contained a cartoon of Trinamool Congress leaders Mamata Banerjee, Mukul Roy and Dinesh Trivedi. He and his housing society co-resident Subrata Sengupta were charged with defamation and outraging the modesty of a woman. While the proceedings are underway with the next date of hearing slated in February, 2013, the Jadavpur university professor says, “Section, 66A of the IT Act is being used for suppression of the freedom of speech. In my opinion, it is being misused by the state government, repeatedly. The section does not empower anyone to arrest those who voice their opinion and never meant to harm anybody’s image. Prompt action is needed to check the misuse of law.”

Likewise, Ravi Srinivasan, a 46-year-old a businessman from Pondicherry, was arrested for tweeting against Karti Chidambaram, son of Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram. His arrest and consequent release has not blunted his spirit. He says, “At the time (of the arrest) I had not heard of Section 66(A). I still cannot fathom why and how a tweet sent out to just 12 people — half of them family and friends — caught the eye of the police. By evening, when I had come home from the police station, my Twitter following had gone up to 1,700. About 15,000 people re-tweeted the statement that got me arrested.”

Given the series of incidents that have marked the last year and the whimsical nature of regulatory injunctions on internet freedom in the country, it might be a good idea for us to reflect on democracy and freedom.

We need to examine the fundamental nature of freedom, and how these attempts at regulating the internet are only a symptom of the systemic failures of enshrining freedom of speech, information, identity and dignity in India. However, internet freedom is often a difficult concept to engage with, because it is one of those phrases that seem to be self-explanatory but without a straightforward explanation. There are three axes which might be useful to unpack the baggage that comes with internet freedom, both for our everyday practices, and our imagined future:

Freedom of: The freedom of the internet is something that is new and needs more attention. We have to stop thinking of the internet as merely a medium or a conduit of information. As the Web becomes inextricably linked with our everyday lives, the internet is no longer just an appendage or an externality. It becomes a reference point through which our social, political and economic practices are shaped. It becomes a defining point through which we draw our meanings of what it is to be a part of the society, to have rights, to be politically aware, to be culturally engaged — to be a human. The freedom of the Net is important because the crackdowns on the Net are an attack on our rights and freedoms. The silencing of a voice on Facebook, might soon gag the voices of people on the streets, creating conditions of silence in the face of violence perpetuated by the powerful.

Freedom to: Freedom to the internet is often confused with access to the internet. While, of course, access is important in our imagination of a just society where everybody is equally connected, freedom is also about creating open and fair societies. If the power of the internet is in creating alternative spaces of expression, deliberation and opinion-making, then the freedom to the internet is about being safe and responsible in these spaces. A society that controls these spaces of public discussion, under the guise of security and public safety, is a society that has given up its faith in freedom.

Freedom for: It is often not clear that when popular technologies of information and communication are regulated and censored, it is not merely the technology that is being controlled. What is being shaped and contained is the way people use them. The freedom for the internet is about the freedom for people. The possibility that Internet Service Providers are being coerced into revealing personal information of users to police states, that intermediaries are being equipped to remove content that they find offensive from the web, and that views expressed on the social media can lead to legal battles by those who have the power but not the acumen to exercise it, all have alarming consequences. There is a need to fight for freedom, not only for the defence of technology but also for the defence of the rights that we cherish that risk being eroded.

The case of these Facebook arrests is not new. It has happened before and it will continue happening as immature governments are unable to cope with the real voices of representational democracy. These cases sometimes get naturalised because they get repeated, and even without our knowledge, can start creating a life of fear, where we internalise the regulatory system, not voicing our opinions and ideas for fear of persecution. And so, whether you agree with their politics or not, whether you endorse the viewpoints of the people who are under arrest, whether you feel implicated or not in this case, we have to realise that even if we might not agree with somebody’s viewpoint, we must defend their right to have that particular viewpoint. Anything else, and tomorrow, when you want to say something against powers of oppression, you might find yourself alone, as your voice gets heard only by those who will find creative ways of silencing you.

— With inputs from Gopu Mohan, Madhuparna Das and V Shoba

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-dec-2-2012-nishant-shah-so-much-to-lose

Smart City Policies and Standards: Overview of Projects, Data Policies, and Standards across Five International Smart Cities

Kiran A. B., Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh — 2016-06-11T13:29:04Z

This blog post aims to review five Smart Cities across the globe, namely Singapore, Dubai, New York City, London and Seoul, the Data Policies and Standards adopted. Also, the research seeks to point the similarities, differences and best practices in the development of smart cities across jurisdictions.

Download the brief: PDF.

Introduction

Smart City as a concept is evolutionary in nature, and the key elements like Information and Communication Technology (ICT), digitization of services, Internet of Things (IoT), open data, big data, social innovation, knowledge, etc., would be intrinsic to defining a Smart City [1].

A Smart City, as a “system of systems”, can potentially generate vast amounts of data, especially as cities install more sensors, gain access to data from sources such as mobile devices, and government and other agencies make more data accessible. Consequently, Big Data techniques and concepts are highly relevant to the future of Smart Cities. It was noted by Kenneth Cukier, Senior Editor of Digital Products at The Economist, that Big Data techniques can be used to enhance a number of processes essential to cities - for example, big data can be used to spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, tack legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions [2]. Having said this, data is deemed to be the lifeblood of a Smart City and its availability, use, cost, quality, analysis, associated business models and governance are all areas of interest for a range of actors within a smart city [3]

This blog reviews five Smart Cities namely Singapore, Dubai, New York City, London and Seoul. In doing so, the research seeks to point the similarities, differences and best practices in the development of smart cities across jurisdictions. To achieve this, the research reviews:

The definition of a Smart City in a given context or project (if any).
Existing policy/regulations around data or notes the lack thereof.
The cities adherence to the International standards and providing an update on the current status of the Smart City programme.

Singapore

Introduction

The Smart Nation programme in Singapore was launched on 24th November, 2014. The programme is being driven by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, through which Singapore seeks to harness ICT, networks and data to support improved livelihoods, stronger communities and creation of new opportunities for its residents [4] According to the IDA, a Smart Nation is a city where “people and businesses are empowered through increased access to data, more participatory through the contribution of innovative ideas and solutions, and a more anticipatory government that utilises technology to better serve citizens’ needs” [5]. The Smart Nation programme is driven by a designated Office in the Prime Minister’s Office [6]. As a core component to the Smart Nation Programme, the Smart Nation Platform has been developed as the technical architecture to support the Programme. This Platform enables greater pervasive connectivity, better situational awareness through data collection, and efficient sharing and access to collected sensor data, allowing public bodies to use such data to develop policy and practical interventions [7] Such access would allow for anticipatory governance - a goal of the Smart Nation Programme as noted by Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information stating “Insights gained from this data would enable us to better anticipate citizens’ needs and help in better delivery of services” [8].

Status of the Project

The Smart Nation Programme is an ongoing initiative, being built on the past programme Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015 masterplan). The plan involves putting in place the infrastructure, policies, ecosystem and capabilities to enable a Smart Nation, by adopting a people-centric approach [9]. A number of co-creating solutions adopted by the Government include:

Development of Mobile Apps to facilitate communication between the public and the providers of public services.
Organization of Hackathons by government agencies or corporations in collaboration with schools and industry partners to ideate and develop solutions to tackle real-world challenges.
Adopt measure for smart mobility to create a more seamless transport experience and providing greater access to real-time transport information so that citizens can better plan their journeys.
Smart technologies are also being introduced to the housing estates [10].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart Nation plan derives its legitimacy from the constitution of Singapore, holding the Prime Minister responsible to take charge of the subject ‘Smart Nation’ blueprint under the Statutory body of ‘Smart Nation’ Programme Office [11]. Singapore has a comprehensive data protection law – the Personal Data Protection Act 2012, rules governing the collection, use, disclosure and care of personal data. The Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore has committed to work closely with the private sector, and also to support the Smart Nation vision on data privacy and cyber security ecosystem [12] [13].

Towards achieving the Smart Nation vision the government has also promoted the use of open data. In 2015 the Department of Statistics has made a vast amount of data available (across multiple themes say transport, infocomm, population, etc.) for free to the public in order to encourage innovation and facilitate the Smart Nation [14]. Prior to this initiative, the government had adopted the Open Data Policy in 2011, enabling public data for analysis, research and application development [15]. The concept of Virtual Singapore, which is a part of the Smart Nation Initiative, has been developed to adopt and simulate solutions on a virtual platform using big data analytics [16].

Adoption of International Standards

The Smart Nation initiative follows the standards laid under the purview of the Singapore Standards Council (SSC). It specifies three types of Internet of Things (IoT) Standards – sensor network standards (TR38 - for public areas & TR40 - for homes), IoT foundational standards (common set of guidelines for IoT requirements and architecture, information and service interoperability, security and data integrity) and domain-specific standards (healthcare, mobility, urban living, etc.) [17].

Singapore is part of ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG7 Sensor Networks and ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG10 Internet of Things (IoT) [18]. Singapore IT standards abides to the international standards as defined by ISO, ITU, etc.Singapore is a member of many international standards forums (see Singapore International Standards Committee) which includes JTC1/WG9 - Big Data; JTC1/WG10 - Internet of Things; JTC1/WG11 - Smart Cities.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Introduction

The Dubai Smart City strategy was launched as part of the Dubai Plan 2021 vision, in the year 2015 [19]. Dubai Plan 2021 describes the future of Dubai evolving through holistic and complementary perspectives, starting with the people and the society and places the government as the custodian of the city’s development. Within the Plan, the smart city theme envisions a platform that is fully connected and integrated infrastructure that enables easy mobility for all residents and tourists, and provides easy access to all economic centers and social services, in line with the world’s best cities [20]. Center to the smart city platform is data and data analytics, particularly cross functional data and big data techniques to give a complete view of the city [21] As envisioned, the Dubai Data portal would provide a gateway to empower relevant stakeholders to understand the nuances of the city and pursue questions that will result in the greatest impact from the city’s data [22]. The platform will be based on current data and existing services, initiatives, and networks to identify opportunities for a smart city [23]. The Smart City Plan also includes a framework for aligning districts of Dubai with the Smart City vision and dimensions [24].

The Smart Dubai roadmap 2015 provides a consolidated report and planned smart city services, its status and the stage of its implementation, for e.g. Smart Grid, Mobile Payment, Smart Water, Health applications, Public Wi-Fi, Municipality, E-Traffic solutions, etc [25].

Status of the Project

The Smart Dubai strategy is envisioned to be completed by the year 2020, and currently it’s ongoing. The first phase of Smart Dubai masterplan is expected to end by 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, the plan aims to deliver new initiatives and services. The second phase of the masterplan is expected to be completed by the year 2020 [26].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart City Plan is being driven by the Dubai Smart City Office – which has been established under Law No. (29) of 2015 on the establishment of Dubai Smart City Office; Law No. (30) of 2015 on the establishment of Dubai Smart City Establishment; Decree No. (37) of 2015 on the formation of the Board of the Dubai Smart City Office; and Decree No (38) of 2015- appointing a Director General for the Office, which will develop overall policies and strategic plans, supervise the smart transformation process and approve joint initiatives, projects and services [27]. Also, an open data law called Dubai Open Data Law was issued to complete the legislative framework for transforming Dubai into a Smart City [28]. This law will enable the sharing of non-confidential data between public entities and other stakeholders.

Adoption of International Standards

In 2015 the Smart Dubai Executive Committee has collaborated through an agreement with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) adopt the performance indicators by the ITU Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to evaluate the feasibility of the indicators [29]. The Focus Group is working towards identifying global best practices for the development of smart cities [30].

New York City, United States of America

Introduction

The ‘One New York Plan’ announced in the year 2015 is a comprehensive plan for a sustainable and resilient city. It includes the adoption of digital technology and considers the importance of the role of data in transforming every aspect of the economy, communications, politics, and individual and family life [31]. Furthermore, through a publication on 'Building a Smart+Equitable City', the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI) describes efforts to leverage new technologies to build Smart city.

Accordingly, the plan seeks to establish better lives through establishing principles and strategic frameworks to guide connected device and Internet of Things (IoT) implementation; MOTI serving as the coordinating entity for new technology and IoT deployments across all City agencies; collaborating with academia and the private sector on innovative pilot projects, and partnering with municipal governments and organizations around the world to share best practices and leverage the impact of technological advancements [32].

Status of the Project

OneNYC represents a unified vision for a sustainable, resilient, and equitable city developed with cross-cutting interagency collaboration, public engagement, and consultation with leading experts in their respective fields. The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability oversees the development of OneNYC and now shares responsibility with the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency for ensuring its implementation [33].

Policies and Regulations

As per the Local Law 11 of 2012, each City entity must identify and ultimately publish all of its digital public data for citywide aggregation and publication by 2018. In adherence to this law, there exists a NYC Open Data Plan which requires annual data updation [34].

The LinkNYC initiative, one of the key projects to make New York a ‘smart’ city, aims to connect everyone through a city wide wi-fi network. The LinkNYC initiative will retrofit payphones with kiosks to provide high-speed WiFi hotspots and charging stations for increased connectivity [35]. Data Privacy in the initiative is addressed through the customer first privacy policy, which considers user’s privacy on priority and will not sell any personal information or share with third parties for their own use. LinkNYC will use anonymized, aggregate data to make the system more efficient and to develop insights to improve your Link experience [36].

Adoption of International Standards

The ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities (ANSSC) is a forum for information sharing and coordination on voluntary standards, conformity assessment and related activities for smart and sustainable cities in the US [37]. The US is a signatory of the ISO/ITU defined standards on smart cities [38].

London, United Kingdom

Introduction

The Smart London Plan was unveiled in the year 2013 by the Mayor of London. The plan is being driven through the Greater London Authority, with the advice of the Smart London Board. The Smart London Plan envisions ‘Using the creative power of new technologies to serve London and improve Londoner’s lives’ [39]. ‘Smart London’ is about harnessing new technology and data so that businesses, Londoners and visitors experience the city in a better way, and do not face bureaucratic hassle and congestion. Smart London seeks to improve the city as a whole and focuses on city macro functions that result from the interplay between city subsystems - such as local labour markets to financial markets, from local government to education, healthcare, transportation and utilities. According to strategy documents, a smarter London recognises and employs data as a service and will leverage data to enable informed decision making and the design of new activities.

Status of the Project

This project is currently ongoing. Since its formation in March 2013, the Smart London Board has been advising the Greater London Authority.The Plan sits within the overarching framework of the Mayor’s Vision 2020 [40].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart London Plan incorporates the existing open data platform called ‘London DataStore’. The rules and guidelines for this platform are defined by the Greater London Authority, which includes working with public and private sector organisations to create, maintain and utilise it, enabling common data standards, identify and prioritise which data are needed to address London’s growth challenges, establish a Smart London Borough Partnership to encourage boroughs to free up London’s local level data. Also, privacy is protected and there is transparent use of data - to ensure data use is managed in the best interests of the public rather than private enterprise.⁴² The Smart London Plan aims to build on this existing datastore to identify and publish data that addresses specific growth challenges, with an emphasis on working with companies and communities to create, maintain, and use this data [41].

The Open Data White Paper, issued by the Office of Paymaster General, seeks to build a transparent society by releasing public data through open data platforms and leveraging the potential of emerging technologies [42]. The Greater London Authority processes personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 [43].

Adoption of International Standards

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has already established Smart City standards and has associated with the ISO Advisory Group on smart city standards. The UK subscribes to the BSI standards for smart cities and has adopted the same [44]. The following standards and publications help address various issues for a city to become a smart city:

The development of a standard on Smart city terminology (PAS 180)
The development of a Smart city framework standard (PAS 181)
The development of a Data concept model for smart cities (PAS 182)
A Smart city overview document (PD 8100)
A Smart city planning guidelines document (PD 8101)
BS 8904 Guidance for community sustainable development provides a decision-making framework that will help setting objectives in response to the needs and aspirations of city stakeholders
BS 11000 Collaborative relationship management
BSI BIP 2228:2013 Inclusive urban design - A guide to creating accessible public spaces.

Further, the Smart London Plan incorporates open data standards in accordance with London DataStore [45]. Various government reports – Smart Cities background paper, Open Data White Paper, etc., have suggested the use of standards related to Internet of Things (IoT), open data standards, etc [46].

Seoul, Korea

Introduction

Smart Seoul 2015 was announced in June 2011 by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which envisions integrating IT services into every field, including administration, welfare, industry and living. Through this, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to create a Seoul that uses smart technologies by 2015 [47]. Towards this, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to make use of Big Data in policy development, and through scientific analytics, will provide customized administrative services and reduce wasteful spending. Also, the government is utilising Big Data to analyse trends emerging from existing services [48]. Examples of projects that leverage big data that the government has undertaken include the Taxi Matchmaking Project – analyzes the data related to taxi stands and passengers, the Owl Bus [49] - maps the bus routes, etc.

Status of the Project

Building on the Smart Seoul 2015, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to establish 'Global Digital Seoul 2020 – New Connections, Different Experiences' vision in next five-years. In this multi-objective plan, it aims to establish a ’Big Data campus’ providing win-win cooperation among public, private, industry and university [50].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart Seoul 2015 aims to create a ‘Seoul Data Mart’, which will be an open platform that makes public information available for data processing [51]. Furthermore, Seoul has opened the Seoul Open Data Plaza [52], an online channel to share and provide citizens with all of Seoul’s public data, such as real-time bus operation schedules, subway schedules, non-smoking areas, locations of public Wi-Fi services, shoeshine shops, and facilities for disabled people, and the information registered in Seoul Open Data Plaza is provided in the open API format.⁴⁵

South Korea has a comprehensive law governing data privacy – Personal Information Protection Act, 2011. The law includes data protection rules and principles, including obligations on the data controller and the consent of data subjects, rights to access personal data or object to its collection, and security requirements. It also covers cookies and spam, data processing by third parties and the international transfer of data [53].

International Standards

The smart city standards are adopted in the development of smart cities in Korea [54]. Korea has adopted the ISO/TC 268, which is focused on sustainable development in communities. Korea also has one working group developing city indicators and another working group developing metrics for smart community infrastructures [55].

Conclusion

The smart city projects studied are at different levels of implementation and have both similarities and differences. Below is an analysis of some of the key similarities and differences between smart city projects, a comparison of these points to India’s 100 Smart City Mission, and a summary of best practices around the development of smart city frameworks.

Nodal Agency

All cities studied have nodal agencies driving the smart city initiatives and many have policies in place backing these initiatives. For example, while the Smart Nation programme in Singapore is being driven by the Infocomm Development Authority, in London the smart city project is governed by the Great London Authority. The Smart Seoul Project in Korea is governed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and New York has the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation serving as the coordinating entity for new technology and IoT deployments across all City agencies. In India, the nodal agency driving the 100 Smart Cities Project is the Ministry of Urban Development under the Indian Government. In India, the implementation of the Mission at the City level will be done by a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which will be a limited company and will plan, appraise, approve, release funds, implement, manage, operate, monitor and evaluate the Smart City development projects.

Policies

Many of the cities had open data policies and data protection policies that pertain to the Smart City initiatives. In Dubai, an open data law called Dubai Open Data Law has been issued to complete the legislative framework for transforming Dubai into a Smart City and the Smart City Establishment will develop policies for the project. New York also has an Open Data Plan in place and LinkNYC will use anonymized, aggregate data to address data privacy of users. In London, the Smart London Plan incorporates the existing open data platform called ‘London DataStore’, the rules for which are defined by the Greater London Authority, which also ensures privacy and transparent use of data by processing personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. For regulation of data in Seoul, a ‘Seoul Data Mart’ will be established to make public information available for data processing and the Seoul Open Data Plaza is an existing online channel to share and provide citizens with all of Seoul’s public data. South Korea has a comprehensive law governing data privacy in place as well. In Singapore, the Personal Data Protection Commission has committed to work and support the Smart Nation vision on data privacy and cyber security ecosystem. To achieve the vision of the project, the government has also promoted the use of open data. It can be said the these countries , with clearly laid out policies to support and guide the project, have well planned ecosystem for regulation and governance of systems, technologies and cities. All cities have incorporated open data into smart cities and many have developed guidelines for its use. All cities have similar goals of enhancing the lives of citizens and developing anticipatory regulation, however, there appears to be little discussion on the need to amend existing law or enable new law around privacy and data protection in light of data collection through smart cities. In India, no enabling legislation or policy has been formulated by the Government, apart from releasing “Mission Statement and Guidelines”, which provides details about the Project and vision, excluding a definition of a ‘smart city’ or the relevant applicable laws and policies. No information is publicly available regarding deployment of open data, use of specific technologies like cloud, big data, etc., the relevant policies and applicability of laws. Unlike India, all cities recognize the importance of big data techniques in enabling smart city visions, technology and policies. On the lines of these cities, India must work towards addressing the need for an open data framework in light of the 100 Smart Cities Mission to enable the sharing of non-confidential data between public entities and other stakeholders. This requires co-ordination to incorporate, enable and draw upon open data architecture in the cities by the Government with the existing open data framework in India, like the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012. Use of technology in the form of IoT and Big Data entails access to open data, bringing another policy area in its ambit which needs consideration. Also, identification and development of open standards for IoT must be looked at. Also, as data in smart cities will be generated, collected, used, and shared by both the public and private sector. It is essential that India’s existing data protection standards and regime must be amended to extend the data regulation beyond a body corporate and oversee the collection and use of data by the Government, and its agencies.

Standards

In Singapore, the Smart Nation initiative follows the standards laid under the purview of the Singapore Standards Council (SSC)and the Singapore IT standards abides to the international standards as defined by ISO, ITU, etc. The Country is also a member of many international standards forums (see Singapore International Standards Committee) which includes JTC1/WG9- Big Data; JTC1/WG10 - Internet of Things; JTC1/WG11 - Smart Cities. In Dubai, the Smart Dubai Executive Committee with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to adopt the performance indicators by the ITU Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to evaluate the feasibility of the indicators. For the purpose of standards, the ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities (ANSSC) in New York is a forum smart and sustainable cities, along with US being a signatory of the ISO/ITU defined standards on smart cities. Also, The British Standards Institution (BSI) has already established Smart City standards and has associated with the ISO Advisory Group on smart city standards. The UK subscribes to the BSI standards for smart cities and has adopted the same and the Smart London Plan incorporates open data standards in accordance with London DataStore. For development of smart cities, Korea has adopted the ISO/TC 268, which is focused on sustainable development in communities and also has one working group developing city indicators and another working group developing metrics for smart community infrastructures. However, in India, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has undertaken the task to formulate standardised guidelines for central and state authorities in planning, design and construction of smart cities by setting up a technical committee under the Civil engineering department of the Bureau. However, adoption of the standards by implementing agencies would be voluntary and intends to complement internationally available documents in this area. Also, The Global Cities Institute (GCI) has undertaken a mission in the year 2015 to align with the Bureau of Indian Standards regarding development of standards of smart cities and also to forge relationships with Indian cities in light of ISO 37120. It can be said that India has currently not yet adopted international standards, but is in the process of developing national standards and adopting key international standards. Unlike other cities,which are adopting standards - national, ISO, or ITU, Indian cities are yet to adopt standards for regulation of the future smart cities.

Notes for India

India is in the nascent stages of developing smart cities across the country. Drawing from the practices adopted by cities across the world, smart cities in India should adopt strong regulatory and governance frameworks regarding technical standards, open data and data security and data protection policies. These policies will be essential in ensuring the sustainability and efficiency of smart cities while safeguarding individual rights. Some of these policies are already in place - such as India’s Open Data Policy and India’s data protection standards under section 43A of the ITA. It will be important to see how these policies are adopted and applied to the context of smart cities.

References

[1] Smart Cities and Transparent Evolution, http://www.posterheroes.org/Posterheroes3/_mat/PH3_eng.pdf.

[2] "Data, Data Everywhere." The Economist, February 25, 2010. Accessed March 17, 2016, http://www.economist.com/node/15557443.

[3] "Smart Cities." ISO. 2015. Accessed March 17, 2016, http://www.iso.org/iso/smart_cities_report-jtc1.pdf.

[4] Transcript of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech at Smart Nation launch on 24 November, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loongs-speech-smart-nation-launch-24-november.

[5] Smart Nation Vision, https://www.ida.gov.sg/Tech-Scene-News/Smart-Nation-Vision.

[6] Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[7] Smart Nation Platform, https://www.ida.gov.sg/~/media/Files/About%20Us/Newsroom/Media%20Releases/2014/0617_smartnation/AnnexA_sn.pdf.

[8] Transcript of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech at Smart Nation launch on 24 November, https://www.ida.gov.sg/blog/insg/featured/singapore-lays-groundwork-to-be-worlds-first-smart-nation/.

[9] Prime Ministers’ Office Singapore-Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[10] Prime Ministers’ Office Singapore-Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[11] Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Responsibility of the Prime Minister) Notification 2015, http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/search/display/view.w3p;page=0;query=Status%3Acurinforce%20Type%3Aact,sl%20Content%3A%22smart%22;rec=4;resUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fstatutes.agc.gov.sg%2Faol%2Fsearch%2Fsummary%2Fresults.w3p%3Bquery%3DStatus%253Acurinforce%2520Type%253Aact,sl%2520Content%253A%2522smart%2522;whole=yes.

[12] Personal Data Protection Singapore-Annual Report 2014-15, https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/docs/default-source/Reports/pdpc-ar-fy14---online.pdf.

[13] Balancing Innovation and Personal Data Protection, https://www.ida.gov.sg/Tech-Scene-News/Tech-News/Digital-Government/2015/9/Balancing-innovation-and-personal-data-protection.

[14] Department of Statistics Singapore- Free Access to More Data on the SingStat Website from 1 March 2015, http://www.singstat.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-library/news/press_releases/press27022015.pdf.

[15] Singapore Marks 50th Birthday With Open Data Contest, https://blog.hootsuite.com/singapore-open-data/.

[16] Virtual Singapore - a 3D city model platform for knowledge sharing and community collaboration, http://www.sla.gov.sg/News/tabid/142/articleid/572/category/Press%20Releases/parentId/97/year/2014/Default.aspx.

[17] Internet of Things (IoT) Standards Outline to Support Smart Nation Initiative Unveiled, http://www.spring.gov.sg/NewsEvents/PR/Pages/Internet-of-Things-(IoT)-Standards-Outline-to-Support-Smart-Nation-Initiative-Unveiled-20150812.aspx.

[18] Information Technology Standards Committee, https://www.itsc.org.sg/technical-committees/internet-of-things-technical-committee-iottc and https://www.ida.gov.sg/~/media/Files/Infocomm%20Landscape/iN2015/Reports/realisingthevisionin2015.pdf.

[19] Government of Dubai-2021 Dubai Plan-Purpose, http://www.dubaiplan2021.ae/the-purpose/.

[20] Government of Dubai-2021 Dubai Plan, http://www.dubaiplan2021.ae/dubai-plan-2021/.

[21] Smart Dubai, http://www.smartdubai.ae/foundation_layers.php.

[22] The Internet of Things: Connections for People’s happiness, http://www.smartdubai.ae/story021002.php.

[23] Smart Dubai - Current State, http://www.smartdubai.ae/current_state.php.

[24] Smart Dubai - District Guidelines, http://smartdubai.ae/districtguidelines/Smart_Dubai_District_Guidelines_Public_Brief.pdf.

[25] See; http://roadmap.smartdubai.ae/search-services-public.php and http://roadmap.smartdubai.ae/search-initiatives-public.php.

[26] Smart Dubai-Smart District Guidelines, http://smartdubai.ae/districtguidelines/Smart_Dubai_District_Guidelines_Public_Brief.pdf.

[27] Dubai Ruler issues new laws to further enhance the organisational structure and legal framework of Dubai Smart City, https://www.wam.ae/en/news/emirates/1395288828473.html.

[28] See: http://slc.dubai.gov.ae/en/AboutDepartment/News/Lists/NewsCentre/DispForm.aspx?ID=147&ContentTypeId=0x01001D47EB13C23E544893300E8367A23439 and http://www.smartdubai.ae/dubai_data.php.

[29] Dubai first city to trial ITU key performance indicators for smart sustainable cities, http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/12.aspx#.VtaYtlt97IU.

[30] Smart Dubai Benchmark Report 2015 Executive Summary, http://smartdubai.ae/bmr2015/methodology-public.php.

[31] Building a Smart + Equitable City, http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/forward/documents/NYC-Smart-Equitable-City-Final.pdf

[32] Building a Smart + Equitable City, http://www1.nyc.gov/site/forward/innovations/smartnyc.page.

[33] One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City, http://www1.nyc.gov/html/onenyc/about.html

[34] Open Data for All, http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/reports/2015/NYC-Open-Data-Plan-2015.pdf.

[35] 7 public projects that are turning New York into a “smart city”, http://www.builtinnyc.com/2015/11/24/7-projects-are-turning-new-york-futuristic-technology-hub.

[36] LinkNYC, https://www.link.nyc/faq.html#privacy.

[7] ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities, http://www.ansi.org/standards_activities/standards_boards_panels/anssc/overview.aspx?menuid=3

[38] IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework, http://publicaa.ansi.org/sites/apdl/Documents/News%20and%20Publications/Links%20Within%20Stories/IoT-EnabledSmartCityFrameworkWP20160213.pdf.

[39] Smart London (UK) Plan: Digital Technologies, London and Londoners, http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2015/03/KleinmanM_Smart-London-UK-v5_30AP2015.pdf.

[40] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[41] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[42] Open Data White Paper, https://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Open_data_White_Paper.pdf.

[43] London Datastore-Privacy, http://data.london.gov.uk/about/privacy/.

[44] Future Cities Standards Centre in London, https://eu-smartcities.eu/commitment/5937.

[45] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[46] Smart Cities background paper, October 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/246019/bis-13-1209-smart-cities-background-paper-digital.pdf.

[47] Presentation of 2015 Blueprint of Seoul as ‘State-of-the-art Smart City’, http://english.seoul.go.kr/presentation-of-2015-blueprint-of-seoul-as-%E2%80%98state-of-the-art-smart-city%E2%80%99/.

[48] “Policy Where There is Demand,” Seoul Utilizes Big Data, http://english.seoul.go.kr/policy-demand-seoul-utilizes-big-data/

[49] Seoul’s “Owl Bus” Based on Big Data Technology, http://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/citiesalliance.org/files/Seoul-Owl-Bus-11052014.pdf

[50] Seoul Launches “Global Digital Seoul 2020”, http://english.seoul.go.kr/seoul-launches-global-digital-seoul-2020/

[51] Smart Seoul 2015, http://english.seoul.go.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SMART_SEOUL_2015_41.pdf

[52] Disclosing public data through the Seoul Open Data Plaza, http://english.seoul.go.kr/policy-information/key-policies/informatization/seoul-open-data-plaza/

[53] Data protection in South Korea: overview, http://uk.practicallaw.com/2-579-7926.

[54]Smart Cities Seoul: a case study, https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/23/01/T23010000190001PDFE.pdf

[55] Smart Cities-ISO, http://www.iso.org/iso/livelinkgetfile-isocs?nodeid=16193764.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/policies-and-standards-overview-of-five-international-smart-cities

Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, Nairobi: A Summary

praskrishna — 2011-10-24T09:09:14Z

The sixth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum was held from 27 to 30 September 2011 at the United Nations Office in Nairobi, Kenya. Sunil Abraham participated in six workshops: Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses, Use of Digital Technologies for Civic Engagement and Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward, The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise, Proprietary Influences in Free and Open Source Software: Lessons to Open and Universal Internet Standards, Access and Diversity of Broadband Internet Access and Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?

Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses

Workshop No. 219
The workshop was moderated by Kim Pham, Expression Technologies, Civil Society (United States). The panel members included Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, Centro de Technologica e Socieda (Brazil), Christopher Soghoian, Indiana University (United States), Karen Reilly, Tor Project, Technical/Civil Society (United States) and Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society (India).
See the workshop details here

Use of Digital Technologies for Civic Engagement and Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward

Workshop No. 184
The workshop was moderated by Katim S Touray Council Vice Chair, Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa and Member, ICANN Board of Directors. Fouad Bajwa of Gerry Morgan Foundation (Pakistan) was the remote moderator. Nnenna Nwakanma of Nnenna.org, Simeon Oriko of @TheKuyuProject &@StorySpaces, Wael Khalil, Activist and Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet & Society were the panel members. Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet & Society participated remotely from Bangalore.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise

Workshop No. 211
The workshop was moderated by Dorothy Gordon, Director General, AITI-KACE, Judy Okite was the remote moderator. The panel members were Satish Babu, ICFOSS, India, Yves Miezan Ezo, Smile Training, Manager, (France), Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, Evans Ikua, FOSS Certification Manager, ict@innovation program.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Proprietary Influences in Free and Open Source Software: Lessons to Open and Universal Internet Standards

Workshop No. 201
The workshop was moderated by Alejandro Pisanty, Director General for Academic Computing Services of the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico. Tracy Hackshaw, Computer Society of Trinadad and Tobago, Trinadad and Tobago, Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India and Scott O Bradner, University Technology Security Officer, Harvard University, USA were the panel members.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Access and Diversity of Broadband Internet Access

Workshop No. 113
The workshop was moderated by N Ravi Shanker, Addl Secy, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India (Chair). Abhishek Singh, Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Public Policy and Government Relations, Google India and Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society, India were the panel members.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Putting users First: How can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?

Workshop No. 75
This workshop was moderated by Ambassador David Gross, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP, Yiannis Theodorou, Regulatory Policy Manager, GSMA was the remote moderator. The panel members included Pat Walshe, Director of Privacy-GSMA), Jeff Brueggeman (Vice President-Publiy Policy AT&T), Patrick Ryan, Policy Counsel, Open Internet for Google Inc, Ms Juliana Rotich, Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc, Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society (India) and Ian Brown, co-director of Oxford University's Information Security and Privacy Programme.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sixth-annual-meeting-igf

SIF Concept Note

Admin — 2019-06-05T04:13:13Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/sif-concept-note

Should Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar project, for identity proof and welfare delivery, exist at all?

praskrishna — 2014-04-14T10:27:57Z

The foundation of Aadhaar—a Congress flagship project to give every Indian a unique identity number and then use it to deliver services—has been under assault in the past three months.

The article by M. Rajshekhar was published in the Economic Times on April 3, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Political, legal, reputational.

The political backlash is coming from leaders of BJP, the Congress' principal rival. Meenakshi Lekhi and Ananth Kumar are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first or the last word on policy matters in the BJP, but they mince no words when they say that if their party forms a government, it will trash Aadhaar —a project that has delivered a unique ID to half of India and on which Rs 3,800 crore has been spent.

Even as BJP's loose cannons fired, the Supreme Court repeated on March 24 that the government cannot make Aadhaar mandatory to access welfare services like pensions and LPG subsidy. The same day, investigative journalism portal Cobrapost aired videos that allegedly showed agencies agreeing to enrol people from neighbouring countries for a bribe.

The BJP piled on. "It (Aadhaar) has served no purpose. They have issued cards to illegal migrants. We want citizenship cards," says Prakash Javadekar, spokesperson of BJP. His party does not have an official policy line on Aadhaar as yet, but another of its leaders, Yashwant Sinha, headed the Parliamentary panel that, in 2011, severely criticised and rejected the draft bill that provided the legal framework for Aadhaar. "We are for direct benefit transfer but not on the basis of Aadhaar, which is a very badly-designed scheme," Sinha told CNBC-TV18 on January 31. "We will give it to all citizens of India on the basis of NPR."

On the campaign trail in Bangalore, Nandan Nilekani, the chief architect and implementer of Aadhaar, defends his work as the chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). "Aadhaar is a pro-development and an anti-corruption platform," says Nilekani, who was brought in by the Congress high command in 2009 and is contesting these elections on a party ticket against BJP's Kumar in Bangalore South. "It is a pity that some vested interests with narrow political and other motives are trying to stall the project."

Lost in those binaries are the objectives of Aadhaar, to universalise identity proof and to use it to plug leakages in delivery of welfare services. UIDAI, led by a hands-on Nilekani, pursued this agenda with a certain authority, great speed and an overriding emphasis on technology, all of which delivered outcomes.

But they also contributed to shortcomings that saw the project stumble on its way and for which it is now being critiqued. "This is the only way transformation takes place," says K Koshy, who was part of the team that conceptualised Aadhaar and is now with Ernst & Young. "When you know the ultimate system is workable, you sort out the problems as you go along."

Except, given the political winds blowing, it's anyone's guess what the new dispensation will feel about Aadhaar and UIDAI, from where Nilekani resigned on March 13 and which is seeing many officers who came from other parts of the government, on deputation, returning. Will the new dispensation see Aadhaar as an idea that is sound but with parts that need strengthening? Or, will they see it as an idea that is, by itself, fallacious? "I don't know where this is going," says Abhijit Sen, member, Planning Commission, under which UIDAI is housed.

At one level, it's a political question. "The next Parliament will have to decide what UIDAI can and cannot do," says Sen. At another level, even that political answer will stem from the answers to three questions that go to the core of what Aadhaar was meant to be and where it fell short.

1. Does Aadhaar Provide a Unique and Definitive Identity?

Yes and no. UIDAI collects two sets of information from an individual. The first is biometrics: prints of all 10 fingers and a scan of the iris in both eyes. Biometric data, which is supposed to be unique to every individual, is used to assign a unique number to the individual. The second set is basic personal information: name, address, father's name, date of birth and address. Individuals can show existing documents—like voter's I-card or passport —as verification. For those who did not have identification documents, UIDAI allowed certain people to attest for them.

Aadhaar is better at identifying individuals through their biometrics than ensuring the accuracy of their add-on data. This is partly due to its design. When Aadhaar was being conceptualised, says Shrikant Nadhamuni, who headed technology for UIDAI: "We wanted to move the ID game—from a state where some people had no ID and others had paper ID to something beyond even what Singapore had, in the form of smart cards, to online. Like biometric. Which is the future.

Here, your presence is enough to vet your ID." This is also partly due to how UIDAI did its enrolments. Shortly after taking charge, Nilekani announced UIDAI would issue 600 million Aadhaar numbers by March 2014. The initial plan was that the National Population Register (NPR), which conducts the decadal Census and which is housed under the ministry of home, would do the enrolments— capturing biometrics and information— and UIDAI would only issue the numbers.

Soon after, Nilekani decided he could not meet his 600 million target if he waited for NPR to give him biometric packets, and offered to do enrolments too. To meet the target, UIDAI wanted to outsource enrolment to multiple vendors. And compared to NPR, UIDAI collected very little demographic data. UIDAI appointed public and private companies as enrolment agencies. Quality issues arose. "90% of the larger enrolment agencies offloaded the work to local, small-time guys," says the head of a Gurgaon-based enrolment agency, not wanting to be named.

Instances of incomplete addresses, spelling mistakes, people bribing enrolment staff to obtain numbers, emerged. "There is always a trade off between inclusion and accuracy," says Nilekani. "And the fact that these errors happened only shows that the gates were kept wide enough to ensure there would be no exclusion." "The Aadhaar database is based on very weak data," says Sunil Abraham, the head of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, an Internet and governance think-tank. "It is basically linking biometrics to a person and the name/address he claims as his." This weakness started showing up as the government began to deliver welfare services by transferring money directly into bank accounts of beneficiaries, using Aadhaar. The first step was to add the Aadhaar number to the department and bank databases.

Reddy Subramanyam, joint secretary of NREGA, tried to seed Aadhaar numbers into his database of NREGA workers. "The current matching is just 25-30%." The mismatch arises because, say, the name will be S Kumar in one and Sunil Kumar in another. Aadhaar is "less ID project and more identification project," says legal researcher Usha Ramanathan. "The onus for ensuring the demographic information is correct falls on the number-holder."

2. Are Aadhaar-enabled Cash Transfers Delivering?

If giving every Indian a unique ID was Aadhaar's main mandate, revamping welfare delivery became its second. In 2011, Nilekani headed a committee to create a roadmap to move to a system of welfare delivery where money was transferred directly into bank accounts of beneficiaries—or direct benefit transfers (DBTs). The architectures it proposed pivoted around Aadhaar and online, realtime biometric authentication. This was to replace the existing smart-card architecture, which can work even in areas even without connectivity.

UIDAI saw the cloud as the future. "We were not very taken with the smart-card solution," says Nadhamuni. "Farmers have to carry multiple smart cards around. And then, there is the cost of the card." Smart-card companies, staring at the prospect of their investments going waste, protested. "Customers and service providers deserve the right to make a convenient choice. Can someone building a public highway insist that only a certain sort of a vehicle can ply on it?" Abhishek Sinha, CEO of Eko India, a mobile-banking start-up told ET in November 2011.

"The question is whether the model is working better now than what existed before," defends Koshy. It's a question that has not been answered conclusively and credibly: there have been no independent evaluations by the government of Aadhaarbased DBTs till now. "Aadhaar should not have been rolled out on a mission mode till it was tested on some scale," says MS Sriram, visiting faculty at IIM Bangalore's Centre for Public Policy. When asked about this, Sen says: "There was no independent evaluation. Everyone was rushing." From the field came reports about manual labourers and the aged struggling to authenticate using biometrics.

Nor were comparative studies conducted to check alternative ways to improve welfare delivery. Economist Reetika Khera argues that Chhattisgarh has removed corruption from its PDS programme through a mix of computerisation and community supervision. This echoes an observation made by the Parliamentary panel while rejecting the UIDAI bill: the government had not considered comparative costs of Aadhaar and other existing ID documents.

Yet, in November 2012, the Congress decided to make DBTs its calling card for the 2014 elections. At a rally in Dudu, Rajasthan, attended by Congress leaders and Nilekani, it announced DBT rollout in the state. A year later, after a patchy rollout, the Congress lost power in the state. And on January 30, the UPA pressed pause on DBTs for cooking gas.

3. Are there Strong Safeguards to Protect a Person's Privacy?

On February 26, the Mumbai High Court directed UIDAI to share its Goa biometrics with the CBI to help it solve a rape case in the state the agency was struggling to solve. UIDAI refused, saying this would violate the privacy of its number holders. The High Court agreed with the CBI. UIDAI went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that its biometric information cannot be shared with any government agency without the consent of number holders.

But the CBI request had shown what could go wrong. "Once you create an ID system, other things happen," says Sen. "The most inevitable one is that government departments—like the police—want to access it. A database exists and I want to use it." Says a Supreme Court lawyer, not wanting to be named: "You innocently give your fingerprints to UIDAI because you want your scholarship or gas subsidy or something. You volunteer this information and then you realise this can be used as evidence against you in a criminal trial?" In time, more agencies will use Aadhaar. "The moment you start putting the Aadhaar number into multiple databases, you make them comparable," says Abraham. "Land registry, tax records, etc, all become comparable." Adds Sen: "We need to think about who can use the authentication service."

He cites the example of banks using Aadhaar to judge a borrower's credit record as a good thing. Conversely, he adds, an insurer using a customer's Aadhaar to access hospital records, and take a call on premiums or policy issuance, is a bad outcome. "Insurance is supposed to work by pooling risk. Should they (insurers) even have the right to ask for authentication?" asks Sen. UIDAI officials say three things in their defence. One, they collect innocuous information, which they don't share. Two, for authentication queries, they only give 'yes/no' answers. Three, they have safeguards.

What is missing is a legal framework that governs collection, use and retention of biometrics. "India has not passed a data privacy law," says Nadhamuni. "This is a very important legislation we need to draft and enact for projects that use large-scale IT systems, be it Aadhaar, NREGA, voter card, income tax, etc. In the absence of such laws, UIDAI came up with rigorous data privacy and security policies to secure resident data." However, the Parliamentary panel, while rejecting the bill, noted that UIDAI began collecting biometric data even as the government worked on a privacy bill and a data protection bill. "The idea that databases can be used by anyone makes people vulnerable, especially in a state where there is neither law nor much respect for law," says Ramanathan.

Aadhaar stands at an uncomfortable junction. A new government, eager to ensure only citizens have unique numbers, could ask all Aadhaar holders to provide address proof and delete the others. Events of the past three months have framed the issues concerning Aadhaar, sometimes with a touch of rhetoric. "This is a good time to open the regulation issue," says Sen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-april-3-2014-m-rajshekhar-should-nandan-nilekani-aadhar-project-for-identity-proof-and-welfare-delivery-exist

Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published

Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2016-10-29T14:47:52Z

We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.

The research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Subbiah Arunachalam was published in the Indian Institute of Science Repository on October 29, 2016.

More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journals and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch.

We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.

More than two decades ago Harnad posted his subversive proposal to a mailing list in which he called on researchers “to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the internet.”^1,2 Many researchers now make their papers freely available either by publishing them in open access (OA) journals or by placing them in repositories or websites. Indeed, a 2013 report asserted that by 2011 “free availability of a majority of papers has been reached in general science and technology, in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics, and statistics,” and that the number of open access papers has been growing by about 2% a year.³

Journals make papers open access in two ways: OA journals make all papers open access immediately on publication, and hybrid OA journals make selected papers open access. Most OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge to make a paper open access. Current Science is such a journal. Many OA journals – about 26% according to Solomon and Björk⁴ – and all hybrid OA journals levy an article processing charge (APC) to provide OA to a paper. However, according to Crotty,⁵the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC. The APC levied by journals used by Indian researchers is in the range INR 500 (~US$8) - US$5,000.

OA journal publishing, particularly by commercial publishers and in the field of biomedicine, is growing rapidly. According to DOAJ there are 9,192 OA journals as of 2 September 2016 published from 130 countries and one can access more than 2.27 million articles. Currently, DOAJ is growing at the net rate of 6 titles per day.⁶ The Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) lists 14,031 OA journals published from some 140 countries.⁷

Repositories, where full texts of research publications are deposited and made available online, are of two kinds: central repositories, such as arXiv, and distributed (or institutional) repositories, such as the University of Southampton institutional research repository, <eprints.soton.ac.uk>, the first of its kind.

Here we are concerned only with the open access journals which make all content open access immediately on publication. Further, our interest is in papers from India that are published in journals levying APC. The question we are particularly interested in is, ‘is paid open access affordable for India?’ And, even if it is affordable, should we go for it?

We assessed the current status of the use of OA journals by Indian researchers using bibliometric analysis of data gathered from Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). We used this analysis to find out the number of papers Indian researchers have published in OA journals charging APC, leading to an estimate of the amount the country as a whole would potentially have spent on APC costs, and to see if publishing in paid OA journals led to higher levels of citations.

Methodology

We searched for articles, letters, proceedings papers and reviews from India in OA journals

indexed in SCIE in the five years 2010-2014. The search made on 11 January 2016 resulted in

37,122 papers. Of these, 44 papers resulting from five international collaborations (CMS,

ATLAS, ALICE, STAR and FAITH), and appearing in journals such as Physics Letters B, New Journal of Physics, Nuclear Physics B and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, had a very large number of authors (running to several hundreds). We removed them from the data set as they hindered processing the data. Thus we considered 37,078 papers. We downloaded full bibliographic data for all these and analysed the data using Visual FoxPro and found that Indian researchers have used 881 OA journals in which to publish these papers. We visited the web site of each of these journals during January- February 2016 to find out information on APCs levied by them. Also we classified the journals into 22 major field categories following the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) classification. This classification does not allocate journals to multiple fields. We identified papers in which at least one author was from a country other than India.

Using the same strategy as used for Indian publications, we recorded the number of papers published by 12 other countries and the proportion of OA papers (data gathered on 29 January 2016).

Results

We present here the key findings. Details of our bibliometric analysis are available from the

authors and will soon be presented in a report.

Use of OA journals by researchers – In the five years considered, SCIE had indexed 6,460,105 papers, of which 748,127 (or 11.58%) were in OA journals. In Fig. 1, we present the share of proportion of journal publications which have appeared in OA journals in 13 countries in the 5year period 2010-2014. Brazil has the highest proportion (close to one in three papers), with

India coming a distant second (one in seven papers). That Brazil leads is not surprising. Long before the OA movement began, the funding community led by the São Paulo Science

Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean

Center on Health Sciences Information recognized the need for strengthening the visibility of the Brazilian journals, and initiated the SciELO movement in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1997, which later spread to Chile and the rest of Ibero-America and South Africa.⁸ As Vessuri et al.⁹ have pointed out, a strong sense of public mission among Latin American universities, coupled with the realization that OA improves the presence and impact of Latin American research publications led Latin America to develop its own knowledge exchange mechanisms on its own terms.

Estimates of the proportion of open access papers vary widely depending on the source used and when the estimate was made. For example, by analysing journals indexed in Scopus we found that 4,231 of the 22,460 active titles (as of 6 February 2016) were OA (as seen from DOAJ on September 2015) and were listed in either or both of DOAJ and ROAD.¹⁰ Of the more than

12,000 journals covered by Web of Science, 1,313 journals are OA as of October 2015 as listed

by DOAJ.¹¹ Analyzing data from Google Scholar, Jamali and Nabavi showed that more than 61% of papers were accessible in full text.¹²

Use of journals charging APC - In 2010, Indian researchers had published their work in 479 OA journals, of which 237 did not charge APC. The number of OA journals used by Indian researchers to publish their work is increasing (Table 1). It has risen from 445 in 2009¹³ to 611 in 2014. More than half of the 611 journals levy APC.

Not all journals charging APC have a fixed APC. There are many models. Of the 881 SCIEindexed OA journals which Indian researchers have used, 488 charge a fee: 437 charge a fixed APC, 49 levy page charges, and two charge a non-refundable submission fee. Contrary to

Crotty’s observation that the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC,⁵ Indian authors publish a larger number of papers in non-APC journals. However, papers published in journals levying APC are cited a larger number of times on average.

The APC OA journal used most often by Indian researchers in the five-year period is PLoS One with a total publication count of 2,404 and average cites per paper (CPP) of 7.32. Starting with 78 papers in 2009,¹³ the number increased to 724 papers from India in 2014. Indeed, Current Science, which comes next in the list with 2,334 papers with a CPP of 1.74, was the leader until 2011.

Overseas collaboration - All authors are from India in 30,152 of the 37,078 papers published by Indian researchers in the 881 OA journals; this includes papers in which all authors are from the same institution as well as papers with authors from more than one Indian institution. These papers have been cited 78,722 times for a CPP of 2.61. There are 6,926 papers with at least one author from an address outside India, and these have been cited 39,031 times for a CPP of 5.63.

Indian researchers have collaborated with authors from some 115 countries. Collaborators are mainly from USA (2,191 papers), UK (815 papers) and Germany (708 papers).

Country of journal publication - Indian authors have published in OA journals from 61 countries. More than half (18,781) were published in 48 Indian journals, six of which charge APC. As one would expect, US and UK journals followed Indian journals in the number of papers published: 7,647 papers were published in 149 US journals of which 107 charge APC, and 2,834 papers were published in 172 UK journals of which 162 charge APC. Indian researchers have published

675 papers in 54 Brazilian OA journals of which nine levy APC, 229 papers in 9 Chilean OA journals of which two levy APC, 231 papers in 14 journals published from China of which five charge APC in the five yeras. In these five years Indian authors have published 652 papers in seven Nigerian APC journals. Of these, all but one were delisted from Web of Science after a few years of coverage. Such delisting is all too common. Of the 881 journals studied here, only 263 have been used by Indian researchers in all five years.

Citations to papers published in journals levying APC – Number of papers by Indian researchers in 57 journals charging APC and publishing at least 10 papers from India and has a CPP of not less than 10 are listed in Table 2. Table 3 lists the 10 journals that do not levy APC and have been cited at least 10 times on average in the five years. Three journals, viz. Nucleic Acids Research, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and BMC Genomics, all of which charge an APC of well over US$2,000, have published more than 100 papers from India. In all three journals, CPP of Indian papers are less than CPP of the journal as a whole, and there is a big difference between the CPP of papers written solely by Indian authors and that of those written in collaboration with foreign authors. For example, Nucleic Acids Research has published 138 papers from India (CPP 14.09) out of a total of 6,614. The journal’s average CPP for the 5-year period is 25.29 as against India’s CPP of 14.09. The 80 papers entirely written by Indian researchers has a CPP of less than 10, and the CPP of the 58 papers with foreign collaborators is more than 22.

As many as 92 papers have appeared in 10 OA journals which do not charge APC, none of which are from India, and these have been cited more than 15 times on average. Of the 92 papers, 41 were published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization at a CPP of about 12.5. In contrast, the CPP of the 478 papers published in the journal during the five years is above 15.

Use of mega journals- Indian authors have published 3,100 papers in nine mega journals where the papers are accepted without applying the usual standards of strict peer review if they are perceived to be technically sound (Table 4).

Papers classified by field - It is in Clinical Medicine that Indian researchers have published in the largest number of OA journals (208) as well as contributing the largest number of papers (10,036). They have published in 88 journals in the field of Plant and Animal Science, but have published a much larger number of papers in both Chemistry and Biology & Biochemistry in a smaller number of journals.

Discussion

Over 14.4% of the 37,122 papers from India as seen from SCIE have been published in OA journals. The actual number of OA papers from India will be much larger since, for example,

Scopus is likely to have indexed a larger number of such papers. Additionally, there are papers published in hybrid OA journals and papers published in non-OA journals that are made open access by placing them in institutional or central repositories or freely available through author websites, which indicates that there is a welcome growing awareness of the need for making one’s work OA. Our earlier study¹³ has revealed that some 16% of Indian papers were pulished in OA journals indexed in SCIE 2009, but in that study we had considered all categories of papers from OA journals collected comprehensively from various sources.

Potential spend on APC seen in perspective

We estimated the total APC for all 14,293 papers published by Indian authors in OA journals charging a fixed APC (leaving out 7% of all OA papers charging variable APC). We found there is an average cost of ~ US$1,173 per paper. We compared this figure with the costs on APCs incurred by institutions elsewhere.

From a survey of a large sample of journals listed in DOAJ carried out in 2014, Morrison et al.

reported an average APC of US$964.¹⁴

The Wellcome Trust, which supports payment of charges incurred by their grantees, reported a total spend of about £4.7 million paid for 2,556 papers, published in OA or hybrid journals, in 2013-14 at an average APC of £1,837. Close to 60% of these papers were published in the journals of the five leading publishers, and of these 68% were in hybrid journals. In 2014-15, the

Charity Open Access Fund, comprising the Trust and five other funders, had paid more than £5.6 million towards APCs for 2,942 papers at an average cost of £1,914.¹⁵

In its report dated March 2015, RCUK indicated an average APC of £1,600, based on APC paid for 6,504 papers from 55 universities during the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15. The average APC paid varies from university to university, from £778 for the School of Oriental & African

Studies to £2,248 for Durham University.¹⁶ Over the 15-month period April 2013 – July 2014,

Leeds University alone had paid publishers a little over £270,000, of which about £10,000 was for colour and page charges. For the 166 RCUK funded papers for which APCs were paid during the review period, the average cost of APC was £1,626.74.¹⁷University of Cambridge spent

£936,000 towards APC in 2014. For the 495 RCUK funded papers the average cost was £1,891.¹⁸ Besides this, the university has also supported payment of page and colour charges and has paid for researchers to join memberships that offer a discount for APCs out of the RCUK fund. There is a growing concern in the university if they should be spending so much money on

APCs.¹⁸

Björk and Solomon, in their report submitted to a consortium of European funding agencies in March 2014, had estimated the average APC from a study of journals indexed in Scopus for at least two years to be US$ 1,418.¹⁹

Gerritsma reported that in 2013, the Netherlands had spent €4 million towards 3,314 papers published in OA journals charging APC and in hybrid journals, and indexed in SCIE, at an average APC of €1,220.²⁰

In 2015, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) spent over €418,000 on APCs for 288 papers in Gold OA journals (average €2,376) and €2.38 million on APCs for 913 papers (average €1,453). In addition FWF incurred an expenditure of €273,600 on other costs.²¹

The variation is to be expected, as the sampled journals vary and in the case of India a substantial number of low-APC journals would have been used. Wang et al. have found that the level of APCs varies with the region. European and North American APC OA journals have average

APC of more than US$2000, while Asian, African and South American APC OA journals have average APC of less than US$1000.²²

If we assume that APC was paid in full for all the 14,297 papers (4,775 with foreign collaborators and 9,522 by exclusively Indian authors) published by Indian authors in OA journals charging APC, the total expenditure would be around US$16.75 million. This figure does not include the APC for the other 7% of papers published in journals charging APC on the basis of number of pages, submission fee, and so on. Nor does it include the expenditure on OA papers published in hybrid journals. These journals usually charge much more than journals with fixed APC. According to Björk and Solomon (2014), the average APC for publication charged by hybrid journals published by subscription publishers (such as Elsevier and Wiley) is US$

2,727, almost double that chaged by fully OA journals published by non-subscription publishers (such as PLoS), US$ 1,418.¹⁹ It is possible that APCs for many papers jointly authored with foreign collaborators might have been paid by the other party. Also, in some cases authors might have been granted either a fee waiver or a discount. Allowing for these possibilities, we may assume that the sum spent would still be very high, more than ~US$12 million, or an average of US$2.4 million a year. This amount is in addition to the national expenditure on its academic and research library budget. Data releaesed early this year as part of the Natioanl Institutional Ranking Framework (https://www.nirfindia.org/Ranking) exercise reveal that the academic and library budget is by no means small.

Author pays model has failed

In the initial years of the ‘author pays’ OA journals, the hope was that OA publishing would be cheaper than subscription publishing. Eisen claimed that APC would go down “and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero.”²³ What we see in reality, however, is that the APC charged by PLoS One has gone up from US$1,250 when it was founded in December 2006 to US$1,450 now. The APC charged by PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine has increased from

US$1,500 at launch in 2003 to US$2,900 in 2012, a rise of 93% in nine years.²³ The situation at

BioMed Central is no different. Comparing the APC levied by the 165 BMC titles between 2010 and 2016, Wheatly has shown that for many titles there has been a substantial rise.²⁴ Neylon, a former employee of PLoS had recently conceded that “no functional market is emerging and it

(APC model) might be the wrong economic model.”²⁵

When the high energy physics community and librarians from more than 20 countries negotiated with publishers to make key journals OA, it resulted in a contract with 11 publishers that would ensure they could make 10 journals OA immediately on publication and, in return, continue to make the profits they were making earlier with the subscription model. From its inception in

January 2014, SCOAP³ is making papers available on an OA basis and it charges an average

APC of US$1,165.²⁶ According to Morrison,⁶ “SCOAP ³ nearly doubled in size this past year

(87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents,” and “the Electronic Journals Library added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a

7% growth rate.”

As early as 1999, Rosenzweig²⁷ pointed out that the world of knowledge was being “kidnapped and held for ransom” by commercial publishers who have “turned renegade, exiling themselves from the academic enterprise, and focusing entirely on making the most money for their stockholders” and in the process “restricting the flow of knowledge.” Laakso and Björk have pointed out that today commercial publishers are the most common publisher of OA papers and the number of papers published by them jumped from 13,400 in 2005 to 119,900 in 2011.²⁸ Björk and Solomon¹⁹ have shown that “among the established OA publishers with journals listed in Scopus, the average APC grew by about 5% a year over the two years 2012 – 2013.” Taking such increases into account, India’s APC bill is bound to grow far beyond the US$2.4 million in the future. These cost increases are unpredictable, making it difficult for organizations willing to pay APC to make appropriate provisions in their budgets.

_{Affordable OA publishing}

Concerned about the high subscription costs and audience-limiting access rules of many traditional journals and the high levels of APCs charged by OA journals, many editorial boards broke away from publishers of such journals ‘in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher or less-restrictive access policy.’²⁹ The most recent example is the en masse resignation of Rooryck and the other members of the editorial board of Lingua to start Glossa.³⁰ An early example was the resignation of the editor of Evolutionary Ecology along with many members of the editorial board to start Evolutionary Ecology Research in 1998.²⁹Suber maintains a list of such ‘Journal declarations of independence.’²⁹ Gowers, a strong opponent of publishers making tall claims about the value they add to publications and the huge subscription prices they charge, has launched an arXiv overlay journal called Discreet Analysis, owned by a group of researchers, in which the overall cost per article will be well below $30.³¹ His idea is to demonstrate that “in the internet age, and in particular in an age when it is becoming routine for mathematicians to deposit their articles on the arXiv before they submit them to journals, the only important function left for journals is organizing peer review.”³¹ How will these journals survive? Initially, the Association of Dutch Universities and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund Glossa so it can be completely free for both authors and readers, and the Open Libraries of the Humanities will take over the funding after five years.³²Seed money from the University of Cambridge will see through Discreet Analysis in the first five years.³¹

"It’s important [that these alternative models] acquire a reputation and prestige that people can feel it’s okay to submit to them — rather than the more established traditional journals — without damaging their careers," Gowers says.³² "We need an alternative, cheap system sitting there — at which point the commercial publishers will become redundant."³³

Should Indian researchers spend a large sum on APCs?

Why do authors choose to publish in certain journals? Scientists want their work not only to be seen and read but also to be appreciated and cited. For them publications are the culmination of their research and a means of achieving prestige and visibility. Moreover, the journals in which authors publish play an important role in the way the global community of scientists and funding agencies evaluate a scientist. Authors choose journals that would bring them maximum visibility, prestige and citations. Although there have been many discssions in recent times about the place of citations in scholarly communication and the undue importance paid to journal impact factors,³⁴ scientists of all age groups look forward to their papers being cited repeatedly and quickly, and journals proudly advertise their impact factors on their cover pages. Scientists do not really care if a journal is OA or if it charges APC (as long as their institution or funder is ready to cover the costs), nor surprisingly are they chary of surrendering all rights to their paper to the publisher. Many journals charging APC satisfy authors’expectations to a lesser or greater extent and authors are able to find the ones that would accept their papers. In addition, many of the journals run by major commercial publishers are run professionally and their unified graphical appearance gives them an identity. As scholarly communication moves from print to online, these publishers take advantage of emerging technological tools and standards to offer the research community ever better ways of presenting their content and they also energetically market their journals. PLoS, which was started with a view to fighting the commercial publishers, has spent US$3 million on software development in 2013-14 and more than US$413,000 on marketing and advertising in addition to expenses on promotion.³⁵

The question, from the point ofview of authors, is, “is it all right to spend huge sums for getting papers published in OA journals?” No, says Balaram, former director of Indian Institute of Science. He believes that Indian researchers should not use government funds – money given for research - to subsidize non-Indian journals, and that the money spent on APCs could be better spent on research per se or on libraries.³⁶ Williams-Jones and colleagues belive that “for many sectors of academe, ‘paying to publish’ is ethically suspicious.³⁷Such an ethical concern has also been raised by Wilson and Golonka.³⁸ There are other voices from the global South opposed to OA through APC. Babini of the Latin American Social Science Council asserts that paying huge sums as APC could increase the overall costs of research and financially undermine a nation’s research and scientific publishing ecosystem.³⁹ Nilsen says paying to publish represents a new apartheid system, and that “we need to move away from a system where someone decides who should have access to what.”⁴⁰For the sake of the global public good, Nilsen recommends that we should abandon the discriminative APC-based publishing practice and adopt open access through repositories.

The APC model of OA is not serving the true purpose of OA, which aims to create a level playing field for access to research. The APC levied by PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine is roughly equal to half of a month’s salary for an assistant professor in the United States, but more than two months of salary for an assistant professor in India.

Moreover, at a time when science is facing a funding crunch, it would be prudent for Indian researchers and research institutions to refrain from paying APCs to journals. A few months ago, both Rao and Swaminathan lamented the shortage of funds for research,^41,42 and more recently the Ministry of Human Resource Development announced some budgetary cuts for Indian Institutes of Technology⁴³ and the Ministry of Science & Technlogy has told the CSIR laboratories to fund reseach by themselves and to convert ongoing projects into for-profit ventures.⁴⁴

What is the alternative model for making research OA?

What is the alternative to publishing in paid OA journals? Balaram suggests that the authors could publish their papers without paying APC and still make them open through interoperable institutional repositories.^36,45 Joshi has explained the advantages of depositing one’s papers in such repositories.⁴⁶ Authors may wonder if making a paper available through such a repository is equivalent to publishing in an OA or hybrid OA journal. The answer is yes, very nearly. Journals may insist on an embargo and they may let the author deposit only the author postprint (the refereed version). Experts such as Harnad would recommend the adoption of OA through repositories worldwide so that institutions could cancel subscriptions and use the savings to pay for the much lower-priced, affordable, sustainable OA journals.⁴⁷ Use of repositories is picking up around the world. According to Morrison,⁶ “Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) repositories collectively added more than 4.7 million documents this quarter for a total of just under 89 million documents,” and “the number of journals actively participating in PubMed Central, making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow.” arXiv grew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the last year.⁶

What is happening in India?

There are many OA journals in India, and 337 have been listed in DOAJ (as on 3 September 2016). These include journals published by leading Academies, societies and government organizations such as CSIR-NISCAIR, DESIDOC, ICMR, and ICAR, and these are free to authors and readers. MedKnow, although part of a private publishing group, publishes a large number of OA titles, most of which again are free to both authors and readers. But not all Indian OA journals are on a single platform like SciELO. Apart from a few exceptions like MedKnow journals, others do not offer all the web features and metrics that leading publishers offer, which is surprising considering the wealth of technological skills available in the country.

Another platform specifically designed to provide open access to journals published in developing countries is Bioline International, a not-for-profit partnership committed to providing open access to quality research journals and reducing the South to North knowledge gap. Bioline currently supports 36 journals from 16 countries. The download statistics of Bioline journals (http://www.bioline.org.br/stats) are very impressive. Kirsop, a founding member of

Bioline International, told us “Within a single month in 2016, some 1.5 million full text articles were downloaded – equivalent to approximately 18 million per annum – showing the value attached to publications resulting from research carried out in regions of the global south, often referred to as ‘the missing science’, but nevertheless essential to achieve a global understanding in such areas as health and the environment.” (Personal communication, 13 April 2016).

Organizations such as CSIR, DBT and DST have already adopted a policy of making research produced in their own laboratories, as well as research they support in other institutions, open access through placing the accepted papers in institutional open access repositories.^48,49CSIR-

URDIP, Pune, has set up a central platform for OA repositories and harvesting from all three organizations and these could be accessed at http://www.csircentral.net/ and http://sciencecentral.in/. Unfortunately, many laboratories under these apex bodies have not taken the OA policy seriously, nor there seems to be any will on the part of the apex bodies to implement the policy forcefully.These repositories are interoperable and have adopted the best international practices. ICAR also has an open access policy, but it does not seem to have much traction.⁵⁰ There are also many institutional repositories (listed in http://roar.eprints.org/), some of them well populated, but others are languishing, largely due to the indifference of scientists.

By contrast, China seems to have made considerable progress. It was only in 2014 that the

Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China

(NSFC) issued open access policies.⁵¹ By mid-March 2016 , the Open Repository of the

NSFC included 135,000 research papers published between 1998 and 2015 by authors from 1,305 institutions. These research papers have already been downloaded more than 669,000 times. CAS now has two OA portals, namely the Institutional Repository Grid of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with content from 102 repositories, and the China Open Access Journal Portal, with content from hundreds of journals.⁵²

Latin America has witnessed the emergence of strong cooperative scholarly publishing ventures, such as SciELO (www.scielo.org) which hosts about 1,250 journals, and Redalyc

(www.redalyc.org) which hosts, 1,095 journals. Of these more than 2,300 journals, 1,300 do not charge APC and others charge only a modest fee.⁵³ A SPARC report says, “SciELO and Redalyc do raise the visibility and accessibility of the journals they host, particularly with their local communities. These types of networked meta-publishers allow for central governance of policies, procedures and controls, but are intentionally decentralized to support the development of local capacity and infrastructure ensuring greater sustainability and alignment with local policies and priorities.”⁵⁴With these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing.

Even so, researchers in Latin America continue to publish a very large proportion of their papers in non-OA journals. For example, as shown in Table 1, in the five years 2010-14, more than 65% of papers from Brazil were published in non-OA journals. The simplest way to make the large volume of non-OA papers freely available is to set up many institutional repositories and populate them quickly. Efforts are already under way in several countries and indeed a network of repositories from nine countries is coordinated by La Referencia

(http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/), and there are legislations in place in Argentina, Mexico and

Peru to make publicly funded research freely available through repositories.⁵⁵

What needs to be done?

Compared with developments in Latin America and China, India is clearly lagging behind in making her research freely accessible. How can this be changed? We believe that making all research freely accessible through interoperable OA repositories is the ideal solution. According to Houghton and Swan,⁵⁶ till the time we reach an all Gold OA (OA through journals) world, Green OA (OA through repositories) may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy. We suggest the following actions.

Populate OA repositories that are already there, as empty and sparsely populated repositories will not reflect well on the research community.
Set up repositories in institutions where one does not exist. Academic and research librarians can play an important role in setting up and populating repositories.
Academic and research organizations (at the state and central levels, as well as apex bodies), which do not have an OA policy, should adopt a policy similar to those of DBT, DST and CSIR and implement the same.
As part of the implementation, funding agencies and heads of organizations should have a compliance monitoring mechanism that would reward those who deposit their papers, and persuade those who do not.
If the policies of all agencies are aligned, it would bring about many advantages such as ease of compliance, optimization of workflow, and sharing of data and best practices.⁵⁷
All organizations may join the CSIR-URDIP effort so that a nation wide platform could emerge for OA repositories. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also, as demonstrated by HAL, France, facilitate “coherent meta-data description, connection to national authority files, quicker take up of new technologies (e.g. visualisation and data mining) and better connection with international initiatives.”⁵⁸
Funding agencies and research organizations that are so far unconcerned about their funds being used to meet APCs should stop supporting this practice.
A cadre of scholarly communication workforce should be developed for building institutional repositories and persuading researchers to upload materials.

Conclusion

If India and China follow the Latin American model of hosting all or most of their journals on a single decentralized platform and make as many journals as possible OA, and if India, China and Latin America vigorously promote a culture of OA repositories and encourage researchers to self-archive their publications, that would have a great impact on making science and scholarship open, not only in these regions but around the world. All of this can happen only with the willing participation of the scientific community. As Harnad would say, ‘Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you’.⁵⁹

If, instead, researchers continue to pay publishers exorbitant APCs, as Poynder points out, there will soon be a crisis over the cost of APCs, which would hit research the world over, but research in the developing world will be hit harder.⁶⁰ As long as we continue to use APC based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Peter Suber and Ms Barbara Kirsop for their valuable comments.

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Figure 1. Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in SCIE, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.

Table 1. Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year

[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]

Year	OA journals (APC)			OA journals (non-APC)			All OA journals
Year	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations
2010	242	2557	17550	237	4131	16301	479	6688	33851
2011	263	3067	17367	244	4280	12645	507	7347	30012
2012	308	2800	15715	251	4157	9276	559	6957	24991
2013	326	3335	12635	268	4457	6257	594	7792	18892
2014	328	3634	6950	283	4660	3057	611	8294	10007
Total		15393	70217		21685	47536		37078	117753

Table 2. OA journals charging APC in which Indian authors have published at least 10 papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP	APC
Nucleic Acids Research	GB	138	1945	14.09	$2,770
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases	US	126	1409	11.18	$2,250
BMC Genomics	GB	123	1330	10.81	$2,145
International Journal of Nanomedicine	NZ	94	1555	16.54	€1,843
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics	DE	65	1116	17.17	€25^#
BMC Plant Biology	GB	44	579	13.16	$2,145
PLoS Pathogens	US	42	781	18.60	$2,250
Molecular Cancer	GB	34	540	15.88	$2,145
International Journal of Molecular Sciences	CH	28	298	10.64	CHF1,600
Molecules	CH	28	300	10.71	CHF1,800
PLoS Computational Biology	US	25	342	13.68	$2,250
PLoS Medicine	US	25	721	28.84	$2,900
DNA Research	GB	24	542	22.58	$750
PLoS Genetics	US	24	354	14.75	$2,250
Biogeosciences	DE	23	294	12.78	€25^#
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health	CH	22	278	12.64	CHF1,600
Journal of Translational Medicine	GB	15	238	15.87	$2,145
Marine Drugs	CH	14	256	18.29	CHF1,800
Journal of Neuroinflammation	GB	12	179	14.92	$450
Science and Technology of Advanced Materials	GB	12	181	15.08	$1,600
BMC Medicine	GB	11	374	34.00	$2,785
Remote Sensing	CH	11	125	11.36	CHF1,600
Cryosphere	DE	10	112	11.20	€25^#
Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER	US	10	128	12.80	$200
Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10		117	1930	16.50
Total		1077	15907

ISO 3166 country code

^#Page charges

Table 3. Non-APC journals in which Indian authors have published their papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP
Bulletin of The World Health Organization	CH	41	515	12.56
Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences	CA	14	173	12.36
Environmental Health Perspectives	US	10	188	18.80
Journal of Machine Learning Research	US	10	118	11.80
Materials Today	GB	4	81	20.25
Earth System Science Data	DE	3	88	29.33
Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica	MX	3	181	60.33
Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas	MX	3	41	13.67
Folia Neuropathologica	PL	2	23	11.50
Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences	GB	2	20	10.00

ISO 3166 country code

Table 4. Mega journals used by Indian researchers

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP	APC
PLoS One	US	2404	17587	7.32	$1,495
Scientific Reports	GB	222	1523	6.86	£990
AIP Advances	US	196	645	3.29	$1,350
Springer Plus	CH	170	235	1.38	$1,290
BMJ Open	GB	56	148	2.64	£1,350
FEBS Open Bio	GB	21	86	4.10	$1350
PeerJ	GB	13	33	2.54	$695
Biology Open	GB	9	9	1.00	$1,495
G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics	US	9	83	9.22	$1,950
		3100	20349	6.56

ISO 3166 country code

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published