Centre for Internet and Society

Open Access to Law

praskrishna — 2013-09-24T08:27:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-to-law-poster.pdf

Open Access to International Agricultural Research

praskrishna — 2011-08-25T08:13:43Z

Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.

CIS Distinguished Fellow, Subbiah Arunachalam and 15 other open access advocates wrote to the top management of CGIAR, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, requesting them to mandate open access to all research publications from all CGIAR centres. The letter was addressed to Dr. Carlos Pérez del Castillo and Dr. Katherine Sierra and it was copied to the Director Generals of all the 15 CGIAR centres.

A permanent member of the prestigious Harvard University Trade Group, Carlos Pérez del Castillo has received the highest decorations from the Governments of Brazil, Chile, France and Venezuela. Carlos Pérez del Castillo also served as the Chairman of the WTO General Council and as Vice-Minister and Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay (1995-1998) and as Permanent Secretary of the Latin American Economic System (1987-1991). He is a member of the Board of the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council (IPC), and a small cattle farmer.

Katherine Sierra, CGIAR Fund Council chair, is the World Bank vice president for sustainable development responsible for people and programs in environmentally and socially sustainable development and infrastructure. Sierra chairs several international consultative groups. These include the World Bank-WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Cities Alliance, Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme, and Water and Sanitation Program. Other international groups that she chairs are InfoDev, which supports information and communication technologies for development, and the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility, which promotes private participation in infrastructure.

The Letter

Dear Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr. Kathy Sierra:

Subject: Please make all CGIAR research publications open access

About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr. William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr. Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."

ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the National Institute of Technology-Rourkela. ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.

Since then Institutional Repository is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.

We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.

As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. The full list of ~220 mandates worldwide is available at the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies.

We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.

Regards
Sincerely,

Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]
Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]
Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]
Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]
Jean-Claude Gudon [University of Montreal, Canada]
Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]
Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]
Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]
Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]
Heather Morrison [University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada]
Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]
T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]
Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]
Alma swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]
John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative Commons]
John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]

Status Report on a Suggestion made to CGIAR

Sixteen open access advocates wrote to the CGIAR leadership – Dr. Carlos Perez del Castillo and Dr. Kathy Sierra – on 19 May 2010, requesting CGIAR to adopt an open access mandate for all research publications from CGIAR centres. [As the names of the signatories were arranged in alphabetical order, my name appeared on the top of the list. I am one of the group and not the leader.] Mr. Richard Poynder posted a write-up on the letter in his famous blog ‘Open and Shut’.

The letter led to a flurry of activity among the ICT-KM professionals of CGIAR. I have heard from ICRISAT (Dr. William Dar, Director General), ILRI (Dr. Peter Ballantyne, Head, Knowledge Management and Information Services) and CIAT (Dr. Edith Hesse, Head Corporate Communications and Capacity Strengthening).

Dr. Dar welcomed the suggestion. Incidentally, he is a champion of open access and is on the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS). He was also the first in the CGIAR system to mandate open access to all research publications from the centre he heads.

From the mails of Dr. Ballantyne and Dr. Hesse, I could perceive some misgivings about the letter to CGIAR among knowledge managers of some CGIAR centres. In contrast, Dr. Francesca Re Manning of CAS-IP, CGIAR, expressed complete agreement with the proposal made by the OA advocates.

The response of Dr. Enrica Porcari, Chief Information Officer of CGIAR, was ambivalent, almost a tightrope walk. She didn’t say that OA was not acceptable to CGIAR and yet she was not willing to accept OA mandating as an option. She said: “Rather than a policy on ‘open access’ limited to journal articles, I would instead prefer to see us develop a strong and clear CGIAR view and set of practices that balance the need for high quality science with highly accessible outputs, and reinforces the substantial progress we have already made across all the Centers…I would advocate for a concerted effort to ‘opening access to our research’. Is not providing open access to research publications the obvious first step in opening access to our research?”

Probably, Dr. Porcari also thought that the advocates were promoting open access journals. Both Richard Poynder and I clarified that what we suggested for CGIR was open access and not open access journals and explained the difference between the two. Richard clarified that our emphasis was actually on open access archiving.

Dr. Peter Bloch and Dr. Kay Chapman of CAS-IP thought that some of the ideas we put forward were astute and relevant but had some concerns about making papers for which the copyright vests with journal publishers open access as well as papers co-authored with non-CGIAR researchers. In response we pointed out how other organizations which have mandated open access have dealt with these issues.

Prof. Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management , Ahmedabad, and founder of the Honey Bee network that disseminate the innovations of thousands of farmers, craftsmen, artisans and the lay public, endorsed the suggestion stating that Harvard made it obligatory for all the papers published by its faculty to be openly accessible. He said that "once this is made into a policy by CGIAR, the publishers will have to fall in line."

Prof. Michael Gurstein, editor of Journal of Community Informatics, welcomed the idea of making CGIAR research open access, and suggested that we should go one step further and see to it that the research is also made easily applied by the farmers and other ultimate users. Others who endorsed the suggestion include Professors Bill Hubbard, Stephen Pinfield and Chrisopher Pressler of the Nottingham University, David Bollier, Co-founder of Public Knowledge, Prof. Helen Hambly Odame of the University of Guelph.

In the meanwhile, I found that "the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative is working to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all. This means working with organisations that hold information or that creates new knowledge – to help them disseminate it more efficiently and make it easier to access. CGIAR, FAO and DFID are CIARD partners.

I refer to the CIARD Manifesto here. It is all for open access. Both DFID and FAO also have adopted open access. Please refer to the R4D portal of DFID. Why R4D? In the past it was difficult to find out what research topics, projects, and programmes DFID was funding or had funded. Researchers all over the world (and even DFID staff) had to rely on a network of personal contacts or inspired detective work to discover who was already working in a particular area, what was already known, and what lessons had been learned. R4D responds to a demand expressed by many DFID stakeholders for better and open access to all this information. It is and will always be only one piece of the jigsaw, but it is a high-quality piece, as in order to have received DFID funding the research posted on R4D will have met strict criteria and quality standards in both formulation and execution.

FAO has complied with all the 13 CIARD requirements for developing institutional readiness and increasing the availability, accessibility and applicability of research outputs. Indeed FAO is the only institution to have done so.

Dr. Ballantyne of ILRI himself has championed open access. Responding to New publication: Learning to Share Knowledge for Global Agricultural Progress, he wrote on 21 March 2010, "Great to see this experience all written up. I was going to complain at the lack of open access to this CGIAR research output… but then I found the author version ‘available’ in full on the CIAT website. Excellent example of I can’t remember which CIARD pathway! Would be even better if your author version was ‘accessible’ in a proper CGIAR/CIAT repository that is harvestable, etc., and not just uploaded on the web!" This is precisely what the 16 signatories to the letter to CGIAR want for all of CGIR research publications!

There should be no difficulty for CGIAR – the Consortium Board, the Science Council and the Programme Committee to accept the suggestion that they adopt an open access mandate for all their research publications.

It is likely that a few knowledge managers were unhappy that people outside the system made the suggestion. It may be their immediate response. It should not be difficult for them to realize, on sober reflection, that all we mean is to bring access to CGIAR research on par with access to research done at some of the best institutions in the world such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Southampton, and to make CGIAR policy the best in the world – even better than the OA policies of NIH, the Research Councils of the UK and the Wellcome Trust. We assure those who have any misgivings that our intentions are honourable, our suggestion was made in the best interest of CGIAR, and they can cast away their misgivings.

Regards,
Arun

The Central Advisory Service for Intellectual Property (CAS-IP of CGIAR) organised a successful workshop in Rome in early July. CAS-IP hopes to conduct a workshop on open access for all CGIAR librarians and knowledge managers before the end of the year.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-international-agricultural-research

Open access to government data on the cards

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:31:48Z

The way has been cleared for public access to the data collected by Union government ministries and departments, with official approval being accorded to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). T Ramachandran's article was published in the Hindu on March 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

Following its recent approval by the Union Cabinet, the policy has been notified and is in the process of being gazetted, said R. Siva Kumar, CEO of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and head of the Natural Resources Data Management System, Department of Science and Technology.

The use of open data as a tool for promoting governmental transparency and efficiency has been gaining ground in some parts of the world. An Open Government Partnership was launched last year by the United States and seven other governments. Forty-three other governments have joined the partnership, which has endorsed an Open Government Declaration, expressing a commitment to better “efforts to systematically collect and publish data on government spending and performance for essential public services and activities.” It acknowledges the ‘right' of citizens to seek information on governmental activities.

India has not joined the partnership, but is collaborating with the U.S. in developing an open source version of software for a data portal.

The NDSAP states that at least five ‘high value' data sets should be uploaded to a newly created portal, data.gov.in, in three months of the notification of the policy. Uploading of the remaining data sets should be completed within a year.

The Department of Science and Technology will co-ordinate the effort and create the portal through the National Informatics Centre. The Department of Information Technology will work out the implementation guidelines, including those related to technology and data standards.

Welcoming the approval for the NDSAP, Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO, said the removal of “a few good aspects” in an earlier draft of the policy — such as linkage with Sections 8 and 9 of the Right to Information Act that specify the kinds of information exempt from disclosure by the authorities — had weakened it “even further.” “None of the criticisms the CIS had sent in as part of the feedback requested on the draft have been addressed,” he said.

The NDSAP seeks “to provide an enabling provision and platform for providing proactive and open access to the data generated through public funds available with various departments/organisations of the government of India.”

However, the Ministries and Departments can draw up, within six months of the notification of the policy, a negative list of data-sets that will not be shared, subject to periodic review by an ‘oversight committee.'

The policy envisages three types of access to data: open, registered and restricted. Access to data in the open category will be “easy, timely, user-friendly and web-based without any process of registration/authorisation.” But data in the registered access category will be accessible “only through a prescribed process of registration/authorisation by respective departments/organisations” and available to “recognised institutions/organisations/public users, through defined procedures.” Data categorised as restricted will be made available only “through and under authorisation.”

The policy also provides for pricing, with the Ministries and Departments being asked to formulate their norms for data in the registered and restricted access categories within three months of the notification of the policy.

Read the original published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-to-govt-data

Open Access to Academic Knowledge

thomas — 2011-11-03T05:40:09Z

The Indian Institute of Science and the Centre for Internet and Society are holding a workshop on 'Open Access to Academic Knowledge' on Wednesday 2nd November from 14:30 to 17:00

The workshop will involve an introductory presentation by Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, followed by an interactive discussion of Open Access issues and ideas. This is a free event.

The workshop will take place in the Seminar Hall of the National Centre for Science Information, within the Indian Institute of Science from 14:30 to 17:00. For a map to this event click here.

For more information and to confirm attendance please contact Tom Dane (tom at cis-india dot org) or on +91 7829 451 902.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/open-access-to-academic-knowledge-at-the-iisc

Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language

subha — 2014-10-24T15:32:40Z

In February 2014, the Government of India declared the South Asian language Odia as the 6th classical language of India which is one among 22 scheduled languages of India and has a literary heritage of more than 5,000 years. There are documents for more than 3,500 years, and the rest are undocumented oral histories.

The article was published by Opensource.com on October 22, 2014.

The native Odia speakers became hopeful of getting a lot of language related projects implemented to grow the lineage of this long literary heritage and see the language used and spoken globally, not just in literature but in computer and mobile games, interactive computer applications and in other digital media—and to reach the masses as a communicative language.

So far, not many federal initiatives have been put into place, nor a single policy level change has been made, to implement a standard as simple as like Unicode for easy access of information. And, there are very few mobile apps that offer concise and easy to digest content. Overall, there is not much content online that is available in a standard format that is easy to search, access, and reproduce,

Wikisource is here to change that and is working to open up a whole new world of online resources for readers.

With more than 40 million native Odia speakers living in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states and the diaspora in rest of the world—primarily living in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and many of the South and East Asian counties—far less content in the Odia language has been made available on the Internet. The highest is Odia Wikipedia, with 8441 articles created by October 2014. A bigger problem is that though there are a few websites with Unicode content, government portals do not have content in Unicode to make them searchable and reusable. A non-profit Srujanika, with support from two other institutions, has digitized around 740 books under the scope of the project: Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB), most of which were published between 1850 and 1950. This remains the largest digital archive so far for the Odia language, yet all of the books are scanned PDFs, restricting searchability of the content.

Odia Wikisource is a project that aims for the digitization of rare books that are out of copyright. The project is even allowing authors and publishers to donate their copyrighted work by re-licensing under CC0 or CC BY-SA licenses. The goal is to bring about access to large volumes of books and manuscripts and create more Open Educational Resources (OERs). The single biggest advantage of the Wikisource project at-large is that it makes text for books available in Unicode standard, making it searchable on the web and allows readers to copy and use it elsewhere. Most other conventional archival systems lack this important feature.

Wikisource is run by a volunteers and communities who often retype or prepare the books by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a technique that converts scanned images of books into text. Participate and contribute to Odia Wikisource by visiting or.wikisource.org, the project is open to all who want to help!

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource went through a thorough and long approval process for about 1 year and 9 months, as an active incubator project—first by the Language Committee and then by the Wikimedia Foundation's Board. During this incubation phase, the project has digitized three books completely and one partially—thanks to the individual contributors. An educational institution Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in collaboration with the Wikimedia funded Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) are in the process of digitizing 9 books by the author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were re-licensed to CC BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

Four new Wikisource contributors joined the project in response to a tweet and a Facebook post by the author to digitize The Odia Bhagabata, classic literature compiled in 14th century. "Content that has already been typed in fonts of various non-Unicode based encoding, now they can be converted by (this) like it was done for The Odia Bhagabata, that was typed and available on the community hosted website Odia.org. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping,” says Manoj Sahukar, who along with the author designed a converter for reading text and transforming into Unicode for The Odia Bhagabata.

Questions for early contributors to Odia Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): You have been with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time Wikimedian who proofreads the books on Odia Wikisource: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

SP: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
Nasim Ali, the oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age, Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

SP: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata? How do you want to get involved in future?
Nihar Kumar Dalai, a Wikisource writer: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

SP: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
Pankajmala Sarangi, a Wikisource writer: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-october-22-2014-open-access-platform-to-save-the-odia-indian-language

Open Access Logo 2

thomas — 2011-11-15T07:43:32Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/20101025034340Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg

Open Access Logo 2

thomas — 2011-10-24T17:11:27Z

The Open Access Logo

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/Openaccess.jpg

Open Access Logo

thomas — 2011-10-24T14:44:20Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/images.jpg

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books

Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule — 2016-01-03T11:26:49Z

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.

This was published in Wikimedia Blog on December 3, 2015.

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.^[1]

MGS is a non-profit organization working for the preservation of Maharashtra’s linguistic and cultural heritage. It was founded in Pune, India in 1894. Being an important archive for the preservation of many hundreds of years old manuscripts and historical artifacts from the Peshwa era, the institution is open to public for study and research.

During the four-day anniversary celebration, the Centre for Internet Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K)—an organization that supports the Wikimedia movement in India—opened a Wikipedia stall there where Marathi Wikimedians were present. Around 600 people visited the stall and learned about the news of MGS’s book donation.

Many active and new Marathi Wikimedians were present at the exhibition stall along with Abhinav Garule from the CIS-A2K program to share the incredible work Marathi Wikipedia and Wikimedia community at large are doing. Autographs of eighteen notable writers who received awards from Sanstha for different genres of writings were collected for uploading to the Wikipedia pages about them. While meeting the authors, Wikimedians also approached them to relicense some of their works under Creative Commons licenses so that they could be digitized on Wikisource and/or enrich Wikipedia—and some of the authors expressed a good deal of interest in opening up their books for Wikisource.

Some of the major books donated are Peshwa Rojnishi (diary of Peshwa), Benjamin Franklin Charitra (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Kekavali, S M Paranjape Charitra (autobiography), Letters Exchanged between the Sanstha and the British Government, Shinde Gharanyacha Padmamay Itihas (manuscript), and Marathwadyatil Arvachin Marathi Vangmay (modern Marathi literature from Marathwada, a region in Maharashtra) are some of the popular books read by Marathi speakers that are going to be part of the books donated by the organization.

We reached out to Avinash Chaphekar, the joint secretary of the organization, to know more about the state of book publication and readership.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Could you share your ideas of opening these invaluable books for Wikisource? How they are going to be useful for the online readers to learn about the Peshwas?

Avinash Chaphekar (AC): These books are of historical importance and contain information that needs to reach more people; they cover topics that are rarely covered well anywhere else. Right after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as it contains a lot of messages for a common person, a lady walked up to and asked if she could read it in Marathi. Be it such autobiographies or a poetry book like “Kekavali”, such books that were published by the MGS should not be kept closed—many readers are searching for them. We donated 800 of these old books to the Marathi Wikisource because we don’t have large presence in the media or the Internet, so how would any reader who does not know us buy a book? If these books are available online, they can at least find and read them.

SP: Where do you think there is gap between publishers and readers today? Many Marathi books get published every year and if you search on the Internet, which many people today do, you would hardly find much.

AC: Online readership is increasing every day, but when you look at Marathi readers, the majority of them are still buying books. During the exhibitions here (even this year!), there is always quite a rush to buy books. Only the youth and tech-savvy people read online. But most people we meet say that they feel more comfortable holding and reading physical books. Moreover, there is no concrete research validating that most of the youngsters here are accessing information only online. I still feel reading books in a conventional way by holding books in your hands will continue to exist as there is some kind of satisfaction that lies in it.

SP: Did you know that we are going to get these books retyped, meaning that readers will not just be able to read them in their smartphones or computers but they could use the text for republishing the same books in the future? How do you think such a model will be useful for publishers?

AC: At the MGS, we don’t have funds to republish these books, and publishers are not ready to do it no matter how historically valuable the books are—even an incredibly valuable reference book called Marathi Grantha Nirmiti Watchal (the history of creation of Marathi books in Marathi), authored by SG Tulpule and published by us in 1973. This book has detailed information about Marathi publications, even those that existed before printing technology existed. As many such books are not being reprinted, we cannot leave the remaining few copies to perish. Let them go online and reach millions of people.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-december-3-open-access-in-marathi-language-expands-by-thousand-books

Open Access Dialogues - Report and Policy Recommendations

sumandro — 2015-12-22T06:52:58Z

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

Report: Download (PDF)

Policy Recommendations (as below): Download (PDF)

Is Open Access Only for Rich Countries?

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

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

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

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

Global Open Access Policy

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

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

Open Access Dialogues

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

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

Strategic Issues and Policy Recommendations

Beyond the Impact Factor

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

Policy recommendations:

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

Uneven Geographies and the Need for Sustainable Models

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

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

Policy recommendations:

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

A Broader Vision for Open Access

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

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

Policy recommendations:

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Access Day Flyer

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:24:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open%20access%20day%20flyer.pdf

Open Access Day celebrated in India

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:06:01Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance co-organised joint celebrations of Open Access Day in Jamia Millia Islamia campus on the 14th of October 2008. Around 50 people attended the event from different departments in Jamia there were also some participants from the Indian Linux Users Group. CIS also published an Open Access flyer on this day featuring quotations from Sam Pitroda, MS Swaminathan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, Frederick Noronha, Barbara Kirsop and Samir Brahmachari.

Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals.

Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely linked career growth in an academic or university context.

Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers are only provided with reference number when experiments are discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access day.

Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of a novelty.

Download Open Access Flyer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india

Open Access Day

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:45:17Z

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day. Speaker include Prof. Andrew Lynn, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society.

Venue: Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

About Open Access Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open-access-day

Open access conference seeks to free research

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:10:58Z

Article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan in the Indian Express (New Delhi), 26 March 2009

When Newton famously remarked that if he had seen further than others, it was by “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wasn’t just being modest. He was stating the simple fact that knowledge builds on previous knowledge, that the back and forth of ideas is vital for scientific achievement. Though the current proprietory publishing model is stacked against scholars, an emerging open access movement across the world aims to free scientific content - and India has big stakes in it.

A conference in New Delhi brought together open access evangelists including Prof. John Willinsky of Stanford University, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Surendra Prasad of IIT Delhi, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications, and Narendra Kumar of CSIR.

Now, all research papers published from CSIR labs will be made open access, either by putting the full text on freely available institutional repositories or publishing directly in open access journals. Meanwhile, across the world, MIT has become the first university to throw open all its research papers through the online repository software DSpace.

Globally, academic tenure and promotion is traditionally linked to research published in reputed, peer-reviewed journals. These journals are owned by commercial behemoths like Springer and Reed Elsevier, who own stables of journals in various disciplines, and dictate terms to university libraries. But in recent years, journal prices have shot through the roof.

Now, after years of weary negotiation, and empowered by new digital infrastructure, universities are teaming up via free institutional repository systems, to pool and circulate their collective research. In India, institutes like NIT Rourkela have adopted super-archives like DSpace for another reason — to showcase their scientific output to global peers. “NIT doesn’t have the research legacy of IIT or IISC — they needed the visibility,” says NIT director Sunil Kumar Sarangi.

Such a knowledge commons is especially valuable to developing countries — for instance, in agricultural research or public health, it is inexcusable that countries which could benefit most from the scientific debate are left out of the loop, simply because of prohibitive pricing (some journals cost up to 20,000 dollars, annually). This only widens the gulf between the state of research here and the US or Europe.

Even research produced in India with our taxpayer money is sent to big-name commercial journals and all copyright signed away, putting it out of reach for the Indian scholarly community. But all that could change if open access journals become the norm. S K Sahu, who runs MedKnow publications (over 80 open access journals), also busted claims that content on such journals tends to vanish into the ether after a few years online.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-conference-seeks-to-free-research

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India

praskrishna — 2013-01-02T05:35:22Z

Professor Leslie Chan, a champion of Open Access (OA) and Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough visited Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore in December 2012 for a series of lectures. Well known advocate for OA in India and the developing world, Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, accompanied him on these tours.

Leslie gave five talks in over three days at the Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, on the morning of December 17, at the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR on the afternoon of December 17 at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala on Decemeber 18 followed by a discussion with Satish Babu, President of the Computer Society of India and Director of ICFOSS in the afternoon, a talk at Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library on December 19, and a talk at SDM Institute for Management Development on December 20, 2012, which was more of a discussion.

Speaking on “Opportunities for Knowledge Management in the Open Access Environment” at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management–Kerala, Leslie Chan said, “the recognition of what constitutes scholarship is still very narrow and the quality of the content is secondary. It is the brand of the journal that is still the driving force behind every western journal.” He further said that there was a tension brewing among open access, quality control and the means of measuring impact. Market forces had infiltrated the realm of knowledge as well, for it was the companies that were increasingly taking over journals that were originally published by scholarly societies.[1]His presentation touched upon what is OA and its key benefits, growth of OA in the last ten years, and opportunities for information and library professionals. See the presentation slides below.

At the Mysore University Library, Leslie gave a lecture on Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communications and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment. He dealt with the key issues of changing contexts of research discovery and dissemination in the digital environment, why greater openness is good for science, the tensions between openness, quality measures, impact and policies, collaboration and competition, interdisciplinary research, deluge of research data. Prof. Chan touched upon some key problems like the broken scholarly communication system, emerging tools not being used effectively to serve scholarship, and the need to re-design scholarly communications and impact measures. See the presentation slides below.

Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communication and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment from University of Toronto Scarborough

Therafter, Prof. Chan visited Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Institute for Management Development and addressed scientists, librarians and academicians. There were discussions on how open access journals and repositories can help improve the visibility of an institution's research strengths, help attract research collaborators for authors and increase the return on investment. Prof. Chan was particularly critical of the current trends, in evaluating both researchers and their institutions using impact factor of journals in which they publish their research papers as the yardstick. Read the press coverage by Star of Mysore (PDF, 462 Kb).


Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam accompanied Prof. Leslie in his tours to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore

Leslie's tour to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore which saw him deliver a series of lectures along with open forum discussions has triggered a fresh awakening to seriously debate on open access initiatives. The event was well covered by the media with the Hindu doing an exclusive interview with him.[2]

More pictures of Prof. Chan's visit can be seen here.

[1]. See “Call for efforts to promote open access platforms, The Hindu, December 19, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/10LEiBU, last accessed on December 31, 2012.
[2]. See "In defence of Open Access systems", The Hindu, December 31, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/VZfmz6, last accessed on January 2, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/leslie-chan-gives-five-talks-in-india