Centre for Internet and Society

Improving Telugu Village Articles

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-11-26T02:27:39Z

Telugu wikipedians on 6 October 2016 held a discussion on improving the quality of Telugu articles. The event was organized by IIIT, Hyderabad, CIS-A2K and OpenGeo.

A possible collaboration between Wikipedia and free and open source enthusiasts and environmental groups was explored at the meeting. Subodh Kulkarni and Pavan Santhosh made a presentation about Wikipedia. The participants were from different groups such as SOUL (Save Our Urban Lakes), OpenGeo.org (organization that works for open source mapping) and Sweccha (organization working to expand free software movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh).

Prof. Madhav Gadgil moderated a discussion on how these organizations could collaborate for different Wikimedia projects. The discussion primarily revolved around improving ongoing Telugu village articles.

Prof. Gadgil stressed on compiling articles using reliable and verifiable sources. He also urged the participants to upload geo-tagged photos to Commons especially photos of lakes of which the authorities have denied existence. The discussion also focused on the synergy between OpenGeo and Wikipedia.

Post-lunch, Prof. Gadgil delivered a lecture on “Human Knowledge: An Evolutionary Perspective in IIT”. Prof. Gadgil explained that the next big leap in evolution of human knowledge is free knowledge in which everyone can contribute and utilize which was Wikipedia. He urged the scholars and students to contribute to Wikipedia which is the future for knowledge society.

Telugu and English wikipedians including Vinay, Lubna Sarwath, Undavalli Ravikumar, Raju and many more participated in the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/improving-telugu-village-articles

Imperial College Orientation Program, Bargarh

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-16T19:51:29Z

An Odia Wikipedia workshop was conducted at Imperial College, Bargarh on 12 February, 2017.

An Odia Wikipedia orientation workshop was conducted at Imperial College, an affiliate of Sambalpur University, on 12 February 2017 for 60 undergraduate students of the College. The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Odia Wikipedia while also giving them a broad overview of the global free knowledge movement. This workshop was conducted as part of CIS-A2K's ongoing efforts to expand the reach of Odia Wikipedia in Western Odisha in conjunction with the Odia Wikipedia community members.

The students were also introduced to the process of digitisation and how digitisation was fundamental to the preservation of language and local knowledge. The students also showed an interest in the digitisation sprint for the Dadhivamana Temple's Pothi digitisation project, an ongoing effort to digitise 250 ancient palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhivamana Temple in Bargarh.

The meta page for this event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/imperial-college-orientation-program-bargarh

Images and links matter quality

rahim — 2016-06-08T09:54:21Z

Wikipedia articles are considered of a higher quality when they have illustrations. An article without images is considered dull. Wikipedia is all about references. Any information on Wikipedia is encouraged to have verifiable citations. Hence images and external links form a criterion for quality of articles on Wikipedias. This blog post tries to analyse the current scenario of CIS-A2K's Focus language areas with respect to images and links.

If we read through the page on English Wikipedia that talks about why adding images improves the quality of Wikipedia, we realise that writing an article is a very difficult task on Wikipedia as it involves one to generate content in their own words, Wikipedia cannot be a copy paste of some content taken from somewhere. Wikipedia has its own style of writing articles, and when we look at the five basic pillars of Wikipedia and the core content policies, they structure the knowledge that we have to a form that best fits Wikipedia and is proven to be effective to larger masses. At the same time, illustrating an article further improves the comprehensibility of an article on Wikipedia.

This takes us to the next question - If only free licensed images are allowed on Wikipedia, how can we illustrate articles where no image is available under a free license, say you are writing about Doraemon or Godrej and want to add the sketch of the character or logo of the company - they are not allowed on commons. What is the way out then?

Some Wikipedias such as English Wikipedia have allowed Wikipedians to upload images locally on the wiki under fair usage policy. This allows Wikipedians to upload low resolution images or audio or video with a pre-defined small length. IT not only helps enrich the Wikipedia content, it also helps in understanding the copyright implications to larger masses editing Wikipedia.

Animation of the act of unrolling a circle's circumference, illustrating the ratio π. Author : John Reid

There are more than 31 million images/videos/audios/documents on commons, which is the central media repository for all Wikipedias. Commons has a policy to keep only free licensed images.

Why references/citations are so important?

Adding references to articles is important to make Wikipedia's content more accurate and reliable. One of the three core content policies on English Wikipedia which is adopted by most Indian languages is to have "Verifiable" content on Wikipedia. This essentially means, whatever content is added to Wikipedia has to have proper links to citations given. If its a book, an ISBN number is desired. In case of newspapers and websites, URLs with access dates are encouraged to be added. If the newspaper does not have a proper archive, Wayback machine from archive.org can be used to create a permanent accessible URL that in turn can be added to the article.

In order to prove NPOV, one can add the same issue opinionated in 3 or more newspapers or books. Here too, an external link is used to provide the verifiable reference.

So, its safe to say that all articles that have an external link in them may have been properly referenced. A list of such articles is generated and the count of such articles that do not have external links is provided below.

Language	Articles without images	Articles without external links	Deadend Pages
Kannada	6,993	10,839	97
Konkani	1,876	1,351	836
Marathi	12,678	29,064	861
Odia	1,227	3,080	11
Telugu	35,701	19,359	585

The numbers in the above table throw the areas of improvement for the focus language area Wikipedias of CIS-A2K. Especially with respect to adding references to articles where in every Wikipedia, almost as much as 50% of the articles do not have proper references.

Deadend pages are those articles on Wikipedia which do not link to any other page on Wikipedia. In recently changed convention, zero namespace pages on Wikipedia that are not redirect pages are not counted as articles if the fall under Deadend pages. A count of deadend pages is also given in the above table for reference. So, effectively total number of articles in any Wiki = total article count shown on home page + deadend pages.

If these three criterion are improved upon, quality of Wikipedia may also go up.

Of course quality of articles depend upon language, spellings, grammar and several other things. But these are broad methods of improving quality.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/images-and-links-matter-quality

ICT for Development

praskrishna — 2014-12-28T03:26:03Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was a speaker at this event organized by Christ University on December 3, 2014 in Bangalore.

Download the presentation on ICT4D.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/ict-for-development

ICOMM2012: International Communications and Electronics Fair

jdine — 2012-12-04T06:37:05Z

The seventh India International Communications and Electronics Fair (ICOMM2012) organized by CMAI Association of India was held at the NSIC Expo Grounds in New Delhi from September 14 to 15, 2012. Jadine Lannon attended the event, and shares us with some interesting and exciting new developments in ICT.

For the last seven years, the ICOMM event has been conducted by the Communication Multimedia Applications Infrastructure (CMAI) Association of India.[1] Since its first installment in 2006, ICOMM has grown to be a significant international tradeshow that showcases the latest products and technologies from a wide array of Asian mobile, tablets and consumer electronics manufacturers. Over the years, the event has also grown to include various participants from related industries, like service providers, application and software designers, and producers of equipment, components, parts and accessories.

While past ICOMM events had a strict B2B (business to business) structure, ICOMM2012 was the first year that the tradeshow was open to the public, making it India’s first consumer mobile and tablet exhibition. This B2B/C2B strategy appeared to be largely successful—the event received a high amount of traffic, especially from young people, and plans for the 8th ICOMM in 2013 involve an increase in event scale through integration with the India Telecom 2013 tradeshow.[2]

The main themes of ICOMM2012 were mobiles, tablets, and consumer electronics, though applications, accessories, and various related technologies and industries were also featured. The event hosted a large diversity of participants, from leading Indian brands like Micromax, Lava International, Karbonn and Maxx Mobile to smaller Indian and international brands such as GlobyTalky, Skymobiles, Gionee, Ivio, Belphone and Signal. A huge array of devices and innovations were featured at ICOMM2012, many of which are still prototypes. Here are some of the innovations and booths that caught my eye:

	Datawind Ltd. occupied a popular booth with the release of four new 7-inch UbiSlate tablets[3] UbiSlate 7Ci, 7C+, 7Ri and 7R+. These sophisticated Android devices function as both tablets and smartphones, support WiFi and GPRS connections, and are the only Android devices on the Indian market to feature Datawind’sUbiSurfer browser. The UbiSlate 7+ devices can now be pre-ordered for between Rs. 3,499 and Rs. 4,799. I was able to interview Mr. Jasjit Singh, the Executive Vice President of Datawind, on the UbiSlate tablets. A link to this interview will be provided in the near future. ICOMM2012 actually saw the launch of fair number of new devices onto the Indian market. One of the most prominent launches was SMSInfosys’[4] new product line of mobile, tablet, and computer devices under the brand GlobyTalky.[5] This “GlobyTalky” brand originally began as a mobile application called “GlobyTalky – Connected Life”, a multi-platform RCSe application that boasts multiple communication and sharing features. The application, brand and devices are the brainchildren of Imtiaz Ahmed, the founder of SMSInfosys.

Datawind Ltd. occupied a popular booth with the release of four new 7-inch UbiSlate tablets[3] UbiSlate 7Ci, 7C+, 7Ri and 7R+. These sophisticated Android devices function as both tablets and smartphones, support WiFi and GPRS connections, and are the only Android devices on the Indian market to feature Datawind’sUbiSurfer browser. The UbiSlate 7+ devices can now be pre-ordered for between Rs. 3,499 and Rs. 4,799.

I was able to interview Mr. Jasjit Singh, the Executive Vice President of Datawind, on the UbiSlate tablets. A link to this interview will be provided in the near future.

ICOMM2012 actually saw the launch of fair number of new devices onto the Indian market. One of the most prominent launches was SMSInfosys’[4] new product line of mobile, tablet, and computer devices under the brand GlobyTalky.[5] This “GlobyTalky” brand originally began as a mobile application called “GlobyTalky – Connected Life”, a multi-platform RCSe application that boasts multiple communication and sharing features. The application, brand and devices are the brainchildren of Imtiaz Ahmed, the founder of SMSInfosys.

The GlobyTalky launch was distinguished by the wide array of devices that were released. The brand features a good selection of feature phones, smartphones and tablets, as well as two laptops (I was unable to get a picture of the laptops). Each of the GlobyTalky mobile and tablet devices feature the GlobyTalky – Connected Life application. Two phones are of particular interest in the photo below—the thin light blue phone with the long blue strap and the dark blue candy bar-style phone on the right.


The light blue phone is about the size of a credit card and 5.6 mm thick. It was advertised as a “back-up” phone that one could keep in their wallet and use when their main phone failed, and was priced at Rs. 1000-1200. The dark blue phone, called the G-Aqua, is completely waterproof—it can function perfectly while submerged in water, and can survive submersion of up to 1.5 meters without taking any damage. It can even receive calls, play music, and take pictures while underwater. It can be seen again in white in the picture below.


According to Mr. Ahmed, 60 per cent of the mobile devices that are brought into services centers in India have water damage, which is what motivated him to create a completely waterproof phone for the Indian market. He estimates that it will be priced between Rs. 4,200 and Rs. 4,500.

GlobyTalky was not the only participant that showcased a waterproof phone, though. IVIO, a mobile brand owned by the Indonesian company PT. Intersys, was also giving demonstrations on their waterproof smartphone, the DG68. With its sleek design, 4.1-inch high-resolution screen, 3G and Wifi capabilities, capacitate touch and Android 4.0 OS, the DG68 is a much more sophisticated phone than the G-Aqua. However, IVIO has yet to release any of its devices onto the Indian market, and the DG68 is still a prototype.

The ShenZhen BLEPHONE Technology Co., Ltd., the company that owns the popular mobile brands Lesun and Lephone (the latter of which is available on the Indian market), also had a popular booth. Aside from their large presentation of feature phones and smartphones, BLEPHONE also showcased some interesting innovations and accessories. In particular, I was quite impressed by their Lephone mobile USB charging devices, called the CooMax, and their Lesun digital recorder-cum-mobile phone, the Gift I.

ICOMM2012 was a hugely successful exhibition. Aside from showcasing many of the most interesting and significant innovations and actors in the Asian ICT sectors, and possibly the wider world, the event was able to attract more than 21,500 delegates over a two-day period.[6] Further, according to NK Goyal, the president of the CMAI Association of India, the fair was able to generate business leads worth USD 154 million.[7] I highly encourage anyone interested in the exciting and ever-changing world of ICT to attend ICOMM2013, as it is sure to continue to grow and attract more and more exciting and fascinating technologies and devices.

Given below is a gallery of the photos taken at the event and of various other booths and devices.

[1]. The CMAI Association of India is a prominent trade association that works to promote growth in the Indian IT and telecom sector domestically and internationally through activities such as investing in industry services and promotion, education, training and market research. Through consultation, events, advocacy, research and promotion, the CMAI now boasts a substantial amount of members and international partners, as well as multiple international offices. More information can be found on the CMAI Association of India at http://www.cmai.asia/association.php
[2]. See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.
[3]. The UbiSlate tablet is the commercial version of Datawind Ltd.’s Aakask tablet, a high-functioning low-cost tablet device that was developed in collaboration with the Indian government as part of the country’s endeavor to supply Indian college and university students with a low-cost computer device. This project was part of the government’s aim to provide an e-learning service to 25,000 colleges and 500 universities across India (this figure was retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10740817). More data on this device can be found at: http://www.akashtablet.com/
[4]. SMSInfosys is a mobile phone testing company with offices in India, Hong Kong and China. They perform quality assurance/quality control inspection, certification verification and IMEI services to mobile phone producers. More information about the company can be found here: http://smsinfosys.com/
[5]. More information on this brand and product line can be found here: http://globytalky.com/
[6].See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.
[7]. See: “7th ICOMM 2012 Held Successfully.” EFYTimes.com, EFY Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., September 17th, 2012, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=90770. Last accessed on October 30th, 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/icomm-2012-report

How to write differently for different Telugu digital platforms - awareness session to Indu Gnana Vedika

pavan — 2018-07-19T14:56:45Z

Different digital platforms require a different style of writing based on nature, ethos, and audience of the platform. Without which writer and piece of writing can only find rejections and deletions.

On June 9th, CIS-A2K Community advocate, and Telugu Wikipedia Admin Pavan Santhosh took a session which aimed to improve writing abilities on various digital platforms to members of Indu Gnana Vedika, who earlier collaborated with A2K to release and digitize their books in Wikisource. On 22 June 2014, CIS-A2K conducted an event to re-license 10 books into CC license and Training on Tewiki to members of Indu Gnana vedika. Later Indu Gnana Vedika members started digitizing those books in Telugu Wikisource & Creating articles about Indu Gnana Vedika books and other aspects in Telugu Wikipedia.

Telugu Wikipedia admins found many of those articles are not notable to be in Telugu Wikipedia, notified and discussed. Finally deleted majority of them. One of the users introduced to Tewiki during this project - Indusri Ushasri continued to contribute improving those 10 books in Telugu Wikisource and undeleted articles about Indu Gnana vedika in Telugu Wikipedia.This event intended to be respectful and good closure for the partnership. The event was designed to provide a better idea to interested members of the organization about varying styles of different digital platforms like Telugu Wikipedia, e-Magazines, Websites, etc., and help them to choose various platforms to contribute according to the subject they wanted to write.

Pavan demonstrated various aspects that needed to look into while writing such a piece like the ethos of the platform, target audience, etc., 5 participants from Indu gnana vedika along with Indusri Ushasri participated in this event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/how-to-write-differently-for-different-telugu-digital-platforms-awareness-session-to-indu-gnana-vedika

How to do GuerillaGLAM

subha — 2015-05-28T15:30:15Z

A proposal titled How to do GuerrillaGLAM" that I had submitted for the Wikimania 2015 has been accepted. I will be presenting this on July 18.

See the details on Wikipedia page. Click to view the programme schedule.

Submission no. 5008

Title of the submission: How to do GuerillaGLAM

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): Presentation

Author of the submission: Subhashish Panigrahi

E-mail address: psubhashishgmail.com

Username: psubhashish

Country of origin: India

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, India

Personal homepage or blog: psubhashish.com

Abstract

Building partnership with GLAM institutions is a great way of funneling the cultural content acquisition and bringing open access to such valuable data. But it is not that easy given the complications each country has in terms of formal agreement, organizational framework, etc. This presentation will detail about the learning curve of institutional partnership building, leveraging personal contacts in small scale GLAM projects and bringing in several indie-projects to cut implication cost, and execute low-cost models.

During this presentation I will present two case studies of contrasting nature: India's first GLAM project at the National Crafts Museum, New Delhi, and various small-scale collaborative projects. Where the first one would have learning from the six months long project, the second one will draw inspirations from many initiatives that have really no cost or low cost implication and less implementation time involved. At times, institutional collaborations become liabilities and labor intensive with low Return on Investment. Training staff and implementing GLAM projects are not always easy and retaining contributors is a challenge. Alternatively GuerrillaGLAM could be thought of when having a Wikimedian-in-Residence is not feasible. This presentation will be useful for those who can mobilize a small team of volunteers equipped with digital camera, access to local cultural institutions and some level of expertise of curating data. Making documentaries and building narratives based on acquired content to creating learning resources and promotional materials will be another aspect of this presentation. building partnerships with many federal or private institutions also needs sustained long-term engagement and volunteer time is not always enough to devote for a long term GLAM project. This presentation will detail about going the guerrilla way to acquire data from GLAM institutions. This will involve low cost models, leveraging various factors, and getting the most out from cultural institutions where collaboration and long term engagement has high cost and time implications.

Track: GLAM Outreach

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/how-to-do-guerilla-glam

How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-10-25T01:39:42Z

Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.

This was published by Opensource.com on October 24, 2016.

Indian-language Wikipedias and open access

Most commonly spoken Indian languages have had Wikipedia projects for almost a decade. Languages like Konkani and Tulu are new entrants in the Wikipedia family, and currently there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias. One example of high-quality open access content is the Open Textbook of Medicine, an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, which was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happen to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high-quality, open content like this.

To help fuel the growth of Wikipedia and its various projects, such as the Indian-language Wikipedias, the Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem with Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates, which are run by both volunteers and paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization responsible for fundraising, technical, and community support. In India, Wikimedia India, the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates working on catalyzing the growth of the content and the communities.

Whereas Wikimedia India focuses on expanding all the Indian-languages content, Punjabi Wikimedians focus on Punjabi language content (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), and CIS-A2K focuses on five languages: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.

Indian-language Wikipedia projects can only grow with the help of volunteers editing their own language Wikipedias and adding missing information from a reliable sources, which is where open access content can help.

Open in action

The 2016 International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30, 2016. The theme this year is Open in Action. The announcement explains, "International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year's theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting preprints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research."

Indian contributors show the spirit of Open in Action as they help add content to the various Indian-languages Wikipedias. They depend on open access to research and other publications to help millions of people, including those living in rural areas, who are joining us online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias

How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services

Guest blogger: Krishna Chaitanya Velaga — 2017-07-10T04:14:58Z

I'm User: Krishna Chaitanya Velaga from English Wikipedia; fortunately and unfortunately my user name and my real name share the same text. I have been contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects since December 2014. I work primarily on Indian military history related topics and articles. Initially, I was focused on creating articles rather than assessing them. My wiki journey can be best described in two parts, before and after Train The Trainer 2017.

The latter part of 2016 proved to be a critical period of my Wiki journey. I was credited with my first good article, first featured A-class article and list, first featured list and, several Did You Know credits on English Wikipedia. Later on, I was awarded the “Military history newcomer of the year” for 2016. I was the first Indian to receive the award. Additionally, I was selected to be the “Featured Wikimedian of Month for January 2017” by Wikimedia India.

As of January 2017, I have been contributing for nearly two years, and as far as I have observed the military history topic area of India is one of the most neglected areas. With two well known military historians from India, Srikar Kashyap Pulipaka (User:StrikeEagle) and Colonel Ashwin Baindur [retd.] (User: AshLin) on a semi Wiki break, I was left to be the only regular contributor. In an attempt to encourage more Wikipedians to work on this area, Indian military history work group emerged as an initiative by the Military history project. The work group closing in on a year since its inception, has more than twenty-five members at present. As the founder of the group, I aspire to incubate the group into an independent task force under Military history project. One of the major problems I faced while working on the military history articles was regarding images. Though the images were accepted on Commons, they were rejected at advanced levels of assessment i.e. A-class review, FAC, FLC etc. One of the primary reasons for the problem is the unclear copyright statement presented on the official websites of the armed forces and various uniformed services. I had been thinking for a long while to resolve this issue and TTT provided me with the path to finds a solution for this. Train the Trainer (TTT) is one of the best initiatives by Centre of Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge. It is a three-day residential program to enhance the trainer in experienced and well established Wikipedians through the length and breadth of India. Prior to TTT 2017, I have only been involved in online activities of Wikipedia, predominantly contributing to Indian military history topics. I hardly knew about the offline community of Wikipedia i.e. the grant structure of Wikimedia Foundation, conduction of edit-a-thons, meet-ups, program affiliates etc. Not only this, but also the Wikipedian contacts I had were very sparse. Though I was selected to attend TTT 2016, I could not attend to academic constraints. During TTT, I had rich exposure to the wider Indian Wikimedia community and that of Indic language projects. TTT also cleared many of the misconceptions I had of Wikimedia, some them include the use of Harvard referencing style, importance of offline events, etc.

Owing to the experience I decided to act on the problem. There is a heavy need of images related to the uniformed services. So I discussed my idea with Ravi Shankar Ayyakannu (User:Ravidreams), coordinator of Wiki Loves Food and Manager for Strategic Partnerships in Asia under Global Reach Team. Initially, I thought of naming it Wiki Loves Armed Forces, Wiki Loves Security Services etc. But with an intention to widen the scope, it was named as Wiki Loves Uniformed services. Once finalized, I started creating necessary pages and templates on Commons. Simultaneously, I worked on forming the core team of coordinators and judges. I chose Suyash Dwivedi (User:Suyash.dwivedi) and Mourya Biswas (User:Mouryan) to be the Coordinator and Assistant Coordinator respectively, with myself as the Lead Coordinator. The jury included Col. Ashwin Baindur [retd.], Diego Delso (User:Poco a poco), Col. Ravi Shankar Vasireddy [retd.] (Off-community) and Sirkar Kashyap Pulipaka. After having done these tasks, I moved on to file a detailed rapid grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grants team was very responsive and the grant was approved in a week. This initiative gained good global support including the foundation’s staff, who were happy to see a new Wiki Loves initiative budding. However, till now there aren't as many images as expected. To increase awareness about the program we’ve decided to implement a new strategy of conducting photo walks with government permission. Apart from that we’re also in contact with the Indian Navy to donate their images to the contest. The deadline may extend for about a month or so depending upon the stats. Personally, I see great potential for this project, but the problem is one of Wikipedians' response. I hope this initiative will be a great success and will be taken up by fellow Wikimedians from others countries. I conclude by thanking CIS-A2K for conducting innovative workshops and Wikimedia India for their support to the project since its inception. I also thank each and every unacknowledged finger behind this great initiative.

Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Lead Coordinator

Wiki Loves Uniformed services (India) 2017

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/how-it-came-to-be-wiki-loves-uniformed-services

How Can We Make Open Education Truly Open?

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:45:55Z

I have spent the last month being unpopular. I have been in conversation with many ‘Open Everything’ activists and practitioners. At each instance, we got stuck because I insisted that we begin by defining what ‘Open’ means in the easy abuse that it is subject to.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was originally published in DML Central on November 22.

It has been a difficult, if slightly tedious exercise, because not only was there a lack of consensus around what constitutes openness, but also a collective confusion about what we mean when we attribute openness to an object, a process or to people. It was easy to define openness as opposed to a closed system – attributes of transparency, ownership, collaboration and a multidirectional panopticon were invoked in trying to understand the form, function and role of openness. However, it was quickly clear that even with people who are on the same side of the battle-lines around openness, there is a disjunction in their imagination of what an Open Society can mean. Hence, the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Government’ for instance, had very little cross-over with the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Education’. Apart from the larger infrastructure industry that supports the various implementations of Open systems ranging from participatory governments to Digital Humanities, there seems to be silos of openness that co-exist but do not converse.

One of the ways of doing away with the cultures of ambiguity that seem to have developed around Openness, where it is the object of inquiry, the process through which inquiries are made, the lens of critique and the aspiration of movements, perhaps need to be unpacked. And one of the ways of doing this would be to shift the focus from Open as an adjective to Open as a verb – to focus not on what it is, but what it works towards. This shift in thinking of Open as a verb, allows to produce a political critique of the Open paradigm, which is otherwise often missed out in the self-avowed goodness of Open movements.

This is probably a good space for me to declare that I am not an Openness dis-evangelist. I appreciate, endorse and celebrate the values of collaboration, engagement, participation, access and empowerment that Open movements work with and indeed belong to quite a handful of them. However, I do want to move away from the Open as self-explanatory and ask the more difficult questions – What is it that we are opening? Who are we opening it for? What is the Open working towards? In whose service and to what purposes? So when I look at ‘Open Education’, I don’t just want to look at how we open up education for mass access but also how do we make transparent the politics that surround the opening up of education.

Open as an Adjective vs Open as a Verb

One of the most celebrated accounts of open education has found its impetus in two distinct narratives – the first is that the University as we have inherited it is in ruins. The University has been described as inadequate, in desperate need of change to fit the requirements of the contemporary times we live in. The second is that education and learning are in a moment of crisis. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does entail the development of new pedagogic and technological structures which can construct new modes of engaging with knowledge practices. Both of these narratives are more or less taken for granted. There are staged battles between those who swear by MOOCs as the answer and those who swear at MOOCs as amplification of the problem; or between those who call for more public investment in education and learning and those who think that privatising education is the way forward. But in all these debates, which often take the tones of sombre zealots who argue over the nature of the divine, there is almost no questioning of the idea that the university is in crisis. Thus, when it comes to Open Education disputants, they never question the narrative of the university in crisis, but merely in how to resolve this crisis.

Sharmila Rege, a Dalit-feminist and an educator at the Pune University in India, who had made it her life work to critically intervene in debates around education and its intersections with social and political processes, suggests that what we need to do is reverse engineer the generation of this crisis. While the University seems to be ubiquitously crumbling across the globe – despite the fact that an historically unprecedented portion of the global population is enrolled in education programmes – this narrative of ruin is not new. Indeed, nor is the narrative of Openness. In Rege’s material history of education and gender in India, she invokes the figure of Savitribai Phule, the icon of India’s modernity, who, as an educated woman dedicated her life to ‘opening up’ education for those who were underprivileged and broken. Along with her husband, a modernist and a social reformer, Phule was the prototype feminist and development worker who radically opened up the modern education system in Maharashtra to those who were the intended beneficiaries but more often than not, excluded from the benefits that the system promised. In fact, as Rege shows us, in Phule’s account of the world, the university was essentially a system that justified its existence through the principles of openness and inclusion which we have now separated from it. While it might be a fallacy to claim these visions for a universal education system, it is still worth recognising that in different forms and formats, the establishment of the public education system has necessarily been one of openness.

When then, did this open system suddenly become closed? When did the university, which was a response to the closed education systems that were limited to the upper castes and classes of India, enter a state of crisis? In India, especially with the huge public discourse around affirmative action, quotas and reservations for different underprivileged communities, and the continued investment in public education infrastructure – the number of private universities, when you compare them with the developed North, is ridiculously low – we really need to figure out what it is that the university failed to do in its visions of openness for itself. Rege suggests that the generation of the crisis narrative for the university is actually a response to the university as an open structure. In the 1990s, with the renewed focus on universal education in the country, especially after the epoch marking agitations against affirmative actions which included massive mobilisations of upper class and caste students against the recommendations of the Mandal Commissions for continued reservation of seats for women and dalits, the university was at its open best. Both in terms of infrastructure, public policy and regulatory mechanisms, we had created universities that invited participation and presence of bodies which were otherwise systemically excluded from education processes.

Over the next two decades, the university then, has become a more inclusive space. It is populated with unexpected bodies and subjects. It has been de-gentrified and has been heralded as one of the few public institutions where a critique of sectarian and preferential politics has emerged. According to Rege, it is this very opening up of the University to women and Dalits, and the ‘vulgarization’ of education that led to the engineering of a crisis in the narratives around the university. This crisis, propelled equally by a neo-liberal development agenda and the need to create exclusive and exclusionary spaces for the elites of the country who did not necessarily want to find their privilege by escaping to the Ivy League universities in the North-West, sustains the idea that the university is in shambles and hence proposes the new Open Education movements, of which the MOOCs and the private universities are the two key embodiments. In a country that is starkly divided across linguistic and technology access lines, it is clear that both these structures, which are the key advocates of Open Education and learning, are in the service of those who can afford it. Or in other words, it is clear that the new openness movements, while they propose to be in the service of mass, distributed and universal education, are actually very urban, Anglophone, and available to a very small fraction of the society that already had privileged access to different and varied education resources historically.

These Open Education policies now offer alternatives to the public education model by suggesting that it is in crisis and thus finding viable options. These alternatives further demand that the Public University, becomes a professionalised space that produces workers and skilled labour for the new information and knowledge industries, while the more privileged sites of critical philosophy, thought and art move on to safer havens where those with rights of entitlement can study them in peace. The open Digital Humanities projects or the institution of private and satellite university campuses, which continue with their ad hoc, de-skilled, meritocratic logic of working with adjuncts and temporary knowledge workers, invest more in the technological development which is again a masculine domain of privilege even in countries like India where we witness massive mobilisation of people being trained to work in the IT industries.

This reverse engineering of what Open Education can mean in a country like India probably has similar narratives of the context and generation of the crisis across different geographies and time-zones. Openness, with the euphoria and the promise of radical transformation often produces this ellipsis that fails to see the larger structures that inform and shape the open education policies and regulations. In its closeness to the Big Data proponents, it even makes us believe that open education is about data and information management, forgetting that these practices have a direct implication on the material conditions that have been historically shaped. Just like we have developed a critique of well-intentioned development agendas that are purportedly pro-poor but eventually only benefit the wealthy by depositing more power in their coffers, openness in education and in governance needs to be re-examined more closely. Yes, Openness has some fantastic virtues that we need to aspire towards. But to open something, it first needs to be closed. And especially when it comes to the modern education system, we need to question the closeness that is easily attributed to and presumed for the public university. It is time to not only implement open education, but also see the larger constellations of privilege and inequity that often get elided in the blanket acceptance of the Open as necessarily the good or the desirable.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-nishant-shah-november-22-2013-how-can-we-make-open-education-truly-open

History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ (Deemed to be University)

Ananth — 2018-10-29T02:20:14Z

This article gives the insight of Christ Wikipedia Education Program, how students are involved in different capacities in the program and shares the best practices of the Education Program.

This was originally published in Wikimedia Blog

Wikipedia Education programme at CHRIST (Deemed to be University) started as a pilot project in 2013 with a goal of using Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool for the undergraduate students. Both the educators of the WEP and of the university were new to one such approach. Students of five Indian languages--Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu--were chosen were enrolled for the program as students opt for these languages as their second language. During the first and second year, almost all the students created new Wikipedia articles where the majority of the articles were below accepted standard. The difficulty in making students learn about input tools in their languages, Wikipedia basics, and wiki markup pushed for creating "how-to" video tutorials in Hindi and Kannada. Working with Urdu was discontinued after the second year because of program staff exit. Slowly, the program was reoriented in a manner that new students learned native language input and markup for the first two semesters by digitizing books on Wikisource and later by editing Wikipedia articles during the next two semesters. This helped better the output by increasing the quality of articles by nearly 30%. From 2015 the program was further improved by helping students get more hands-on training of input, wiki markup by intensive typing during the first semester, a few advanced options like interacting with each other on user talk page during the second semester, moving to Wikipedia editing and developing articles on Wikipedia sandbox during third semester, and finally moving the articles by peer-review from fellow batchmates, faculty and the larger Wikipedia community. The faculty is involved in the development and on-wiki review process ensuring quality.

The program so far has gone to the level of producing about 70% very good quality articles where nearly 0.6% of the articles are of really poor quality. The female to male ratio is surprisingly equal and at times, there are more female students as compared to the male ones. However, there is little concern in integrating the student-Wikimedians to the larger Wikimedia community.

Also, there is little exchange of learning and best practices between cross-language outreach programs across India across several different languages. One of the ways to better this process is making program leaders talk to each other.

To know more about us follow on

Twitter- https://twitter.com/wepchrist

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/ChristWEP/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/history-of-wikipedia-education-programme-at-christ-deemed-to-be-university

History of Creative Commons in India

dwivedi — 2013-11-13T04:20:38Z

This blog-post discusses the potential for Creative Commons in India, in light of imminent Creative Commons Re-launch, by highlighting the history of works licensed under Creative Commons in the country.

In the era where internet has permeated a vast majority of the globe, vast amounts of content is only a few clicks away from billions of users world-wide. As a response, the cumulative appetite of the users for this content rose exponentially and therefore, the mainstream creators are no longer able to satiate it all by themselves. Due to the combination of this hunger with the access to basic editing software on a computing device like a smartphone, users today can create and re-create the content on a massive scale. Termed as “remix culture”,[1] this phenomenon focuses on the enormous aggregated creativity residing among the masses of amateur creators, who are driven not by motives of profit but of sheer innovation.

However, the biggest obstacles that these amateur users-cum-creators face are the limitations imposed on the use of available content by copyright laws. Despite the fact that not all the creators of original content wish to completely restrict the use of their works through copyright, the law grounds “all rights reserved” with the creator. This ensures that the moment something original is created, there is a high potential of stifling the very creativity it was aimed to protect and propagate. The main chilling effect comes from the fact that every use an individual wishes to make of the copyrighted material, permission needs to be sought from the creator. Creative Commons steps in as a solution to this by basing the license on the principle of “some rights reserved”[2]as opposed to all. The licences[3] allow the creator to choose any combination from four conditions (attribution, share-alike, non-commercial, no derivatives) to provide free and unlimited use of the work to all users on one end, or just the right to freely share the work without any change giving proper credit to the author.

In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted. The Indian Chapter of Creative Commons was launched by IIT Bombay in 2007 as a part of its technology fest, ‘Techfest’.[4] However, due to certain problems, it didn’t materialize. Now, Creative Commons India is being re-launched on November 12, 2013 in New Delhi by the Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Wikimedia India and Acharya Narendra Dev College.[5]

This does not mean that India has no works licensed under Creative Commons yet. Recently, a short film titled River Terns of Bhadra documenting the life cycle of River Terns was screened in Bangalore and touted as the first film in India to have Creative Commons license.[6]

However, there have been quite a few films licensed under Creative Commons licenses which can be traced as far back as 2007. These films originating from Kerala were archived by an erstwhile website, Kerala Free Knowledge,[7] dedicated to making the creative works available to public with limited restrictions. The creators of these films, which vary in forms such as documentaries or music videos, not only allow their exhibition to small audiences without their permission but actively prohibit any sort of financial collection at any such exhibitions. Perhaps the most attractive part of the licenses employed by these movies is the clause “Copy left, right and centre!”[8]

Another example is a music video titled Gaon Chhodab Nahin![9] about Adivasi struggles due to developmental projects. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 India[10] license, which allows not only for copying, distributing, displaying and performing the work but also making derivatives of the same, commercially or otherwise. Yet another initiative that needs mention, though not in filming, is one by Pratham Books, a non-profit publishing house which encourages unrestricted access to content in children’s books by advocating and employing Creative Commons licenses similar to the aforementioned music video. They have achieved unmatched success in reaching their objectives of maximum penetration along with exponentially increasing the reading content while propagating a culture of openly accessible derivative works.[11] These examples clearly demonstrate the viability and the desire for a culture of sharing in the Indian context, thereby emphasising the potential for success for the imminent Creative Commons India Re-launch.

[1]. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid economy, 28 (2008).

[2]. Watch http://creativecommons.org/videos/wanna-work-together

[3]. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

[4]. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/2007/01

[5]. For details see http://cis-india.org/openness/events/creative-commons-india-launch

[6]. http://www.timeoutbengaluru.net/bangalore-beat/features/tern-events

[7]. https://web.archive.org/web/20080401064333/http://kerala.free-knowledge.org/

[8]. https://web.archive.org/web/20070307175447/http://kerala.free-knowledge.org/?page_id=3

[9]. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFmsl7KrZn8&feature=youtu.be

[10]. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/in/

[11]. http://spicyip.com/2011/09/creative-commons-licensing-success.html

The author, Priyank Dwivedi is a student at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and an intern at the Centre for Internet and Society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/history-of-creative-commons-in-india

Hindustani Language: We Are Wikipedia

syed — 2015-04-10T16:20:07Z

In 2014, the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) embarked on a new social media-based initiative - WeAreWikipedia. The aim of the project was "One Wikimedian every week to tell untold community stories on Twitter".

Read the original published on Wikipedia page here.

Although CIS-A2K has the mandate of promoting Wikimedia Projects only in India, by virtue of the inherent power of Twitter and Internet, the project was able to attract Wikipedians from virtually all parts of the world - India, Cambodia, Israel, USA, and a number of other countries for curating WeAreWikipedia account on Twitter. The enriching outcome was these Wikipedians' expression of community views and as well as their own editing and Wiki World experiences in the form of short and succinct tweets. These messages give a more clear pictures of happenings than tons of blogposts, videos and lengthy articles which we find today scattered over the internet.

In February 2015, I attended the first Hindi Wiki Sammelan Meet in Delhi. This event was also supported by CIS-A2K. It was attended by 15 people, including three administrators of the Hindi Wikipedia: Ashish Bhatnagar, Aniruddha Kumar and Sanjeev Kumar. Also present were two reviewers: Piyush Maurya and my humble self. During the meet, one of the participants, Manish Panday, demonstrated the massive reach and impact of "Twittercasting" the event proceedings. This drew a keen interest from the Hindi Wikipedians with the Hindi Wikipedia admin Ashish Bhatnagar taking the lead in curating the "WeAreWikipedia" shortly after the meet. As his one week of curation came to end, he asked as to who would curate next. I volunteered to be part of this exercise. My CIS ex-colleague Subhashish Panigrahi informed about allocating the week March 2-9 for me, which I agreed.

As a Wikimedian, I made it a point to first showcase the developments within Hindi Wikipedia such as the notable articles written during the week, the discussions on the Hindi transliteration of non-Hindi names/ titles, village pump discussions, etc.I also shared suggestions with some of the Hindi Wikipedians on editing aspects.

A remarkable development during the week was publication of my report on Hindi Wiki Sammelan Meet in Delhi and its Hindi translation by Ashish Bhatnagar on Wikimedia Foundation Blog. I was delighted to post the information of both these developments on Twitter. In fact, Ashish Bhatnagar favorited my Twitterpost about the Hindi translation. . In addition to Hindi Wikipedia, I was also vocal on the developments at the language front such as Kavita Path Pratiyogita (Poetry Competition) by HindiUSA, Unicode converters, Hindi blogs, developments in Urdu and other Indian languages. I also highlighted some of the projects such as Speedydeletion Wikia, Manypedia, blogpost/ online forum discussions on Wikipedia as well as the rise of mobile edits on Indian Wiki projects.

Since March 8 or Women's Day happened during the week, I made many tweets during the week about the commemorative Wikipedia Editathons both in India and abroad, including those in places like Latin America. I also tweeted about important events such GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference, Erasmus Prize 2015 for Wikipedia, Howard University's efforts to fill in Wikipedia’s gaps in Black History, etc.

I was glad to highlight many important issues during my week as a curator. This included the special media attention abroad given to people who edit Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects such as the featured interview of Bryan Henderson in the The Independent. I suggested that there is a need for such an encouraging gesture to the contributors of Wikimedia projects. I remember some of the Wikipedians favoriting this message as they concurred with me. I also stressed on the need to reinforce fresh lease of life in projects such as Devanagari Wikis Monitoring Team as an active team will benefit not just Hindi but all Wiki Projects in Devanagari-based languages.

The most pleasing aspect of my curator experience were the proactive discussions, retweets, favoriting, of many of my messages. I witnessed an instant response when I mentioned how beautifully the bot-assisted Twitter account "PakistanEdits" posts about anonymous edits from Pakistan on English Wikipedia and the need for a similar tool for India. One Wikipedian promised to work on finding a similar solution to this idea. Similarly, my Twitterpost on the time-barred "Hindi Wiki Sammelan" message notification on every page of Bhojpuri Wikipedia was removed instantly. A still surprising reaction was seen only a few days back when a gentleman enquired about how he can contribute to fill the need for Sanskrit text in the online Vietnamese Wikipedia guestbook page - this response comes after a fortnight of my tweet, and two persons had curated the Twitter account during this period.

Thus, I believe that my messages were well received and my interactions with other Twitter-users were friendly, informative and extremely fruitful. A summary of my curator experience is as follows:

Description of Tweets	Number
No of Unique Tweets	148
My Tweets Retweeted	53
My Tweets Favorited	63
My Discussed Tweets	12
Others Tweets I Retweeted	27
Followers+	34
Following+	17
Image Uploads	5

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hindustani-language-we-are-wikipedia

Hindi Wiki Community Baithak in Delhi

subha — 2015-02-27T01:34:25Z

Hindi Wikimedians met in New Delhi during February 14 and 15. This was the first meeting of the Hindi community. Subhashish Panigrahi attended the meetup.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/how-the-first-time-face-to-face-interaction-helped-india-hindi-wikipedia-community

Helping Institutions Embrace Open Access

Admin — 2017-11-27T15:11:34Z

World over, a large number of universities and institutions are making way for open access repositories. Why have Indian researchers shied away from it?

The article by Manupriya was published in the Wire on November 17, 2017

On October 28, 2017, a group of panelists in the faculty hall at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), discussed the framework of policies that can help academic institutions embrace open access in letter, spirit and action. The discussion was a part of week-long activities organised by DST Centre for Policy Research (DST–CPR) at IISc to increase awareness and acceptability for open access publishing in India.

The panel included Jayant Modak, deputy director, IISc, Satyajit Mayor, director of National Centre for Biological Sciences and inStem, Padmini Ray Murray, vice-chair, Global Outlook: Digital Humanities, N.V. Sathyanarayana, chairman and managing director, Informatics India Ltd and Madan Muthu, visiting faculty at DST–CPR at IISc. The discussion was anchored and moderated by Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society.

Open access is a form of publishing that makes the fruits of research, such as journal papers and other forms of data accessible to anyone interested in it, without a cost. World over, a large number of universities and institutions are beginning to give up the library subscription model of publishing to make way for open access, owing to the latter’s lower cost and higher visibility.

In India too, funding agencies like DBT and DST have laid out guidelines that require researchers to submit their research output in open access repositories. Ironically though, most researchers have shied away from submitting their work in the repositories. Which raises the question, why?

In fact, this was one of the first questions that the panelists debated upon. Abraham initiated the discussion by asking the panelists – What are the weaknesses of DBT–DST policy on open access? Why have a large number of scientists not followed the guidelines laid by the policy? Is it because the policy document does not talk about any punitive measures for scientists in the event of not depositing their work in the institutional repositories (IRs)? And, how can the policy be improved?

Modak opened the argument by saying that we as a nation are good at making provisions but bad with implementation. He agreed that scientists are yet to warm up to the idea of open access but was disinclined on using punitive measures to force scientists into submitting their work in IRs. Mayor, in agreement with Modak, said that the policy document is advisory in nature and sort of lacks ‘teeth’. However, he too was against the use of punitive measures.

Murray, the third academician on the panel said that though the policy talks about staying away from publisher-based metrics like impact factor to assess a scientist’s work, it does not provide any information about what alternative metrics can be used to measure it. She suggested that the accessibility of a scientist’s work and how much effort she has put in to make it easily available to non-scientists could be used as a metrics for measurement. She also drew attention to the fact that the policy completely bypasses the requirements of independent scholars and those working in languages other than English. “Which institutional repository should they deposit their work in?”

Sathyanarayana, the fourth panelist and a strong advocate of open access said, the policy document “lacks an aggressive strategy” to drive a disruptive and “fundamentally voluntary model” of adopting open access. He asked the other panelists and the audience, “why have repositories like ResearchGate become so successful and attractive for researchers? Why can’t open access IRs be modelled along the lines of such repositories? His argument was that the IRs can be fashioned in a way to make them a ‘convenient step in the process of research’”. One suggestion that he offered was that IRs can be structured as a paper submission platform. So that anybody who is interested in publishing their work first puts it up in the IR and only after that the process of going to a journal begins.

Muthu, the fourth panelist and a long-time crusader for open access in India said that scientists in India have stayed away from the open access publishing because they don’t fully realise that in traditional models of publishing, you surrender all copyrights of your work to the publisher. He added that more scientists can be encouraged to adopt the open access model of publishing by making IRs institute-managed, easier to use and as a mandatory step in the process of publishing.

Mayor added to this argument by saying that the idea of submitting (unpublished) work in an IR is quite similar to the concept of pre-print archives which are fast becoming a powerful way of sharing work. Almost all top journals accept work that has been published in a pre-print archive. In fact, in the physical sciences, people have been using pre-print archives for a long time and now slowly, even the biology community is warming up to it.

Murray emphasised on the need to talk to students about open access and making them aware of the ways to design their metadata so that it is amenable to open access repositories.

As the discussion inched closer to its final moments, it veered off towards the costs of open access publishing. Modak said that in the last year alone, the amount of money IISc has spent for publishing papers has doubled. If all researchers start opting for open access (OA) journals/hybrid-OA journals that charge the authors nearly double of what traditional journals do, then publishing papers will become unsustainable.

To this, Sathyanarayana said, it may appear that the cost of publishing in OA journals is high, but on a macro-level, when you consider the cost of publishing and accessing all the papers published in a year, then the OA model costs much lesser. He added that scientific publishing is the only business in the world where authors (creators of proprietary material) give away all their rights to publishers.”

Backing up the points made by Sathyanarayana, Murray said that in traditional models of publishing the publishers make close to 400% profits. We need to think about, “how much labour we as academics put in for publishers’ profits?”

It is authors’ inertia that is stopping open access from becoming the obvious model of publishing, said, Muthu.

In conclusion, Abraham summed up the arguments and acknowledged that there are many dimensions to open access and an institutional policy on OA cannot be framed in a vacuum. Common people need to participate in the debate to shape the direction the policy takes.

Apart from the panel discussion a poster competition and a quiz competition were organised as part of the OA-week activities. DST–CPR was joined by the student’s council at IISc, Centre for Contemporary Studies, JRD Tata Library and IndiaBioscience in organising the activities.

This article was originally published on IndiaBioscience. Read the original here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access