Centre for Internet and Society

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics

praskrishna — 2011-11-08T05:01:14Z

The Western Ghats portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state on biodiversity informatics on 25 November 2011 at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), Bangalore.

Schedule

09:00 – 09:20	Registration of participants
09:20 – 09:30	Welcome / Introduction
09:30 – 11:15	Plenary talks - Technology behind biodiversity informatics (3 talks)
11:15 – 11:30	Tea break
11:30 – 12:30	Plenary talks - Scientific commons and policy (2 talks)
12:30 – 13:00	Discussion
13:00 – 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 – 16:00	Biodiversity portals in India - Presentations by different teams/panel discussion
16:00 – 16:15	Tea break
16:15 – 17:00	Discussions and networking

Spheres of the Workshop:

Plenary I: Technology behind biodiversity informatics - 0930 - 1115 hrs

Development of Information System, Open Data standards, Archive and Geospatial solutions, Visualization in Bhuvan - Arul Raj, National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Exploring the semantic web for species pages - M. Sravanthi, Western Ghats Portal - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Challenges on the emerging discipline of Biodiversity Informatics - Donald Hobern, Atlas of Living Australia - 30mins + 10 mins discussion

Focus:

The objective of this session is to understand the global developments in biodiversity informatics in relation with developments in India. The session will focus on:

the evolution of the discipline of biodiversity informatics and its current status
the development of standards in Indian context
the technologies for biodiversity informatics
the challenges in biodiversity informatics

Plenary II: Scientific commons and policy - 1130 - 1300 hrs

Commons in the context of Biodiversity Information - Danish Sheikh, Alternative Law Forum - 20 mins + 10 mins

Open data in the scientific realm - Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society - 20 mins + 10 mins

Discussion on Scientific commons and Policy - 30 mins

Focus:

The objective of the session is to understand the commons principle and its implications for scientific research. The session will focus on:

the experience of developing a creative commons policy in Indian scenario and the resulting impacts for scientific collaboration, open data and open access
policy and social implications of open data sharing

Plenary III - Biodiversity portals in India - 1400 - 1700 hrs

Moderation: R. Prabhakar/ MD Madhusudhan
Panelists: (Introductory note by each of the panelists - 10 minutes each)

Suhel Quader, Season Watch (www.seasonwatch.in), Migrant Watch (www.migrantwatch.in)

Sanjay Molur, Pterocount (www.pterocount.org/)

K.N.Ganeshaiah - Indian Bioresource Information Network (www.ibin.co.in)

Ramesh BR - Western Ghats Portal (www.thewesternghats.in/)

Shwetank Verma, Biodiversity of India, formerly Project Brahma (http://www.biodiversityofindia.org)

Krishnamegh Kunte, ifoundbutterflies (http://ifoundbutterflies.org/)
Vijay Barve, DiversityIndia (http://diversityindia.org/)
Deepak Menon, India Water Portal (http://www.indiawaterportal.org/)
Chitra Ravi, India Biodiversity Portal (http://indiabiodiversity.org/)
Mr D.K Ved, Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (http://envis.frlht.org)

Focus:

The objective of the session is to learn from each other’s experience and develop a combined vision for the future of biodiversity informatics in India. The panelists will present a focused summary of the

key features available on their portals
the experience of building the portal
the key lessons learnt
future plans

We believe these four aspects will be of common interest to all participants and the presentations are expected to stimulate discussion around these four aspects.

Summary of the Day: R Prabhakar - Call for synergy/collaboration/Thank you!!

Concept Note

Rapid advancements in the domains of computer Science and information technologies have allowed integration of biodiversity information and analytical capabilities to collaborate on social networks, leading to the emergence of a new discipline, Biodiversity Informatics. The dynamics in this discipline are defined by integrating multiplicity with the semantic web and enabling of democratic social networks focused on biodiversity. We are bound to see tremendous diversification in the scope of biodiversity informatics globally and in India.

Harnessing technology for aggregating, storing, querying and analyzing biodiversity data has seen major developments over the last decade. There has been a plethora of biodiversity information resources that include mailing lists and discussions groups, occurrence records, geographical databases, biodiversity image libraries, institutional databases, species description pages, specimen records of herbaria and museum databases, and biodiversity focused Internet sites. The challenges on the biodiversity informatics landscape are on two fronts: (1) A semantic web framework to link these biodiversity information islands; and (2) Effective and flexible data exchange standards for seamless information sharing among these sites.

The evolution of social networks and communities around biodiversity information systems has been a unique factor in influencing the ways in which these information systems have developed. The assimilation and aggregation of user-generated biodiversity data and dissemination under the 'commons' principle has gained momentum globally. It has changed the way scientific collaborations are being made, and created possibilities for effective citizen-science initiatives. It is now possible to ask fresh questions, with more data, newer methods, better tools and for citizens to participate and report data from different geographies. With this, local-level data can be integrated with large-scale data leading to a better understanding of biodiversity.

With the increased penetration of the Internet into developing economies, and the widespread adoption of web technologies, biodiversity informatics has spawned an impressive variety of initiatives. These initiatives range from global knowledge bases and networks, national initiatives, eco-region based initiatives, as well as sharply focused initiatives which address a single species or event. There have been tangible advantages for stakeholders from these initiatives which has inspired many other endeavours. Success stories exist at both global and local level, and learning from these experiences can help one understand the multi-faceted nature of this discipline.

The Western Ghats Portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state of biodiversity informatics as expressed in three spheres: i) technology behind biodiversity informatics, ii) scientific commons and policy and iii) biodiversity portals in India. With these objectives in mind, we welcome your active participation during the workshop. It could provide an opportunity for us to interact and learn from similar endeavors in this discipline.

Download the agenda here [PDF, 124 kb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop

We are Wikipedia

subha — 2014-09-06T03:19:29Z

Wikimedia Deutchland has included a paragraph about WeAreWikipedia on their blog.

@WeAreWikipedia auf Global Voices

Subhashish Panigrahi hat einen Beitrag über das Twitter-Projekt „We Are Wikipedia“ auf der Bloggerplattform GlobalVoices veröffentlicht. Subhashish erklärt unter anderem wo die Idee für das Projekt herkommt und greift einiger der unterschiedlichste Beiträge auf, die über den Twitter-Account in den letzten Wochen liefen. Inzwischen gibt es auch schon eine deutschsprachige Version des Beitrags

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

Watch what you read on that website

Prasad — 2011-04-02T14:10:54Z

Google has decided to give newspapers better control over their content appearing on the search engine but netizens don’t seem too pleased about it, says an article by NT Balanarayan of DNA on December 9, 2009

While many newspaper heads are rejoicing Google's decision to provide more control over their content appearing on the search engine, netizens don't seem too pleased about it.

More than Murdoch's stand demanding visitors to pay for news, what surprised most was the fact that Google made it easier for them to do so. "Anyone who owns a website knows that they can add or remove their content from search engines by modifying the robots.txt file, and that's what newspapers like Wall Street Journal should have done. But instead, many newspapers kept blaming search engines for their falling readership. Now that Google's provided such a tool, they have no more reason to complain," Jayant M, a city-based blogger says.

First Click Free, a tool from Google lets users view a limited number of articles on a website before being asked to register or to pay up to move ahead. But this tool again uses browser cache and cookies to keep track of how many stories a visitor has viewed. This can easily be overcome by clearing the cache or by using another browser. Google spoke out after an initial rumour of Microsoft holding talks with News Corp for exclusive indexing of the news sites on their Bing search engine gained traction. Microsoft later denied any such move.

"It's not like I'm not ready to pay a news website for news. But I wouldn't pay a news service for a few stories once in a while. I'll readily pay a local newspaper, if they demand a reasonable amount and provided it's not just agency news that's thrown my way," Suresh Nayak, a Bangalore-based techie says.

A few are ready to pay for content online, but a lot of people say they'll depend on other sources like blogs which provide news for free. "Mostly, in a newspaper, I don't read the full story because I get most of the information from the first few paragraphs. There are a lot of bloggers who post the most important news snippets on their blogs too. That is enough information most of the time," Jayant adds.

According to Sunil Abraham, executive director at Bangalore-based Centre of Internet and Society, every generation brings in disruptive new models which affect the existing ones. New business models are coming up and the ongoing discussions between search engines like Bing, Google and newspapers is just a part of it.

"As far as India is concerned, the question is not whether the media will provide their content for free or not, but if they come with a medium which can sustain them. It could be paid, ad-based or even based on a system where search engines pay for indexing them," he says.

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/watch-what-you-read-on-that-website

Washington Meet on Open Data Principles

praskrishna — 2015-03-09T02:05:01Z

Sunil Abraham was invited to discuss the common international open data principles on February 24, 2015. The meeting took place at the World Bank office in Washington.

The meeting focused on:

Reviewing the content of the Open Data Charter document
Understanding the target audience of the document, and how to be inclusive of local governments and non-government organizations
Developing a strategic plan and calendar of key events to support adoption of principles
Setting out practical next steps

Download Sunil's presentation here

Agenda Item	Description
1. Welcomes and Introductions (9:30-9:45)	See attendance list
2. Background Information (9:45-10:30)	Presentations on: o G8 Open Data Charter o G20 open data initiative o Post-2015 and the Data Revolution o OGP OD WG
Break (10:30-10:45)
3. Strategic alignment of open data principles initiatives (10:45-11:15)	Discuss need for common approach on OD principles · Discuss whether principles articulated in Int'l OD Charter, meet this need
4. Content of OD Charter (11:15-12:15)	Review Int'l OD Charter Provide comments on content, potential changes
Lunch (12:15-13:00)
5. International consultation on OD Charter (13:00-13:30)	· Suggest key stakeholders (governments, private sector, and civil society organizations) to consult on OD Charter · Discuss strategy and methods for global consultation on OD principles, especially with Global South
6. Governance of OD Charter (13:30-14:15)	Discuss need for ongoing governance for Charter · Discuss mechanisms and resources necessary to keep Charter updated and foster its adoption
Break (14:15-14:30)
7. Critical path for OD principles (14:30-15:15)	· Develop list of key milestones and events to support Charter adoption and implementation
8. Next steps (15:15-16:00)	· Develop list of specific action items for completion in the next 2 months, as well as over the medium- and long-term

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/washington-meeting-on-open-data-principles

Voices from Goa: Rusita Paryekar, a MA student writes articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-06T12:30:19Z

Rusita Paryekar is one of the 38 students from the MA Konkani department of Goa University gathered at the State Central Library to learn writing and editing articles on Konkani Wikipedia. Currently Konkani Wikipedia is in incubation and needs more voluntary participation from enthusiasts who want their language, Konkani to strengthen its base in the digital knowledge domain.


					Wikipedia editor Rusita Paryekar speaks about her editing experience on Konkani Wikipedia.

Thirty-eight M.A. students from the Konkani department of Goa came together for a four day long Konkani Wikipedia editing fun workshop and created history. Konkani Wikipedia is one of the Wikipedia projects that went into incubation (a phase every new Wikipedia project goes to allow the editor community to grow and take the project to a sustainable position) seven years back. Sadly it is still in incubation. One of the major reasons is the conflict for script. Konkani is written in 5 different scripts; Devanagari in Goa (as the official script of Goa) and Maharashtra, Roman (also known as Romi) and written by Goan Christian population, Kannada in Mangalore region of Karnataka, and Malayalam in Kochi region of Kerala. The Konkani speaking diaspora is now very much part of the the socio-ethnic groups of these neighbouring regions. The language of these states has naturally influenced Konkani spoken and written by the Konkani diaspora which has resulted in multiple writing standards and dialects. There are four standards of writing systems:

Writing standard that is officially approved by the Directorate of Official language, Government of Goa written in Devanagari script. Majority of the books (includes all Government of Goa publications) are written in this standard.
Writing standard that was influenced by the Portugese language during the Portuguese rule. Earliest available writings in Konkani including The Holy Bible are written in this standards.
Writing standard that Mangalorean Konkani diaspora use.
Writing standard that Keralite Konkani diaspora use.

Interestingly Konkani diaspora of all these regions have produced books in the writing standards mentioned above. The Konkani Wikipedia incubation project currently has 133 articles written in 3 different scripts; Devanagari, Roman and Kannada which has been a problem to get the approval. But this has not stopped the language enthusiasts to stop contributing. While meeting these students I felt that urge for bringing up Konkani in a digital domain and telling the Konkani diaspora about the untold story of Goa. This is the motivation that drives Rusita and many others to contribute to Wikipedia. Her first contribution was about Goan folk songs (गोंयची लोकगितां) which is the first Konkani article about this topic on the internet that is available for free. ‘If I would not write about my culture in my language who would do that?, says Rusita.

Further reading
Manohar L. Sardessai. Influence on Konkani. Journal of South Asian Literature. Vol. 18, No. 1, Goan Literature: A Modern Reader (Winter, Spring 1983), pp. 155-158.

Copyright note: The video and the content of this post are in CC-BY-SA 3.0. Feel free to use, share and remix the content and attribute me.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa-wikipedia-editor-rusita-paryekar

Voices from Goa: Frania Pereira tells Why She Writes Articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-05T09:24:57Z

Konkani as a language has seen geographical, political and religious conflicts. Being the official language of Goa and spoken widely in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra it is still trying to strengthen its base. Recently the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Konkani department of Goa University organized a four-day Wikipedia workshop for MA, Konkani language students. This workshop involved 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia which is incubation. We’re hoping that these efforts will contribute towards bringing this 7 year old project out of incubation to a live Wikipedia project.

				Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Why do you [edit] Wikipedia?

Wikipedia editors are always volunteers which translates to “Anyone and everyone can contribute to Wikipedia”. What is that brings people in today’s date to write articles on Wikipedia. This is a question we are not sure at times. You get up late in the night and check how many times your article has been edited and feel excited. This happens to many of the wikipedians including myself. It has been a personal journey to ask Wikipedians about the same. While conducting this workshop along with my colleague Nitika, I spent some time with the students asking about their experience of Wikipedia editing. We found that many of them were shy enough to sound low and we could not take the videos. This particular video features Frania Pereira, an MA student from Konkani department of Goa University. She attended the Wikipedia workshop we organized at the Central Library at Panaji for two days and edited articles on Bebinca (Konkani article here) and Colvá fama (Konkani article here), a local festival celebrated by the Colvá Catholics. Frania is worried how people stereotype Goa to be the just land of enjoyment and not look at the diverse culture, its ethnic food and festivals. Even the Konkani speaking population in other regions (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and abroad) don’t know much about this socio-language-cultural diversity. No other language than her mother-toungue Konkani could tell about these. And that is why she edits Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa

Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator

nitika — 2013-12-31T10:56:22Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Goa University is working to build Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this program it organised the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program recently.

Konkani Wikipedia Editor, Varsha Kavlekar, talks about her experience with Konkani Wikipedia Incubator.

Video


Above: Varsha speaks about Konkani Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/varsha-kavlekar-konkani-wikipedia-incubator

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans going foward:

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

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

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

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

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

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

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

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

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

Working System

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

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

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

Plans for the future

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

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

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

Use of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) ournals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upload More Kannada Articles on Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2015-09-13T06:09:34Z

Uploading information in Wikipedia helps to develop language, said Indian Languages Programme Manager U B Pavanaja here on Saturday. The article was published in Indian Express (Mangaluru edition) on July 5, 2015.


Above: A scanned version of the article that appeared in Indian Express on July 5, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/indian-express-july-5-2015-upload-more-kannada-articles-on-wikipedia

Unpacking Openness: From Seemingly Transparent to Definitely Opaque

Maarten Zeinstra and Marlieke Kieboom — 2012-08-01T09:16:38Z

Nishant Shah was in Netherlands recently and as part of his trip had given a public lecture to an audience at Kennisland. One of the respondents wrote a small write-up of the talk.

This was originally published on the Kennisland website on July 25, 2012

Last month we were honoured to have Nishant Shah visit our office to have a vibrant discussion about the multiple understandings and purposes of the term ‘openness’. Shah is research director of the Indian Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). CIS undertakes interdisciplinary research about knowledge access, openness, transparency and governance in the digital age. Shah spent an hour of his valuable time discussing how openness may be interpreted. Kennisland is also actively promoting openness. Therefore it was interesting to discover how the term is used differently across the world, at least within our discussion in the Netherlands and in Asia.

Shah describes openness as an opaque metaphor. Openness is used as a metaphor or rhetoric tool to achieve or argue for transparency, accountability, efficiency, community building and other changes in governance and structuring civil society.

Openness or technocratic uncovering?

There is not one specific conceptual tool to explain what openness is. Still we use the term openness in different contexts to argue for being moral, good, efficient and transparent. When we decompose the term, we discover that ‘open’ is not necessarily always the equivalent of ‘good’. Shah unpacks this opaque metaphor in terms of transparency and shows us that when a government uses the metaphor of openness for transparency it does not mean that all the data exposed is useful for everyone, produced by everyone, or beneficial for everyone. It can actually mean other perspectives and information are kept hidden or turn invisible at the same time. An almost technocratic uncovering occurs. The perspectives and documents that can be made available through the tools of transparency, like access to statistics and policy, gain importance and become the dominant perspective of ‘progress’.

This makes other perspectives and problems less visible. In China for example many people are being displaced because new cities are being constructed. Documents on these new cities are readily available, but no documents are available on the people who used to live in those areas. This type of selective ‘transparency’ actually makes these displaced people less visible for researchers and policy makers. Likewise, in India transparency is used as a tool for financing and subsidies. But it disrupts the social structures that are already in place to make types of social subsidies possible. In this case a bureaucratic solution has pushed away a social structure that had been around for decades. Consequently openness excluded the most marginalized people who depended on these social structures.

Shah argues for more multi-faceted research on the multiple uses and interpretations of the term openness to uncover situations where openness has its drawbacks. He does not argue that openness is bad or good, but that we need more insights into to the process of openness in seemingly transparent societies.

Openness and what it means to Kennisland

At Kennisland we use the term openness frequently. What does Shah’s proposed argument mean for our activities? In our work openness is not directly geared towards pushing for more governmental transparency but meant to empower citizens to achieve social and sectorial innovations. Kennisland does not directly lobby or petition governments to open up datasets but we believe that more open datasets help empowering citizens to participate more equally in our society. We agree that just opening up data is only a part of this process.

Moreover Kennisland uses openness in a legal rights perspective: openness is content or data that is shared with everyone with permission to re-use and mix, even for commercial purposes. We educate the general public, NGO’s and governments about the opportunities that arise by creating access to copyrighted material. For example, our project opencultuurdata.nl helps archives and museums to open up their collections by creating open data and open content. It is very important for us to stress the point that open data ought to be used as an extra communication channel that needs to be used in addition to already existing communication channels. Simply replacing existing communication channels by open data or open content will lead to the same social problems that Shah revealed.

Below I describe two examples or scenarios in which a group of people holding certain information, or a group of people who do not have access to data, can become marginalized and therefore unheard.

Old vs. young

The Dutch cultural sector, a very innovative sector, needs to keep older generations in mind. It needs to realize that the generation that demands openness in terms of transparency, efficiency, and reuse is a different type of audience: young, fast and tech-savvy. Besides, in the Netherlands the products of openness, in our legal perspective, can also have significant social consequences. In the Netherlands openness is usually connected to the internet and digital access. That means that older, less technologically educated generations can actually lose access to important resources, data and forms. Therefore it is important to serve different generations independently from each other.

Large vs. small

In a second scenario, there is also a risk of a growing cultural bias in favor of the larger cultural institutions. Only these large institutions have now managed to open up their institutions with open data and open content. Only these collections can now be used on Wikipedia, third-party websites and in innovative applications. Smaller cultural institutions experience more difficulties opening up because of several reasons: lack of money, lack of power and therefore access, and lack of knowledge. This could lead to a dominant cultural canon, in which less influential cultural collections are invisible. Luckily we see a lot of national aggregators that fill this gap, like digitalecollectie.nl and Collectie Gelderland.

In our current and future ventures we will keep these important points in mind and we encourage others to do the same by asking the following questions: who is opening data, and for what purpose? And consequently, who isn’t, and why?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/unpacking-openness

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

pavanaja — 2014-07-24T07:03:45Z

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license.

Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia. The print volumes of the first version of the encyclopaedia are out of stock now. Recently UoM has started revising and reprinting the encyclopaedia. So far 4 volumes have been revised, enhanced and published.

UoM believes in Open Access to Knowledge. It has put up the research outputs from its departments online for free access to the public. UoM has done these as a subscriber to the idea of Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Open Access Institutional Repository, of UoM, covers scholarly publications covering journal articles, conference papers, books, book reviews, presentations, reports and patents ever since UoM was established in 1916. Extending the philosophy of open knowledge to the Kannada encyclopaedia published by UoM becomes a natural extension. UoM is in the verge of celebrating its centenary soon and has taken many initiatives in that direction.

CIS-A2K has been in negotiations with UoM towards releasing of its high quality Kannada Vishwakosha (Kannada Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons license. CIS and UoM signed a MoU on February 22, 2014. Here is the relevant extract from the MoU: "They will work together to digitize all encyclopaedic publications for which the copyright is owned by UoM, and re-release them under the Creative Common license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The digitized content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia and Wikisource. The digitization will be done employing the global standard Unicode so that the content has longevity, is universally portable and is easily searchable. Both parties have joined hands to undertake the above in order to enhance digital literacy in the Kannada language and facilitate collaborative production and free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to the students, academics, researchers and the wider public. The parties also believe that by reintroducing the knowledge in digital and openly accessible formats could significantly enhance the production of knowledge in Kannada and give a new lease of life to Kannada language in the digital era. The parties will co-design and jointly implement relevant programmes to achieve this objective." As part of this MoU, UoM agreed to release the first six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC.

Volume numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha of UoM have been revised and published recently. A project page has been created in Kannada Wikipedia for this project. Kannada Wikipedians joined hands in the project. The project involved extracting the text from the soft copies of the files, converting them into Unicode, extracting articles from these files and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource.

A team of interns from Christ University had a major role to play in this development. These were students from the Wikipedia in Education Program that was conducted in Christ University during the academic period of 2013-14. These students took active part in the current project and uploaded about 1200 articles so far (till July 21, 2014).

Media Coverage

The event attracted very good media coverage. Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Other Links:

UoM Kannada Vishwakosha conversion project page in Kannada Wikipedia - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivwp
Articles from UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv
Category UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivws
For pictures from the Open Knowledge Day event in Mysore - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysore_University_Open_Knowledge_Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/university-of-mysore-releases-kannada-vishwakosha-under-cc-license

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

subha — 2013-07-17T09:02:46Z

A new app is up for typing in Indic languages from mobile phones. This is is available online at: http://bitly.com/indictyping and supports on iOS. Android version is to be released soon.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."
Phil Karlton

Yuvi Panda smiles saying this. Yuvi Panda, a former Wikimedia Foundation contractor and developer was here in our Delhi office and I had an opportunity to spend some time discussing some of the technical problems that we have been facing.

One of the major setback most people have with their phones is the lack of language support and lack of typing support for Indic languages. Fortunately most of the new generation phones support Indic languages. Three of the major operating systems used currently by most phones are Android, Windows, Blackberry and iOS. Android being an open source operating system has extensive community support and developments which is something we were primarily hopeful while starting this project. Windows phones also have a good number of user base in India and support for Indic languages on Windows is really good. Though iOS has good support for Indic display there is no support for typing. IOS, Windows and Blackberry all being proprietary have really less community support and any tool available on these app market would be proprietary. So, our idea was to start a cross platform app which will use the available jQuery ime used for Indic typing for Indic Wikipedias and sister projects.

Currently, most of the Indic language Wikipedias use a typing tool called Narayam ( "Narayam" is a Malayalam word which refers to a metal stylus that was used for writing on palm leaves and papyrus in ancient days). By default the typing scheme for most of the language wikipedias is set to transliteration or phonetic. An Indian mobile user would normally type his own language using Roman letters from a mobile. "और दोस्त सब ठीक है?" in Hindi would be typed as "Aur dost sab thik hai?" when someone pings a friend on facebook or sends a text message. Now with the new typing tool you need to type "aur dosta saba thiika hai?" to get the same text in Devanagari script. This typing scheme is almost same like the phonetic typing most people use for regional languages on mobile which is why typing won’t be much of difference. In terms of usability most people would use the typed text either for web search in regional languages, Facebook posts, tweeting or even sending mails and text messages.

The detailed procedure for typing using this tool is documented at: http://goo.gl/HdVJW. Indic typing tool is available at: http://bitly.com/indictyping

Scan the QR code below using your QR code application to go "Indic typing tool".

Developer speaks:

This is a simple tool that lets you type in your native language on mobile phones. Currently only iOS devices are supported.

The tool is a simple wrapper around Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering's jquery.ime project. It simply adds a much easier to use (on a mobile device) language selector, and makes it available offline (on iOS devices).

Quick links:

Source code: https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool
Test the app and report the bugs directly on GitHub or on Meta.
Credits: YuviPanda, Subhashish Panigrahi, Santhosh Thottingal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/typing-in-indic-languages-from-mobiles