I’m personally a very strong supporter of “Open Access” (OA) . I feel that information should be freely accessible and particularly information that has been produced with public funding which includes much of the research information that fuels the very very expensive private peer reviewed journal industry. I also think that it is difficult in any professional sphere to distinguish between information whose funding is “private” and information that is publicly funded particularly when effectively all new information builds on the platform of previous information/research which to a very considerable degree can be seen as part of the common heritage of mankind.
The issue of copyright I think should be re-interpreted not on the basis of “property rights” but going back to the original intention which was to ensure that information/intellectual producers were allowed the opportunity to benefit from their activities but in a way which did not restrict the overall social/public requirement of supporting scientific and technical innovation as a social/public good.
(As an aside I should mention that the Journal of Community Informatics) which I edit is fully “open access” with authors retaining their own copyright.)
So, I very strongly support my friend and colleague (and member of the JoCI Editorial Board), Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) in his blog statement and open letter to the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) , the UN’s consortium of agricultural research centres, concerning “open access” to their research information and I wish he and his fellow signers of the document every success in their efforts.
However…
Even though I am a strong supporter of OA I would probably also want to see a rider attached to the OA position and the open letter which is a recognition that open access information primarily advantages those who would otherwise have the training/skills to use that information. These are primarily professional academics or researchers in Less Developed Countries (LDC) for whom the availability of pertinent information and thus research and teaching work is restricted because of their (and particularly their institutions) financial limitations in purchasing access to materials locked away behind toll booths of various kinds—the cost of journal subscriptions, of professional publications, of professional conferences and proceedings, of access to specialized databases and so on.
I think that there is a second issue to be addressed which is going beyond “open access” to that of “open use/usability”. Giving LDC researchers access to the range of publications and research which are currently denied to them is a good thing to be supported but regrettably I don’t see a lot of evidence that doing this would in fact, mean that the uses to which they as researchers would put the information would be very different from what those who currently have access do with the information. Hopefully it would be different, but regrettably and from both observation and experience researchers and academics in LDCs appear to be no more likely to be concerned with making “their” information useful to the potential lay end user audience than their counterparts in Developed Countries.
Of course, open access information should and very likely would benefit people in LDC’s by speeding up the pace of research on matters of particular relevance in particular LDC’s or LDC regions especially insofar as there is locally oriented research going on in LDC institutions. But specifically for research institutions such as those linked under CGIAR the challenge is surely twofold—that of speeding up the pace of research and of speeding up the pace of dissemination and uptake/use of that information.
“Open Access” should make a very useful contribution to the former while not impacting on the latter which surely is the real value that comes from the additional knowledge and information that is being disseminated and developed.
Ensuring that research information where suitable is “usable” and not simply “accessible” would mean that for example, those at the community level would be able to “use” the crop and pest information available from the CGIAR labs without having to go through companies trying to broker (and gain value) from that information by selling them something while providing the information. The issue here of course, directly parallels the broader issue of “effective use” from a Community Informatics perspective.
Making the information usable would involve issues concerning information design, training of locally based publicly supported information brokers, translating information into formats and content usable by extension workers and so on. I would very much like to see some attention being given in the OA campaign to matters of ensuring the “effective use of information” as well as simply the matter of “access”.
Subbiah Arunachalam
June 1, 2010
Dear Mike:
Good post. With one caveat. I thought you meant ‘And’ but typed ‘However …’
Actually you agree, and agree strongly, that OA is a good thing and needs to be adopted and implemented, And you want to go a little beyond. As far as I know, at least in India where English is learned and not picked up from one’s parents and neighbours,* ‘however’ is used when one wants to differ or take a totally different direction from what one has been talking about till then. That is not the case here.
“Making the information usable would involve issues concerning information design, training of locally based publicly supported information brokers, translating information into formats and content usable by extension workers and so on.” I agree. All that is possible only when the information is available. So the first step is to make the information flow freely and be available to anyone who wants to use it. Once the information is available, institutions such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (and similar institutions in other developing countries), agricultural universities, extension officers of state agriculture departments step in. Open access will help these groups of people with expertise at different levels get the information and they in turn will take the message to the farms and the fields. Needless to say that this is an important aspect and needs to be strengthened.
Your statement “…. regrettably and from both observation and experience researchers and academics in LDCs appear to be no more likely to be concerned with making “their” information useful to the potential lay end user audience than their counterparts in Developed Countries” will be contested by colleagues from ICAR in India and similar outfits elsewhere. One great example was the ushering in of the Green Revolution in India in the late 1960s. India was virtually written off and policy makers in donor countries and international organizations thought any amount of food aid would not be sufficient to keep India alive. It was then Prof. M S Swaminathan, who was then a young but fairly senior agricultural researcher, Mr C Subramanaim, Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Mr B Sivaraman, Secretary to the Government of India, together decided to adopt the technology developed by Norman Borlaug and introduced the high-yielding dwarf variety of wheat. The work involved much research but also considerable amount of extension, reaching out and working together with farmers. The rest is history. Prof. Swaminathan was later on rated as one of the twenty most outstanding Asians of the Twentieth Century by Time magazine and one of only three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. As the story goes, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Prof. Swaminathan if what he proposed would succeed. If it did not, he said, Prof. Swaminathan would not lose his job at ICAR, but the entire Cabinet would have to go! The young Swaminathan did not let him down, of course.
Immediately after the Green Revolution, one variety of rice in my home state, Tamil Nadu, was widely referred to as Radio rice, as farmers came to know about its introduction through All India Radio. As a young college student, I used to tune in the radio in the evenings to listen to the day’s cricket score in the news bulletin of All India Radio. Just before the 7.15 p.m. news, there used to be a 15 minute farm programme in the format of a conversation between two farmers.
In the days before the Green Revolution, India had gone through severe drought and famine. One of them the Great Bengal Famine touched Amartya Sen and he grew up into an economist and especially a welfare economist. I had seen people standing up in long queues in front of ration shops, only for more than half of them returning home empty handed.
Regards.
Arun
*Years ago Mr V K Krishna Menon was India’s Minister for External Affairs and once he was returning from New York after presenting India’s case before the United Nations. A young American boy seated next to him how he spoke English so very well although he didn’t look like an American. Mr Menon is reported to have replied, “Young man I learned it, not picked it up”
gurstein
June 2, 2010
Hi Arun,
As they used to say of the US and the UK–two countries separated by a single language…
The “however” was meant to distance myself a bit and shift the grounds of the overall discussion (from my perspective) away from a simple argument in support of OA and “beyond” to a focus not on the “access” but on the “use”… Perhaps, it would have been better to have said “both/and” at some point knowing your own strong support for a community based approach to knowledge dissemination and use.
And I take your examples of the “effective use” of research based knowledge in support of Indian agriculture and apologize for being too flippant and categorical in my comments concerning the gap between research practice and local application and use in LDC’s.
In the spirit of “both/and” let me say that in addition to a strong program of Open Access to ensure the broadest possible availability and access to research results there needs to be a parallel emphasis on ensuring the broadest possible design, training and implementation to support the translation of these research results into the means for the “effective use” (EU) of this information at the grassroots level.
If access to publicly supported research and knowledge development is a “right” as I believe it is, then there is the attendant “responsibility” to ensure that that knowledge is made available to those who can make the best and most socially productive use of that information in a manner supportive of that use. For me the execution of those “responsibilities” can’t be left to chance, good intentions or as a by-product of existing operations.
The effective use of knowledge (as you know better than almost anyone) requires deliberate planning, formal intervention, information design/redesign, training and deployment of info-mediaries and a variety of other techniques of which India in general and the MSSRF are world exemplars.
So, in the spirit of “both/and” I would like to see included in campaigns and statements in support of OA at least mention of the attendant need for attention to be given to EU.
With best regards,
Mike
Subbiah Arunachalam
June 1, 2010
Here is a very good example from India of how a major high-tech national laboratory works in an area that would directly benefit the community. Just to show that research and concern for its use by the community can go hand in hand.
SOLAR DESALINATION SYSTEM DEVELOPED BY BARC
A desalination system based on solar energy has been developed by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
Solar energy-based small and community level Reverse Osmosis (RO) units have been developed for producing safe drinking water, Saly T Panicker of the Desalination Division of BARC said.
In the RO unit, the feed water is passed through the membrane with the help of a DC (Direct Current) pump connected to the Photovoltaic (PV) panels without any batteries. The units can be operated for 9 to 10 hours on a sunny day, which can cater to the drinking and cooking requirements of three to four families at an average rate of five litres per person per day, Panicker said.
“It contains a filter cartridge and a spirally wound RO membrane element, ” he said, adding there was no significant variation in the rate of power production from the PV panels. “Thus, the pump is able to maintain its pace, keeping the rate of drinking water production constant, ” Panicker, who has developed the technology along with scientists K L Thalor and PK Tiwari, said. Explaining the system, he said the RO is a pressure driven process, where pure water is continuously drawn from salty water through a semi-permeable membrane.
Highlighting the importance of solar-powered system which will be useful especially in remote areas, Panicker said integrating desalination with renewable energy sources is also important for addressing the issues related to adverse impacts of climate change.
The source of solar energy is inexhaustible and is free. Also, no harmful gases like nitrogen oxide, mercury, carbon dioxide or sulphur dioxide are emitted, he said.
About the cost, he said, “which the improvement in PV efficiencies and the subsidies available, the solar-based desalination system would become more cost effective.”
(PTI Science Service)
Ajit Maru
June 3, 2010
Dear Michael and colleagues:
I agree with you, Michael. I would go further. I would want information from agricultural research and innovation from public funded research systems and Institutions not only to be available, accessible and applicable but also affordable to and be appropriated and made use of by the communities these systems aim to serve.
In my opinion, it is not, in the case of agricultural development and especially for the resource poor communities engaged in agriculture and related activities for livelihoods, enough to stop only at “open access” or even making information “applicable”.
Recent global consultantions have clearly indicated that agricultural research and innovation systems for development be they global, international, regional and national, all have to be inclusive in participation by their stakeholders. One way to make ARD stakeholder participation inclusive in agricultural research and innovation for development is by integrating information generation, flows and use in and across these stakeholders communities.
The challenge is how to make information processes in these systems and Institutions inclusive at various levels. It is an opportunity for the CGIAR and its International Centers to lead and demonstrate that this is the new way forward.
Warm regards,
Ajit
Ajit Maru
Senior Knowledge Officer
Global Forum on Agricultural Research
FAO
B 648,
Viale Delle Terme di Caracalla
Rome, 00153
Ph. No. 39-06-57054022
Fax. No. 39-06-57053898
Website: http://www.egfar.org
Parminder Jeet Singh
June 6, 2010
The discussion between Arun and Mike is interesting. Pl allow me to chip in….
The email my organization, IT for Change, recently shared on this list regarding ‘principles for public software’ and on establishing a ‘public software centre’ has important connections to this discussion. Significantly, as we all know, the ‘open’ or ‘openness’ movement started in the software realm.
When it came to figuring out how to get software to be actually used for real development outcomes, we found that the philosophies and principles enshrined in open source software, or even free and open source software, were not enough, and inadequate in many ways. I could go over it at length but may be sometime later… Basically, ‘openness’ is an architectural/ spatial term which implies a certain formalism. In the software arena, it speaks of what goes into making a software, but not what comes out of it….. and in the context that we wanted to use software for, in real situated context of development and governance, ‘what comes out’ is at least as important to define/ conceptualize and articulate categorically. I see that Mike also harps on the same point when he speaks of ‘effective use’.
We found that the term ‘public software’ much clearer in terms of ‘what should come out’, and not only that, it also helped provide pointers to ‘how’ can it come out… The term ‘public’ connotes an institutional ecology – it has an institutional meaning, with the corresponding normative outcomes in terms of public interest, public goods etc. (We do agree that there are contestations between the concepts of ‘public’ – as implying a larger social category – and the more situated concept of ‘community’. These contestations are an important aspect of information society changes.)
To cut the argument short, we find similar issues with the openness movement in the content space… We are indeed exploring the idea of ‘public content’ and even an public content centre, where we will seek to pull together various developmental content, from governmental and non-governmental sources, under open licenses, and also provide ‘actual’ means of accessing and sharing this content even with organisation without access to the kind of broadband needed for downloading from the Internet.
Perhaps even more importantly, these resources or content are meaningful only if connected to corresponding structures and systems which enable actual outcomes. This thinking informs two areas of our work.
(1) Centre of Community Informatics and Development – A couple of years ago we started a project to convince various development agencies – governmental and non governmental – to put their content under open licenses. We also started a portal with all such content, and tried putting up a free distribution system for community based organisations (CBOs). However, we realized that CBOs are simply not trained in, and oriented to, using audio-visual content for their work, in any really effective manner. We also realized that these CBOs must start making their own content, and use it, to get really effective at using outside content. CCID now works with CBOs to build their capacities in area of videos, radio as well as community computing.
(2) While we have launched public software centre, and propose do some such thing with public content as well, and at present these efforts are focused at engaging with the public education systems, we have separate projects that (a) train teachers and education managers on free and open source software, and (b) are building an online community of teachers who will build educational resources together and also meet offline and attend workshops,
Apologies for the long email. Did not mean to advertise our work, but give examples of what ‘beyond open access’ mentioned in the subject line of this e-discussion may mean. And how we struggle in our organization to relate the new concepts of information society to the context of development.
We also recently did the first draft of a paper ‘Open but not public – membership in the information society as a club good’ which takes a more critical look at the abuse of the concept of ‘openness’ in many a new information society phenomenon, in a manner that ends up consolidating advantages for the already dominant. We do not at all mean that open source software and open content movements do this. These movements are the mother movements in terms of progressive politics in the information society. However to contexualise them to the context and needs of development, we may still need to do more, including in theoretical/ conceptual terms.
regards to all
Parminder
Parminder Jeet Singh
IT for Change
http://www.ITforChange.net