Group items tagged

ADVOCACY FOR OPEN ACCESS IN INDIA

The National Archives of India is the repository of the non-current records of the Government of India and is holding them in trust for the use of administrators and scholars. It is an Attached Office of the Ministry of Culture. It was set up in March 1891 in Calcutta (Kolkata) as the Imperial Record Department and subsequent to the transfer of the National Capital from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1911 it was shifted to its present building in 1926.

Another good interview by Richard Poynder, with Indian OA advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam. Focuses on the challenges faced by Indian scholars and next steps.

Intellectual property rights in India-. What are intellectual property rights? International considerations.Treaties and reciprocal agreements

Does anyone know about Global eJournals Library? It seems to be a subscription-based discovery service that indexes all of the open access or post-embargo journal articles it can find. The two private companies that operate this service, from the UK and India, are not very clear. It claims to have indexed many more articles (7 million) and journals than DOAJ (almost 2 million). I'm curious about the whole thing!

Very recent video that has gone viral - two indian girls fight back after being sexually harassed on the bus. This video has brought a lot of media attention from all over the world to the mistreatment of women. As a form of citizen journalism, this video went viral through social media and has since stirred up political and social debates online, creating a movement for change.

An insight of how citizen journalism prevails in India

Open data at work! Sanjay Pradhan was thrilled when, at age six, a cart full of sweets was wheeled to his family's doorstep in Bihar, India. The gift, however, was intended as a bribe for his father, who was responsible for building roads in India's poorest state.

It's unquestionable that Research4Life has had a significant impact in improving access to research information for communities in developing countries. I do have a number of criticisms about how the program is organized and delivered, however. 1. Publisher participation in the program is 'entirely voluntary', without 'a single contract (being) signed between any of the partners' (Aaronson, 2004), meaning that publishers can opt out at any point. This issue was highlighted in 2011 when Elsevier, Lipincott Williams & Wilkins, Springer and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publisher of Science Magazine) withdrew access to over 2500 journals through the HINARI system. Following international attention, and widespread condemnation, publishers restored access, with Elsevier announcing that they were in discussions with the government in Bangladesh to transition towards a paid licensing scheme (Wise, 2011). 2. Countries that meet the eligibility criteria of the program (which are based on the World Bank's listing of Lower and Lower Middle Income Countries) are sometimes excluded. Take for example India or Pakistan- although these countries are in the lists of eligible countries, the publishers deliberately exclude participation to protect whatever business they may have in these countries. So although hundreds of institutions could benefit, they exclude access to protect the business they receive from a handful of institutions. 3. Access to content is delivered through a single username and password for each institution. This is problematic for librarians, as they are unable to ensure the security of the password (a well-meaning researcher may share the password with a colleague in another institution, violating the license agreement). Abuse of institutional accounts has severe consequences, and librarians are sent messages from Research4Life threatening to not only cut off the institution, but all institutions in their country if they

Research4life is a great program by committed government and non-government organizations dedicated to produce valuable researches that will improve the life of people. Librarians play an important role in assisting researchers find valid, current, relevant information in order to produce a reliable output or results that will help humankind's betterment of living.

A local group of the open knowledge foundation 1. Push for Open Science and Research practices in Indian research institutions. . 2. More involvement of citizens in the spirit of Open Knowledge Involvement of the masses in order to work towards making ourselves a better managed nation. Constitutional instruments like the Public Interest Litigation (PIL), the Right To Information (RTI), etc., lose their relevance without complete transparency in the dissemination of government as well as non-government data. Building a mass-based system of knowledge-banks can help us a lot in achieving our goal. We can assist the governments for making more information public, wherever necessary. 3. Push for education. Involving the masses can to a great extent result in a quicker transformation of the present scene (for example, we can have citizens making study material open and free and also involve them more in the dispersion of education). We aim to arrange for vocational profession-based education for the adult population.

from website: "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI's goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide." The site offers a range of journals, with full text access. Areas include zoology, health, agriculture, and nutrition. There aren't a lot of journals so the site is manageable. Good source if you are a scientist seeking data/information from areas other than the west.