Sridhar Gutam – Australian Science

Open Access in Australia: An Outsider’s Account

Sridhar Gutam — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:08:48 +0000

I am doing advocacy on Open Access in India and following the activities related to Open Access around the world online. After writing a blog post on ‘Open Access India’, I thought of writing a series of country specific Open Access activities and decided to write about Australia’s Open Access activities. With the launch of Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)’s website on February 2013, I see that the visibility of Open Access in Australia had significantly grown up. The internet resources which I have collected for this blog post says that the AOASG was formed during the Open Access Week 2012 by Victoria University being its first member.

John Shipp, a University Librarian from the University of Sydney in 2006 had given an account of Open Access in Australia which can be accessed here. In his article, Mr. John mentions about the Australasian Digital Thesis Program (ADT) has 5,391 full text files were available in mid-January 2006. Currently Australia has 71,880 thesis online and available via the National Library of Australia, Trove.

When we look at the Open Access Movement in Australia with the growth of Open Access Journals, we can see that it all started in 2003 and every year very good number of Open Access Journals are being added to the Directory of Open Access Repository (DOAJ).

The OAK Law project which had ended in 2009 had set up a database of all the publishers open access policies and publishing agreements. A similar database known to SHERPA/RoMEO publishers’ copyright policies is also existing at Univeristy of Nottingham, UK. These lists are facilitating researchers about what and how to share their research outputs legally with the cosmos.

According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), approximately 82 repositories are existing in Australia with Australasian Digital Thesis Repository of Tasmania being the oldest and Monash University Research Repository the recent one.

The Australia Australian Research Council (ARC) had announced its Open Access Policy in January 2013 which requires deposition of research outputs within a month from the publication date. However, according to the Creative Commons blog post, it appears that the Australian Government had already devoted to Open Access in 2010 for using CC-BY licenses for the Australian Public Sector Information.10 for using CC-BY licenses for the Australian Public Sector Information.

Support of Open Access in Australia is led by AOASG and Open Access Austalia group on openaccessweek.org

Image source.

Cite this article:
Gutam S (2013-05-21 00:08:48). Open Access in Australia: An Outsider's Account. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 02, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/australia-2/open-access-in-australia-an-outsiders-account/

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Opening up of Access to Agricultural Research Information

Sridhar Gutam — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:07:06 +0000

While organising the Knowledge Management in Agriculture Session at the International Conference on Statistics and Informatics in Agricultural Research at New Delhi on 19^th Dec 2012, Dr. Ajit Maru a Senior Officer for GFAR’s theme on Agricultural Knowledge for All had asked the panellists to respond on How do largely agricultural societies/communities such as in Asia who are in transition to a “knowledge based economy

Cite this article:
Gutam S (2012-12-26 08:07:06). Opening up of Access to Agricultural Research Information. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 02, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/open-access-2/opening-up-of-access-to-agricultural-research-information/

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Growth of Scholarly Open Access Agricultural Repositories in India

Sridhar Gutam — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 01:31:01 +0000

Screen Shot of Eprints@CMFRI

After the successful organisation of workshop and seminar on Open Access Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), Bangalore and Indian National Science Academy (INSA), New Delhi at Bangalore and Pune in 2002 and 2003 respectively, the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) had organised two workshops on Open Access at Chennai in 2004. In these workshops, researchers and policy makers from Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and others from various State Agricultural Universities in India have participated. However, there was no activity on Open Access in Agriculture in India. During 2006 in the first AGRIS workshop on open access in agricultural sciences and technology held at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, the participants had decided to suggest the establishment of the two pilot open access information repositories in the agricultural domain in India and in 2009, the ICRISAT has formally launched its Open Access Repository for its scientific publications mandating every researcher at ICRISAT to send a authors final copy for deposit upon acceptance of the publication. In the same year (2009), the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) supported consultation on enhancing Open Access in Indian agriculture was held at ICRISAT. In the consultation, the researchers from ICAR and the Agricultural Research Service Scientists’ Forum (ARSSF) agreed to build Open Access agricultural research publications repository either within Agropedia, a digital knowledge repository with the open platform for learning and sharing information related to Indian agriculture or establishment of institutional repositories so that the researches in ICAR would be be able to deposit their research articles for wider reach.

The fall out of the meeting held at ICRISAT in on Open Access (2009) resulted in establishment of Eprints@IARI, an Open Access Institutional Repository of Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). and OpenAgri, an open access agricultural research repository in 2009 and 2010 respectively. These developments made for the establishment of Eprints@CMFRI, an Open Access Institutional Repository of Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI); DSpice@IISR, an Open Access Institutional Repository of Indian Institute of Spices Research (IISR) and E-Repository@IIHR, an Open Access Institutional Repository of Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR)

In the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) of India, apart from the ICAR and NAIP established repositories, exclusive thesis repository for agricultural sciences in India was initiated in 2008 under the name ‘Krishiprabha‘. It houses all the doctoral dissertations submitted to various agricultural universities in India (NARS). It is now housing, 7624 dissertations and is hosted by Chandhary Charan Singh Haryana Agriculture University, Hissar. However, it is only open to the consortium partners and other constituents of the NARS. Whereas, the ETD@UASD, thesis repository established by University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad in 2011 is freely available to public for download and use. It has total 1119 thesis submitted to the university since year 2005. Under the NAIP’s Rice Knowledge Management Portal (RKMP), India Rice Research Repository (i3R) is established in 2010.

Though the efforts are being made to make agricultural research publicly available since 2004 in India, the pace at which it needs to be taken forward is very slow and the concept of Open Access had not reached all the stakeholders of National Agricultural Research System (NARS) especially, the researchers and the research managers. The records in Eprints@IARI are 229; Dspice@IISR 497; E-Repo@IIHR 193. The only most populated repository in ICAR/NARS is Eprints@CMFRI with 8978 records. The ICAR needs a policy on ‘Open Access’ and the researchers and the research managers should consider Open Access as an important agenda for taking forward the movement of making all the publicly funded research publicly available and accessible in India.

To take forward the concept of Open Access and to advocate it, Open Access India (OAIndia) an online group is formed by the researchers, librarians and students in NARS. The OAIndia is quite active on facebook with ~2290 members and is involving its members to discuss and debate on ‘Open Access’ – why it is needed and what needs to be done and what are the bottlenecks and how to overcome them and is now looking for establishment of its online repository which would harvest all the publicly available research information (meta-data) and make it accessible to all the stakeholders in NARS.

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Free and Open Source Agriculture

Sridhar Gutam — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 01:05:22 +0000

Credit: Thamizhpparithi Maari, Wikimedia Commons

A recent news published online by The Wall Street journal about the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) offer of germplasm from its massive seed gene bank at National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) to multinational corporations (MNCs) in exchange for expertise and a share of the profits made me to put forth before you about the topic ‘Free and Open Source Agriculture’ which is proposed and discussed by Janet E. Hope (2004), Susan H. Bragdon (2005), Daniel D. Holman (2007) Keith Aoki (2009) and others. It is strange that the ICAR which is an the apex body of the world’s largest National Agricultural Research System (NARS) coordinating, many institutes involved in basic and strategic research, education and extension, is still looking at MNCs for next generation genetic technologies and the for the want of the same, it is going to share/sell its genetic materials. No doubt agriculture in India and elsewhere in the world is facing challenges from the changing climatic conditions, threats from biotic and abiotic factors. India is rich in biodiversity and with the use of agricultural biotechnology, it is now possible to develop new crop varieties that are tolerant to adverse climatic and poor soil conditions, pests, diseases, insects, weeds etc. and build agriculture and food security. The MNCs with their huge investments have taken proprietary rights on most of the rapid scientific and technological advancement tools and products. Now they are looking at harness the public plant genetic resources for the creation of new generation of crops with the use of advanced molecular biology tools.

As per the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 1992, plant varieties are national sovereign resources and with sui generis system of protection in India under the Protection of Plant Varieties & Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001(PVFR P), the plant breeders and farmers have been given rights for conservation, improvement and re-use. Now the question arises once the MNCs takes the role of plant breeders and claim their rights on the improved traditional varieties with the help of biotechnological tools, does the farmers have any right to use the same improved material for his own use? or would they be left with no choice other than to buy the planting material at the cost specified by the MNCs?

As per the PPVFR, the farmers would have the right to claim for rewards from Gene Fund if genes from their local varieties are used for the production of improved material for commercial purpose, they don’t have any right to participate in decision making on matters related to the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture as suggested in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGR) in Article 9.2. However it seems that in man of the decisions on sharing/selling the country’s germplasm, there is no seeking of prior consent from the farmers/communities from whose locations, the germplasm might have been collected.

Under the IPR regime, the free progress of science and innovation is hampering and the fruits are not reaching to the public while, the exchange of knowledge and tools should be a way of life in agricultural research. Hence, I would like to put forth the concept of ‘Open Source‘ in Agriculture and Biotechnology which is proposed/discussed since quite sometime when the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and GNU movements had become global movements. In contrary to the proprietary software which gives only license to work, FOSS gives source code and a bundle of rights to the user to use, reverse engineer, learn, share and improve it. We are seeing now many FOSS products which are built by the community and are very good. These products are licensed as ‘Copyleft‘ or ‘Share Alike‘ of creative commons and or GNU Public License which requires that the copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as that of original.

This concept of FOSS initiative in agriculture has not taken up as a policy by the public funded research institutes. Though the germplasm is being received and sent (shared) by material transfer agreements (MTAs), many of the breeders are not exploring the concept of ‘Share Alike‘. When the crop improvement is being taken up by both public and private, the MTAs should have the licensing terms which asks the agencies to share their improved materials in the similar terms to the public for further use and development without seeking any royalties for the further improvement and use. Recently, there are reports that there is a charge against the Bt Brinjal’s developers in India for violation of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and allegations that they had accessed Indian varieties of brinjal for the development of genetically modified ‘Bt Brinjal’ without prior permission from the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA). These issues could be avoided when the materials are freely available to everyone to use and also for re-use.

Though there is a provision for ‘Compulsory License‘ under PPVFR for undertaking production, distribution, and sale of the seed or other propagating material on the grounds that the reasonable requirements of the public for seeds or other propagating material of the variety have not been satisfied or that the seed or other propagating material of the variety is not available to the public at a reasonable price, there is no provision for the use of the material for further improvement.

The FOSS movement had not built in one day but its a continuous building movement. And if this initiative to happen in agriculture, it would be a great thing. However, for that it needs greater advocacy and to be built by the convinced breeders/farmers. Centre for Sustainable Agriculture from Hyderabad in India which is working for sustainable agriculture is now exploring the concept called ‘Open Source Seeds‘. In the world, the BiOS Initiative of Cambia (BiOS – Biological Innovation for an Open Society) is the one which is based on the GNU/FOSS model and is sharing enabling technologies with large community of innovators under ‘Protected Commons‘. The BiOS licenses when employed for MTAs, would enable the public to access to the technologies freely and there would not be any prevention of the same by appropriation of IPR rights by private players.

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Sensitizing National Agricultural Research System on Free Open Source Software

Sridhar Gutam — Thu, 10 May 2012 08:08:20 +0000

Courtesy Véronique Fritière

The food grain production in India is reaching an all-time record of 252.56 million tonnes for the year 2011-12. However, as per the report of Sainath (2012) the daily per capita availability of food grains has fallen from 474.9 grams during 1992-96 to 440.4 grams during 2007-2010. This needs a great attention as the population is increasing and there is growing demand for food and nutritional requirements in the country. The one of the United Nation‘s ‘Millennium Development Goals‘ is reduction of extreme poverty and hunger in the world. Hence, it is the responsibility of the country’s National Agricultural Research System (NARS) to make interventions in the sustainable agriculture and to feed its burgeoning population with the recommended nutritional requirements.

When we see at the Indian agriculture, it is rainfed and is very much dependent on the monsoon. Apart from this, it is also facing tough competition from various biotic and abiotic factors and global climatic changes. Marketing of the produce is also a big challenge due to volatile local and global markets. The NARS having the responsibility for the agricultural research, education and extension is looking at the possible interventions for sustainable agriculture and food security. It needs to advise the farmers and policy makers at various levels in the value chain of agricultural production. As agriculture being the principal occupation in the country, timely communication of agricultural information assumes a greater priority as it would help in taking informed decisions. Therefore, use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in NARS, assumes an important role in all the efforts towards sustainable food production and food security.

Increased use of ICTs would benefit farming in making available the right information at right time. However, the affordability of hardware and software had become the major constraints for the wide adoption of ICTs in the developing countries and in India. This situation could easily be overcome by the adoption of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) products/applications. The FOSS applications developed by the community developers/programmers, who believe in the philosophy that the software should be freely available to all in world to modify, improve, adapt and share. The adoption of FOSS would increase the access to ICTs by overcoming the price barrier compared to the expensive commercial/proprietary software packages. The FOSS products which are built on open standards and protocols allow sharing of information/knowledge across all the technologies and help in collaborating with everyone in the country and world. The advantage with the FOSS is that there would be flexibility in choosing wide variety of software flavors and could migrate from one platform to another easily.

In NARS, however the use/adoption of FOSS products/applications is minimal. Even if at all they are being used, it is because of convenience and not because of FOSS philosophy. Many of the institutions in NARS don’t train its students during their degree programmes and train their staff by capacity building programmes because of lack awareness and availability of FOSS trainers in the system. Many believe and argue that proprietary software is easy to use and they are more secure when compared to FOSS and moreover they say that they would get commercial technical support for all the proprietary software. In the NARS since the first establishment of Agricultural Research Information System units which are now renamed as Agricultural Knowledge Management Units (AKMU) centers, had established ICT infrastructure with proprietary software and now they are hesitating to switch over to FOSS. And the decision makers in the institutions prefer to be in the system they are familiar with rather than exploring the available FOSS products. When funds are earmarked for the procurement of software and progress is measured in terms of the money spent, the institutions continue to use proprietary software in NARS.

Under National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) Component – I, though considerable efforts have been made for the use and development of FOSS products, not many of the institutions have adopted the application of FOSS. As it can be seen that under the AGROWEB-Digital Dissemination System for Indian Agricultural Research (ADDSIAR) project, though there is a mention of use of open source software for content management, not all the projects partners have adopted/used FOSS. In the ADDSIAR project, the ICAR could built its website on Drupal; and the IARI and NAARM institutes could built their websites on Joomla. The NAARM had used Moodle for its e-learning initiatives for its students. The other projects in which we could see use and adoption of FOSS are the ‘Rice Knowledge Management Portal’ (RKMP) by DRR and ‘Agropedia‘ being developed on AgriDrupal under NAIP project lead by IIT Kanpur. It is surprising that under another NAIP project, Strengthening Statistical Computing for NARS proprietary software SAS is being used for training & capacity building NARS researchers but there is no use of FOSS statistical software ‘R‘. In the precision farming and plant genetic resource conservation and exploration projects too, where Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software is extensively used, there is no mention of using FOSS software like OSGeo which could be effectively used. However, in most of the GIS trainings programmes, commercial proprietary software is used rather than FOSS. In the Project Information & Management System of ICAR, to add the projects, one has to use only Internet Explorer and other Internet browsers do not work.

In NARS, about 100 scholarly societies are registered and they publish scholarly journals and organize conferences, seminars, and symposiums. All of them uses email for the paper submission and makes available them in printed books/CD-ROMs to all the attendees. However, the non attendees never get access to the abstracts, papers, and proceedings. When, the conference proceedings are managed and made available online, then the there would be greater reach of information and research outputs. The FOSS products from Public Knowledge Project’s Open Conference Systems (OCS) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) could effectively used by these scholarly societies for the conference and journal publication. In NARS, only KAU‘s Journal of Tropical Agriculture, UASD‘s Karnataka Journal of Agricultural Sciences and ‘Indian Agricultural Research Journals‘ of ICAR’s NAIP project are using OJS and OCS is never used till date. Similarly the FOSS products viz., AgriDrupal, AgriOcean DSpace and VocBench from the ‘Agricultural Information Management Standards‘ of Food and Agricultural Organization could be used in NARS for the knowledge dissemination. During the past year, we could only see only one short course on FOSS in development of agricultural information and communication management system organized by CIRG.

This shows that NARS needs sensitization and capacity building in use and application of FOSS in agricultural research. For this, a new initiative FOSKIARD (Free and Open Software and Knowledge Initiatives in Agricultural Research for Development) has been taken up by FOSS evangelists in NARS. It intends to conduct sensitization & capacity building workshops at various institutes of NARS and impress upon the NARS managers for the need of creation of central AKMU computer labs with FOSS operating systems like Ubuntu. From the workshops it is expected that the agricultural researchers, FOSS developers, free knowledge advocates and legal experts can meet, interact and could work for the development of applications of FOSS products relevant to agriculture for sharing agricultural information and research outputs for public good.

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Open Access India: Movement for Making Public Funded Research Open

Sridhar Gutam — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:34:09 +0000

The ‘Open Access‘ movement which is built on the principle that the publicly funded research should be freely accessible online is gaining momentum around the world. In India, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories and Directory of Open Access Repositories nearly 80 repositories have been registered since 2004 and three of them are listed in the top 200 of world repositories ranking. However, this momentum is slow in the field of agricultural sciences when compared with other sciences in India. Only few institutional repositories viz., Eprints@IARI, Eprints@CMFRI, E-Repository@IIHR, DSpice@IISR along with a thematic repository ‘OpenAGRI‘ have been established till date. Following the calls from Budapest Open Access Initiative and Berlin Declaration, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy took lead in Open Access activities in India. During the 93rd Indian Science Congress held in Hyderabad, a ‘Optimal National Open Access Policy for India‘ was proposed and the National Knowledge Commission of India had recommended an Open Access mandate for publicly funded research. As per the University Grants Commission‘s regulations (2009), a digital repository of Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertation ‘Shodhganga‘ was set up and made accessible to all.

However, the situation in the field of agricultural sciences is that earlier to the establishment of ‘Eprints@IARI’, an institutional repository of the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI) in 2009 only the Journal of Tropical Agriculture from Kerala Agricultural University and Karnataka Journal of Agricultural Sciences from University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad are the two Open Access Journals available. The National Agricultural Research System (NARS) comprising all the 97 ICAR institutes and 47 State Agricultural Universities (SAUs) is the largest system of the world. When the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had adopted Open Access policy and made all its journals Open Access and has established institutional repositories for all its laboratories in 2009, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in the year 2010, as a part of e-Publishing & Knowledge System in Agricultural Research project under National Agriculture Innovation Project (NAIP), launched its two flagship journals on Open Journal Systems and declared them as Open Access. It is now offering hosting support to scholarly societies on its ‘epubs‘ platform for their journals. Under another NAIP project, a thesis repository, ‘KrishiPrabha‘ was established for NARS. However, unlike ‘Shodhganga’ it is only available to NARS institutions for online viewing and without full-text download permission. In the NARS, more than 100 scholarly societies are functioning and the use of the community developed tools & techniques for sharing and enriching the research information on the web by these societies is uncommon. Though under the NAIP, the entire NARS is being provided with the access to relevant corporate journals under the project Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture. The access to the enormous outputs from Indian agricultural research which had aided in the advancement of agricultural science are being restricted for sharing openly with the world.

At this backdrop, seeing the slow pace of growing Open Access momentum in India, a group of agricultural researchers formed a voluntary group called ‘Open Access India’ (OAIndia) in July 2011 on ‘Facebook’ with an aim to take up the advocacy on ‘Open Access’ and to make agricultural information openly available, accessible and effectively used for farming in the country. Till date the group had grown to the membership of 1990 and to have a wider reach, OAIndia had created its page on Facebook, and groups on Linkedin, on Google groups and on openaccessweek.org. The group is listed in the Open Access Directory as one among the 15 groups formed on Facebook on Open Access.

The aims & objectives of ‘OAIndia’ are as follows:

Advocacy – sensitizing the researchers, policy makers and general public on the need to make data & information generated through public funds openly available.
Development of community e-infrastructure, capacity building and framework for ‘Open Access’ policies for sharing data & information.

In the NARS, researchers have generated extensive data and are stored in data books and project reports. Many a times, much of the data exists as unpublished (Grey Data) and once the researcher leaves the organization, the data is lost. Timely release of this data would help the researchers to carry forward the research for attaining the important scientific goals without ‘reinventing the wheel’ and in the light of recently approved National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy for India, the discussion on the development of data standards, collection & analysis, sharing, archiving and rewarding policies assumes a considerable importance. To take forward its aims and objectives, the OAIndia had started consultations with various agencies working for the open knowledge to seek support for the creation of community owned Open Repository for all the researchers to voluntarily archive data & information whose institution did not have any infrastructure for the same.

Now, the OAIndia now had become partner with MyOpenArchive an international Non-Profit Organization for advocating “green road

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