Friends:
UNESCO is championing open access. Organizations such as ICSU, CODATA and
IFLA are also supporting the spreading of the culture of open access. The
Ukrainian parliament has adopted a resolution to mandate open access (of
all publicly funded research). And yet many developing countries,
including India, China and Brazil, have not adopted OA in a big way.
Open Access is especially important for development. As Professor M S
Swaminathan points out, for development to take place knowledge sharing is
important at four levels, viz. lab-to-lab, lab-to-land, land-to-lab and
land-to-land. Here lab stands for scientists, researchers and experts. And
land stands for farmers, fishermen, and the common people in general.
There should be knowledge flow among experts, among the common people and
two-way flow between the two. Open Access (as promoted by people like
Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber, Leslie Chan, Alma Swan, and others and
institutions such as the Open Society Institute, CERN, Wellcome Trust,
University of Southampton, etc.) facilitates lab-to-lab knowledge flows.
And the knowledge centres set up by the M S Swaminathan Research
Foundation (and to be set up all over rural India by Mission 2007: Every
Village a Knowledge Centre) facilitate the other three kinds of knowledge
flows. If all four kinds of knowledge flows take place without a hitch,
then it should be easy to achieve most development objectives, including
the Millennium Development Goals.
It is for this reason, Prof. Bruce Alberts, former President of the US
National Academy of Sciences, continues to be a great admirer of both the
work of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in the area of ICT-enabled
holistic development and the idea of using science to leverage overall
development of the less developed countries, especially those in Africa.
Science and laboratory research may appear to be far from poverty
reduction and capacity building in rural areas. But visionaries like
Swaminathan and Bruce Alberts have shown that they are intimately
connected. They are two facets of a continuous spectrum. As Leslie
Chan of the University of Toronto has pointed out access to research
literature is a key to capacity building in Africa and other developing
countries.
It is for this reason, I would urge enlightened development organizations
such as the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), International Development
Research Centre (IDRC), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
(SDC), and OneWorld, science academies of the world, and the many United
Nations and other international agencies and governments of both developed
and developing countries to pay attention to improving knowledge flows
through a better understaning and support of open access, open source and
open science.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
---------------------
Here is a news story from Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News"
UNESCO endorses OA
On September 22, UNESCO adopted Amendments to the Draft Programme and
Budget for 2006-2007 that have the effect of endorsing OA. (Thanks to
Heather Morrison.) Excerpt:
[UNESCO] Requests the Member States (a) to foster through the
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
(IFLA) dissemination of the principles of open access; (b) to foster
dissemination of the principles of open access, particularly in
universities; (c) to promote developing countries' open access to
archives for the sake of spreading scientific know-how;
Invites the Director-General (a) to assess the feasibility of creating
a database on existing open access initiatives worldwide and to report
at the forthcoming sessions of the Executive Board and the General
Conference on the progress of open access strategies throughout the
world; (b) to promote a network of national working groups with a view
to fostering open access in their universities, to cooperate
internationally in initiatives and projects on the subject of open
access, and to promote the training of experts for cooperation in the
publication of and open access to texts free of charge.
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