Dear Johnson and friends:
Unless all of us stake our claims the Internet will continue to be goverrned and dominated by a few in the advanced countries, especially the United States. Our governments, civil societies, intellectuals and professionals should take some interest in Internet governance and similar other public good issues and work in unison to win what is rightfully due to us.
I am working hard, with a group of similarly motivated friends around the world, to make the entire world's scientific and scholarly journal literature freely available on the Internet to anyone who wants to access it. We call it the Open Access movement. In simple terms, there are two parts to Open Access. One is to make all the journals freely accessible on the Internet as soon as they are published. More than 1,200 journals are already available under this model and the University of Lund in Sweden maintains an electronic Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This method may take many many years before even 50% of the journals become open access. Publishers - both commercial and some society - will resist. The second and easily achievable option is for institutions to set up their own interoperable archives in which all researchers of the institutute can deposit their research papers (the final version that would appear in a professional journal). The technology and software for such software are all in place and training can be organised.
The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, has such an archive. A few other Indian institutions will soon have their own interoperable archives. Most African higher educational institutions and research labs should follow the IISc model. Institutions such as the Kofi Annan Centre can host a common archive for all of Africa or Western Africa.
What is the benefit of such open archives, one may ask. There are many. For one, the research that we do in the developing world can be read by a very large number of people. Right now, most of the journals we publish have very poor circulation - often only a few hundred copies. Archiving our papers will bring us a larger audience and greater visibility. Our researchers can access a much larger volume of current literature than our impoverished libraries provide now.
Let us all work together in ushering in an era of open access to scientific and scholarly literature. Those interested in bringing in this revolution may please read the voluminous and lucid writings of Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber, and Leslie Chan. A simple search on these names will lead you to a vast amount of literature on open access.
Best wishes.
Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]
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Subject: FW: [wsisaccra] India and ICANN...
Hello Colleagues,
This is from India about ICANN, one of Internet governing bdies. We got it
from Prof Arunachalam, and we are greatful to him.
For your information.
Johnson
-----Original Message----- From: Subbiah Arunachalam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 23 February 2005 10:07 To: Accra2005 Mailing List Cc: telecentres@wsis-cs.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [wsisaccra] India and ICANN...
Here is a statement by the Indian Government on ICANN. I received it through
a mailing list.
Arun
http://at-large.blogspot.com/2005/02/india-our-thoughts-on-icann.html
Still At Large-the last outpost for ICANN's unrepresented masses
Thursday, February 10, 2005 India: Our Thoughts on ICANN
.
The government of India is the first government thus far to submit formal
comments to the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) which is
preparing a report for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
India had this to say about ICANN:
"Presently ICANN is a private organization, working under MoU with US
government. We understand that the MoU is to expire in September 2006.
ICANN's incorporation in the USA implicitly means it will always be
subject to USA law. It is believed that this shall introduce an asymmetric
role of the USA Government vis a vis other governments. Today ICANN is the
only visible body which exercises any kind of oversight in relation to the
internet with a few supporting organisation being responsible for some of
its critical components - such as voluntary root servers, regional
Internet Address Registries , the Domain Name registries. Most of them
have contractual relations with ICANN. At the international level, there
is no single international( Inter-government or private ) organisation
that coordinates all the issues related to the Internet and IP based
Services.
In essence Internet Governance includes collective rules, policies,
standards, procedures that are consistent with the sovereign rights of the
states . At present there is little or no role of governments in these
multifarious decision processes and Governments of developing countries
are effectively marginalised. India among the Developing countries is not
at ease with the limited influence of Governments of various countries in
ICANN and in particular with the purely advisory role of GAC.
Governments have a clear interest in ensuring that internet evolves in a direction that protects and advances the public interest. In addition to the management resources( IP Addresses, DNS, Root Servers, Protocols, IDN etc ) there are number of questions in which technology and policy issues are interlinked. Based on the understanding of the issues as discussed above, we are of the opinion that internet should be governed by an inter-governmental, multilateral, multi-stakeholder international body."
Dgroups is a joint initiative of Bellanet, DFID, Hivos, ICA, IICD, OneWorld,
UNAIDS and World Bank
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