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Implications of the Open Archives Initiative
on Science and Scholarship in the
Developing World
Subbiah Arunachalam
Distinguished Fellow
M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
Third Cross Street, Taramani Institutional Area
CHENNAI 600 113, India
<[email protected]>
Embalam Centre
Veerampatinam
Centre
It is in the nature of technology to favour the rich and
deprive the poor. The Industrial Revolution in England
and Europe has demonstrated it only too well. True,
technology can once in awhile throw up new
millionaires. Information technology has created many
new millionaires in a short time, like never before. But in
general the Mathew effect operates in full force in
technology and in particular ICTs.
Virtually every new technology tends to exacerbate
the inequalities that separate the rich from the poor.
The newer and more potent the technology, the
greater is its ability to increase the inequalities.
The situation with ICT is especially worrisome. There is
a tremendous disparity in teledensity in different
countries. Nearly 40 countries have less than one
telephone per 100 inhabitants at one end and USA,
Denmark and Norway have more than 65 per 100 at the
other. In January 2000 there were about 72.4 million
hosts on the Internet. The developing world is still
participating with a mere 3%. About 85% of worldwide
Internet hosts are in the G7-countries, which make up
only about ten per cent of world population.
As Steve Woolgar and Rev. Jesse Jackson have
pointed out in different contexts, the Internet is no
exception. ICTs not only expand the gap between the
rich and poor nations, but also widens the gap
between sections of people within a country. The
digital divide is not only growing even within the
United States but it is also exacerbating the racial
divide, making inner cities a major concern of the
people and the government.
The most populated countries of the Third World,
China, India, Brazil and Nigeria all together make up
less than 1 % of all hosts with more than 40 % of
world population. It is against this background, we
must see how best we can take advantage of OAIs.
In the performance of science, the distribution is
tremendously skewed: the top ten countries producing
more than 80% of the world’s mainstream literature, as
against 8% by more than 120 developing countries,
which are charecterised by low levels of collaboration
both within the country and outside .
One of the reasons for this pathetic situation is lack of
access to relevant information and poor means of
dissemination of research carried out in these
countries.
In the turn of the century, the center of gravity of world
science was firmly anchored in Great Britain and
Western Europe. Young American students, keen on
learning and scholarship, went to the old world –
Cambridge, Gottingen, Paris and so on. But today the
flow is reversed. Not only bright young students from
the UK and Europe and everywhere else are flocking to
American universities, but also senior professionals
including Fellows of major Academies of the world are
migrating to the USA. Dissenting opinions such as that
of Duane Shelton of International Technology Research
Institute notwithstanding, the USA is undoubtedly the
leader in most areas of scientific research.
One of the causes of the US superiority has to do
with the way information is handled there. Many
professional societies in the USA, no doubt modeled
after the older societies in the continent, publish
journals of quality. Many of the important secondary
services – Chemical Abstracts, for example – are
produced in the USA. What is more, every time new
technological
developments
took
place,
the
Americans were quick to take advantage. Take for
example Science Citation Index, which was originally
published as an unwieldy print-on-paper product.
Later it was made available on a handy CD-ROM disc
and later on the Web with all its advantages.
Today scientists in the rich countries can seamlessly
move from a paper to the abstract or the full text of
another paper referred to in the first paper, thanks
primarily to technology and also to agreements
among many primary journal publishers and
database producers. This would remain a dream for a
long time to come for most of us in the developing
world.
As has been evident from our own Foundation’s
experience in using information and communication
technologies for alleviating poverty in rural India,
intelligent human intervention alone can help us
realize
the
advantageous
potential
of
new
technologies. This is so even with scientists and
scholars trying to benefit from products of digital
technology such as electronic journals and open
archives initiatives. Merely making journals and
preprints available on the net is not enough.
What percentage of physicists in the developing world
is using the Los Alamos physics preprint archives? Or
for that matter, what percentage of publishing
physicists in India, better than many other developing
countries in the matter of computing skills, is even
aware of it?
How many journals published from
developing countries are available electronically?
What is needed is a much broader package, including
education, provision of the necessary technology – if
need be to be subsidized, as recommended by Bruce
Alberts, President of the National Academy of
Sciences, USA – and mobilizing governments,
academies, professional societies and academic and
research institutions to take advantage of the new
developments
Men like Paul Ginsparg and Stevan Harnad are there to
think of technologies that can democratize information
access. It is for the rest of us to translate the full
potential of these technologies to reality. Bruce
Alberts, president of the National Academy of Scinces,
USA, has suggested that even if it means subsidizing
we should provide broadband Internet access to
scientists and scholars everywhere in the world. It is
good for science. After all, many great ideas in science
in the recent past have come from not so rich
countries.
Indeed, it is the scientists and scholars of the
developing world who could benefit the most from
open archives initiatives, as they are the ones who
suffer the most from the current regime of ever
increasing journal subscription prices and dwindling
budgets. Ironically, they are the last to adopt and
benefit from OAIs. Even within their own societies,
they are among the last to be reached by new ICTs; in
India the stock broking community had its own
national network in place years ago and many
universities and research laboratories do not have
basic email facilities even today!
Now there are many OAIs: LANL’s Physics Archives
(arXiv), clinmed, CogPrints, CSTC (computer science),
NACA (technical reports), nestrl (computer science),
and NDLTD (theses and dissertations), all of which are
Santa Fe convention compliant. Besides these, we have
PubMed Central, E-Biosci, and Pubsci. There are also
archives which provide citation information, e.g., the
NEC database promoted by Lawrence for computer
science, and the SLAC SPIRES HEP database from
Stanford. These should be publicized in developing
countries.
Developing country scholars should be encouraged and
helped to take part in OAI related activities. At the
moment, by and large they are left out in the cold. They
neither deposit their new publications in these archives
nor search them for information. The gap between the
developed and developing countries is widening faster
now than in the print-only era! There were hardly any
participant from developing countries at the Santa Fe
meeting in 1999 and the more recent San Antonio
meeting.
International aid agencies active in the area of science
development should allocate a substantial proportion of
their investments to promoting an information culture in
developing countries. It is not enough if they fund
laboratory and field research. Bruce Alberts, President of
the NAS, USA, has spoken about this issue, but I do not
know if the Academy has taken any concrete steps.