Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

There are other far more fundamental considerations too. It is not just researchers who
need access to research information. Teachers and students wishing to make the class
lively, doctors, patients and their families seeking medical information, small
businesses looking for product and process-related information, and the lay public
generally interested in late international developments in science are also unable to afford
access to such information much of which is produced with taxpayers' money. If, as Nobel
Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues, knowledge is a global public good that is central to
successful development, then the international community has a collective responsibility
for the creation and dissemination of knowledge for development. 47 But there is an increasing
tendency to privatize knowledge and strengthen intellectual property regimes.
Here is what Arun Narasimhan of IIT Madras says: “As a researcher, I do all the hard
work, think of an idea, find the research methods and tools, find the funding if necessary
to accomplish certain tasks to realize the idea and see its merit, write the results using the
idea and analyze the pros and cons of the idea and send that research article usually to a
research journal office comprising of other researchers. The subsequent peer review
process that qualifies my idea for its worthiness as original useful scientific knowledge is
done by these academics and researchers mostly for no fee. It is a service they all must
perform because it will be reciprocated in kind and quality by other researchers in the
community to uplift their research work. Strict but free of money. … But the actual publishing
of the entire body of research knowledge is done by publishers, the middlemen,
(and it is they) who control entirely the key aspects like who could have access to such
knowledge, how much profit the publishers could make, what sort of copyright the researcher
who generates original knowledge could have and so on.” 48
Every innovation makes use of previously accumulated knowledge — it draws on the
global commons of pre-existing knowledge. This issue of the use of the global
knowledge commons has been brought home forcefully in the context of bio-diversity,
where private firms have prospected for valuable drugs in natural settings in developing
countries. 49 Countless numbers of plants used in traditional medical systems of India,
China, Africa and Latin America have been drafted into the western medical system
through knowledge acquired from local people. Western pharmaceutical companies take
away tonnes of plant material from these regions but the local people get hardly any
47
Stiglitz J E (1999), ‘Knowledge as a Global Public Good' in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation
in the 21st Century, edited by Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunbuerg and Marc A Stern, published for
UNDP by Oxford University Press, New York, 308-325.
http://www.undp.org/globalpublicgoods/TheBook/globalpublicgoods.pdf#page=346.
48
Narasimhan A (2008), Open Access Publishing, nOnoScience,
http://www.nonoscience.info/2008/02/20/open-access-publishing/.
49 Supra note 38.
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