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

grossly uneven and this practice of paying for publication “will undermine, rather than
encourage, the whole area of grant free research.” 126
To Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum publicly-funded information is part
of the knowledge commons and it needs to be protected from commercial barriers. He
would like us “to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic
rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property. No one could
‘own’ knowledge and that the greatest scientists are often called ‘gifted’, implying that
their contribution was given to the world openly. The concept of selling such knowledge
was alien to the academic world.” Property in the English sense, he says, the conflation of
‘self’ and ‘own’ resting on exclusion, is something not common to other languages. In
Hindi, ‘apnapen’ is not a matter of owning, or property, but of closeness. Ownership in
this sense has the obligation of care. 127
Prof. T V Ramakrishnan, a former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a
Fellow of the Royal Society, is a great supporter of open access too: “I believe that open
access to all publicly funded research is a moral obligation, in the following sense. The
greatest strength of science is that it is cooperative and 'open'. This is the main way I can
understand the size and strength of the flood of knowledge represented by science. Given
this, it is natural and a matter of self sustenance to have open access to its results.”
[Private communication]
When asked why open access was not picking up in India, a senior scientist told “I do
not think that the science managers of India by and large think this is an important question.
They are concerned about other issues, and generally in the spirit of 'prabhavah
samayadushita' (changing colours with changing times), in the language of Bhartrihari,
the great poet and author of the Nitishataka (among other things). He says that the
lords, the ones with power, have lost the capacity of surprise or being surprised, or the
impurity of self satisfaction is within them.” [Private communication]
126
Gadagkar R (2008), Open-access more Harm than Good in Developing World, Nature, 453: 450;
doi:10.1038/453450c.
127 Supra note 90.
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