Dear Madhan,
Interesting call by Paulo Coelho!
The universe owned by the authors should turn Gandhian by changing the currently used copyright statement “All rights reserved” to a new statement “All rights unreserved”.
Gandhi wrote his famous book “Hind Swaraj: Indian Home Rule” in 1915 during his journey by ship from South Africa to India. He released this book in Gujarathi and English with both imprints carrying the statement “All rights unreserved”. Gandhi was a lawyer by profession as we know. Back in India, he intended this book to serve the purpose of launching his non-violence style of freedom movement. It is another story that his Gujarathi edition was banned by the British Government. They didn’t bother about Indian edition as they thought that none would read English version!
The important message here from Gandhi to the authors of the scholarly communication in particular -- which is a far better message than Paul Coelho, is: declare your papers at the pre-print level itself with the statement: “All rights unreserved” and post it in a public repository site like arXiv or chemrXiv or medrXiv or biorXiv. This may start a new “Sathyagraha” (civil disobedience) movement leading to free the scholarly journals from the pay-wall controlled subscription model for ever! Gandhi taught us to be truthful and not steal from others. Instead of giving a call to defend thieves and pirates like Alexandra Elbakyan, OA movement should pursue the leading scientists and researchers of India and the world to rigorously pursue the Gandhian model.
OA movement needs to be re-invented, two decades after its first-round of limited success so far, waking up the scholarly world only partially! We need a Gandhian of the scholarly world to emerge for this. Who could this be?
Sathya
N. V. Sathyanarayana
| Chairman & Managing Director | Informatics India Ltd. | Bangalore 560004 |INDIA |
| www.informaticsglobal.comhttp://www.informaticsglobal.com |
From: LIS-Forum