Friends: I just visited the Bytesforall.net portal and found the following two interesting items. -------- UN opens its Official Document System to the general public The United Nations has launched its Official Document System (ODS), a full-text web resource for official UN documentation. INDIA * The 'virus' of Free Software is spreading... This is a list of the useful user groups that help in spreading Free/Libre and Open Source Software. Most are from around India, and could play a useful role in spreading the ideals of sharing and freedom in the FLOSS movement. Would really appreciate any help in updating and correcting this list and keeping it current. Thanks for helping to update this list and keeping it relevant. -- FN (Frederick Noronha in Goa) fred at bytesforall.org. ------- A number of the readers of this portal are keen to promote open source software. There is an equally important and useful goal to be achieved. I am talking about making the world's scientific and scholarly journal literature accessible to everyone free of cost and instantly on publication. The portal is happy to report that the UN has opened up its official documents. Should we not work towards opening up the scientific and schoalrly research literature? Some may ask why is that important. Let me explain. Knowledge is important at all levels. We at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation know from our experience with the knowledge centres in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu in southern India over the past decade how very useful access to knowledge is for the rural poor. The role played by these centres both during and after the recent tsunami attack on our coasts has been written about and discussed in intenational fora. The orderly fashion in which relief measures were delivered in these villages was in stark contrast to what had happened elsewhere. Andy Carvin and others who attended the recent Baramati Conference were full of praise for Prof. Swaminathan's talk on our kowledge centres. If access to relevant and useful information makes a difference in the lives of the rural poor, it is even more crucial for those in the business of generating new knowledge that can form the basis of development. That is why scientists and scholars need to have immediate access to the newly emerging kowledge, irrespective of where it comes from. Unfortunately, the scholarly journals which mediate this process have become unaffordable; there are too many of them and most of them are very expensive. But developments in technology, especially ICTs, have made it possible for us now to have such access at a ridiculously low cost. Taking advantage of the web technology, physicists of the world started exchanging their research findings through an archive called arXiv about 15 years ago. Today most physicists worth the name use arXiv to let others know of therir new papers and to learn what other physicists are up to. arXiv is a centralised archive, originally located at Los Alamos National Laboratory and now at Cornell University, and it has more than 15 mirror sites, several of them in Asia including one at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai (Madras). People who have thought about archiving research papers have thought of interoperable institutional archives as another possibility and today there are about 400 such institutional open access archives around the world. The one at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has about 1,700 papers stored in it and the number is increasing every day. It is in the interest of developing country scientists and scholars to promote the culture of institutional archiving. Imagine a world where every institution performing and publishing research has an archive and every scientist deposits his/her papers in these archives. Now anyone can access any paper if he/she has an Internet connection. Knowledge will flow freely and science will advance much faster than in a regime where knowledge is locked up and kept inaccessible to all the users through cost barriers. There is another and possibly more important benefit for developing country scientists. Right now papers by scientists from DCs are rarely noticed, read and quoted by others. The journals produced in DCs are rarely subscribed by libraries in advanced countries. Often someone in Bangalore may not know what another scientist living in Kanpur has published! But if all these papers are available free on the Net, then their visibility and citability will increase manifold. And that is precisely what every scientist would want. Setting up interoperable institutional open access archives is pretty easy. The software is free and can be downloaded from the Net. There are experts who are willing to provide training (if needed). There are many international organizations actively promoting the culture if OA archiving. Those of us who are trying to promote the use of free and open source software could in addition promote OAA as well. A recent study has shown that we need to create an awareness among scientists and policymakers of the tremendous advantages of such archives. We need to mount many advocacy programmes. The recent meeting (Berlin-3) held at the Southampton University came up with the following recommendation: "In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should 1) Implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository. and 2) Encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen." I would urge all of you friends to persuade institutions (your own and others) to adopt and implement these recommendations. Thanks and best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Friends: I just visited the Bytesforall.net portal and found the following two interesting items. -------- UN opens its Official Document System to the general public The United Nations has launched its Official Document System (ODS), a full-text web resource for official UN documentation. INDIA * The 'virus' of Free Software is spreading... This is a list of the useful user groups that help in spreading Free/Libre and Open Source Software. Most are from around India, and could play a useful role in spreading the ideals of sharing and freedom in the FLOSS movement. Would really appreciate any help in updating and correcting this list and keeping it current. Thanks for helping to update this list and keeping it relevant. -- FN (Frederick Noronha in Goa) fred at bytesforall.org. ------- A number of the readers of this portal are keen to promote open source software. There is an equally important and useful goal to be achieved. I am talking about making the world's scientific and scholarly journal literature accessible to everyone free of cost and instantly on publication. The portal is happy to report that the UN has opened up its official documents. Should we not work towards opening up the scientific and schoalrly research literature? Some may ask why is that important. Let me explain. Knowledge is important at all levels. We at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation know from our experience with the knowledge centres in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu in southern India over the past decade how very useful access to knowledge is for the rural poor. The role played by these centres both during and after the recent tsunami attack on our coasts has been written about and discussed in intenational fora. The orderly fashion in which relief measures were delivered in these villages was in stark contrast to what had happened elsewhere. Andy Carvin and others who attended the recent Baramati Conference were full of praise for Prof. Swaminathan's talk on our kowledge centres. If access to relevant and useful information makes a difference in the lives of the rural poor, it is even more crucial for those in the business of generating new knowledge that can form the basis of development. That is why scientists and scholars need to have immediate access to the newly emerging kowledge, irrespective of where it comes from. Unfortunately, the scholarly journals which mediate this process have become unaffordable; there are too many of them and most of them are very expensive. But developments in technology, especially ICTs, have made it possible for us now to have such access at a ridiculously low cost. Taking advantage of the web technology, physicists of the world started exchanging their research findings through an archive called arXiv about 15 years ago. Today most physicists worth the name use arXiv to let others know of therir new papers and to learn what other physicists are up to. arXiv is a centralised archive, originally located at Los Alamos National Laboratory and now at Cornell University, and it has more than 15 mirror sites, several of them in Asia including one at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai (Madras). People who have thought about archiving research papers have thought of interoperable institutional archives as another possibility and today there are about 400 such institutional open access archives around the world. The one at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has about 1,700 papers stored in it and the number is increasing every day. It is in the interest of developing country scientists and scholars to promote the culture of institutional archiving. Imagine a world where every institution performing and publishing research has an archive and every scientist deposits his/her papers in these archives. Now anyone can access any paper if he/she has an Internet connection. Knowledge will flow freely and science will advance much faster than in a regime where knowledge is locked up and kept inaccessible to all the users through cost barriers. There is another and possibly more important benefit for developing country scientists. Right now papers by scientists from DCs are rarely noticed, read and quoted by others. The journals produced in DCs are rarely subscribed by libraries in advanced countries. Often someone in Bangalore may not know what another scientist living in Kanpur has published! But if all these papers are available free on the Net, then their visibility and citability will increase manifold. And that is precisely what every scientist would want. Setting up interoperable institutional open access archives is pretty easy. The software is free and can be downloaded from the Net. There are experts who are willing to provide training (if needed). There are many international organizations actively promoting the culture if OA archiving. Those of us who are trying to promote the use of free and open source software could in addition promote OAA as well. A recent study has shown that we need to create an awareness among scientists and policymakers of the tremendous advantages of such archives. We need to mount many advocacy programmes. The recent meeting (Berlin-3) held at the Southampton University came up with the following recommendation: " In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should 1) Implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository. and 2) Encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen." I would urge all of you friends to persuade institutions (your own and others) to adopt and implement these recommendations. Thanks and best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]