Friends: UNESCO is championing open access. Organizations such as ICSU, CODATA and IFLA are also supporting the spreading of the culture of open access. The Ukrainian parliament has adopted a resolution to mandate open access (of all publicly funded research). And yet many developing countries, including India, China and Brazil, have not adopted OA in a big way. Open Access is especially important for development. As Professor M S Swaminathan points out, for development to take place knowledge sharing is important at four levels, viz. lab-to-lab, lab-to-land, land-to-lab and land-to-land. Here lab stands for scientists, researchers and experts. And land stands for farmers, fishermen, and the common people in general. There should be knowledge flow among experts, among the common people and two-way flow between the two. Open Access (as promoted by people like Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber, Leslie Chan, Alma Swan, and others and institutions such as the Open Society Institute, CERN, Wellcome Trust, University of Southampton, etc.) facilitates lab-to-lab knowledge flows. And the knowledge centres set up by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (and to be set up all over rural India by Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre) facilitate the other three kinds of knowledge flows. If all four kinds of knowledge flows take place without a hitch, then it should be easy to achieve most development objectives, including the Millennium Development Goals. It is for this reason, Prof. Bruce Alberts, former President of the US National Academy of Sciences, continues to be a great admirer of both the work of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in the area of ICT-enabled holistic development and the idea of using science to leverage overall development of the less developed countries, especially those in Africa. Science and laboratory research may appear to be far from poverty reduction and capacity building in rural areas. But visionaries like Swaminathan and Bruce Alberts have shown that they are intimately connected. They are two facets of a continuous spectrum. It is for this reason, I would urge enlightened development organizations such as the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and OneWorld, science academies of the world, and the many United Nations and other international agencies and governments of both developed and developing countries to pay attention to improving knowledge flows through a better understaning and support of open access, open source and open science. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------------------- Here is a news story from Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News" UNESCO endorses OA On September 22, UNESCO adopted Amendments to the Draft Programme and Budget for 2006-2007 that have the effect of endorsing OA. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Excerpt: [UNESCO] Requests the Member States (a) to foster through the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) dissemination of the principles of open access; (b) to foster dissemination of the principles of open access, particularly in universities; (c) to promote developing countriesÂ’ open access to archives for the sake of spreading scientific know-how; Invites the Director-General (a) to assess the feasibility of creating a database on existing open access initiatives worldwide and to report at the forthcoming sessions of the Executive Board and the General Conference on the progress of open access strategies throughout the world; (b) to promote a network of national working groups with a view to fostering open access in their universities, to cooperate internationally in initiatives and projects on the subject of open access, and to promote the training of experts for cooperation in the publication of and open access to texts free of charge.