An interesting question has recently been asked in the Open Access Forum India. What is Open access and What is a policy for mandated open access?
There are excellent resources that explain the “Open Access” movement including Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_%28publishing%29).
Taking these explanations further, to me, open access for Agricultural Research and Innovation for Development (ARD) is more than being for published scientific journals. It is about all information generated by and for use in ARD. It is also about making information available, accessible, applicable by ensuring its validity, usefulness and relevance to the society and its appropriation by communities, through being able to learn from information and making its use for their own development. I call them the basic framework of 4 A’s for improving Information and Communications Management (ICM) for ARD and by ensuring their implementation effectively across an information chain, we can put information to use for agricultural progress.
I believe that information for ARD is not generated only by scientists and researchers but by all related in some way to agriculture, from input suppliers, farmers, producers, processors, market intermediaries, consumers, those who support agricultural innovation and those who decide on the progress and development of agriculture globally. They all are actors in a complex information chain for agricultural innovation that leads to progress and development.
Today, vast amounts of relevant and useful information lies hidden in Institutional vaults very much like the temple treasures in Kerala. Within the vaults of Scientific organizations, information is further stored in silos. The agronomist’s information is not available to the soil scientist. The plant pathologists information is not effectively used by the plant breeder. The case is no different in animal or fisheries related science. Further in the stream of agricultural innovation there is hardly any information that is generated and used for whole systems innovation. Scientists innovate seeds, fertilizer use, pest control but not the farming and production systems as relevant to agricultural development where it should matter most, the systems of resource poor small holder farmers and producers.
So, when I consider open access, I consider how we can open the access to information from within organizations, within communities and within societies so that this openness contributes to agricultural progress and development through research and innovation and the use of science and technology.
There are many barriers to open access as I believe it should be. These are technological, for example, the biased use of the Internet (only accessible in urban areas and for those who can use computers) and before that printing (cost, literacy), radio (cost, power supply), television(cost, content), Institutional including the lack of awareness of technological potential, policies, strategies, structures, investment and capacities and related to community participation, for example, the scientists and researchers who for some reason do not want to share their information and farmer innovators who cannot avail the critical information they require because they do not know whom to ask for it. We need to struggle against these barriers if we need to bring open access for ARD.
The struggle for lowering each of the barriers requires the entire community of agricultural stakeholders to act in their own way possible. Individually we can advocate, promote, contribute, support and participate in the dialogue on enabling access to information for all. Collectively we can act to make information available, accessible, applicable and be used by communities as today’s information and communication technologies have huge potentials never earlier known to human kind. At the Institutional level, we can develop policies and strategies that contribute to open access.
As an agricultural community member, I advocate and support open access in ARD. One of my activities is related to the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) movement (See http://www.ciard.net). In my organization (The Global Forum on Agricultural Research or GFAR; see http://www.egfar.org) we support CIARD and lead CIARD.RING (http://www.ciard.net/ring) for all CIARD partners.
At the Institutional level, we can develop policies and strategies that contribute to open access. And that is how, I have suggested that for national agricultural research and innovation systems in economically developing countries that urgently need innovation in agriculture for their development, we need open access to information policies. Agriculture is knowledge intensive and becoming even more so. New knowledge is a critical resource for innovation and for agricultural development and progress. And for resource poor small holder farmers and producers, information is a very scarce resource. Some part of the resource poverty is also information poverty - information about what to grow, how and when, where to market, how to market and who to market to.
The Indian national agricultural and innovation system has taken a progressive step to provide open access to some of the scientific journals it publishes. We have to recognize that it is exemplary for similar systems across the world. The question is: Is it enough? Especially for a country where 60 per cent of the rural population depends on agriculture and more than 80 per cent are of this population are small holders, a majority of them resource poor. I believe open information access as I define it can resolve their poverty significantly. I am suggesting that the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the State Agricultural Universities who are public Institutions in India and largely funded by public money and are also major generators of agricultural information, have as a mandate, policies that enable open access to agricultural innovation that contributes to research and innovation in agriculture. For example, a policy direction could be that all Institutions inform openly on their websites the experts with their expertise, projects and project outputs in a searchable form. Another could be that the ICAR / DARE mandates as a policy that all research outputs should not only be accessible but appropriately aggregated and amalgamated, such as through tools such as Wikis for effective use by agricultural communities.
At one end we have information poor small holder farmers and other users, at the other end publicly funded generators of agricultural information. Can we show to the World what we can do to share information more equitably and contribute to poverty alleviation? And, how we do it?
We need to discuss what we all can collectively do. We may start with a mandated policy for open access.
