In an earlier posting I emphasised the critical importance of scientist-to-scientist exchange. In the past two decades or so, the journals which have been facilitating such exchange from 1665 onwards have become unaffordable to many researchers, especially those in the developing world (but also for those working in not-so-wealthy institutions in the West). Unable to cope with the rising costs of journals - at a rate three to four times the rate of general inflation - many librarians even in affluent American universities started looking for intelligent ways to meet what they termed 'the serials crisis.' One alternative has become rather popular, open access. In the excerpt from an interview of Professor M S Swaminathan by the British technology journalist Richard Poynder, the father of the Green Revolution has strngly come in favour of open access. Please read on: Intellectual Property RP: We have stressed the important of information in this interview. Any mention of content today almost invariably leads to a discussion about intellectual property rights ( [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property]IPR[/url] ), particularly in the context of the developing world. Critics argue, for instance, that The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual property Rights ( [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Trade-Related_Aspects_of_Inte…] ), which is administered by the World Trade Organisation ( [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization]WTO[/url] ), is forcing developing countries to buy into a global intellectual property system that disadvantages them. Certainly as net importers of knowledge and information, they would seem to have more to lose than they have to gain from stronger IPR. Would you agree? MSS: IPR is certainly an obstacle to implementing the philosophy of social inclusion in access to technologies. This is why support for public good research and development is equally important. While on the one hand, some would like to see increasing privatisation of knowledge and technology, there are many others who are opting for the open access system of knowledge sharing. RP: You use the phrase "open access". This is a term most frequently used today in the context of scholarly publishing, with Open Access advocates arguing that publicly-funded research should now be made freely available on the Web, not locked behind the subscription firewalls of commercial publishers. This may not directly impact the users of VKCs, but it presumably has significant implications for healthcare in developing nations. After all, if local doctors and health care practitioners are unable to access the latest information on cures and treatments they will not be able to help their patients so well). Do you have views on Open Access? MSS: I fully believe in Open Access. RP: You are a Fellow of many of the world's leading Science Academies — including the Royal Society , the US National Academy of Sciences , the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences . Would you be willing to use your undoubted stature to persuade these academies to proactively promote Open Access to scientific and scholarly literature? MSS: I will do my best to persuade all academies to follow the principle of Open Access. RP: I have a slightly different question about IPR. You are a plant geneticist: I understand that the two principal means for creating transgenic plants have been patented , and the rights now belong to large US companies. Some claim that there are many similar patent problems affecting food science, and that once again it is developing nations that are disadvantaged as a result. How much of a problem do you believe this to be? MSS: It is a problem. I believe we should create an International Patents Bank for Food, Health and Environmental Security, to which all scientists who see themselves as trustees of their intellectual property should assign their patents, thereby enabling them to be made available to the economically and socially underprivileged sections of the human family . Global Alliance RP: I want to broaden the discussion out a little if I may. I don't know how much interest you take in the various [url=http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_and_free]free and open [/url]movements, but it strikes me that there are interesting parallels in what you are trying to achieve with the VKCs, and what these various movements are trying to achieve in their respective arenas. I wonder, for instance, if this might suggest that at some point mankind forgot how to co-operate, or to share effectively. Since it seems likely that co-operation will be essential if we are to progress, and ensure that we don't destroy the planet, perhaps we are in the process of reinventing how to share, or devising new ways of doing so. Would you agree? MSS: Maybe. Mahatma Gandhi said that we should behave as trustees and not as owners of both physical and intellectual wealth. In my view it is criminal to make access to information and technologies which are of great importance to human health, nutrition and environmental security, exclusive. I believe there must be compulsory licensing of rights in all cases where the discovery is of great importance to the elimination of hunger and poverty, as well as health security ( e.g., HIV AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc.). And this principle should also apply in the case of information and technologies able to mitigate the adverse impact of global warming and sea level rise. RP: Here is my final question then: The 2005 World Summit on the Information Society ( [url=http://www.itu.int/wsis/index.html]WSIS[/url] ) was intended to address many of the issues we have been discussing. In your view did WSIS deal with the issue of the digital divide adequately? What should be the next step in terms of solving the digital divide at a global level? MSS: Big gatherings like the World Summit on the Information Society are of limited use from the point of view of taking the technology to the unreached. They are useful as PR Exercises for ICT. What we need right now is a coalition of everyone who is concerned with bridging the urban-rural digital divide. This is what we have tried to achieve in India through the formation of a national alliance — Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre. Now we hope this national alliance can grow into a global alliance. RP: The point here, I guess, is that these are problems that can only be dealt with at an international level. As you said in your Economist article: "irrespective of political frontiers, our future is ecologically intertwined ... Both unsustainable life styles and unacceptable poverty must vanish, if humankind is to have a better common present and future." Thank you very much taking the time to discuss these issues with me.

On scientist-to-scientist exchange of knowledge Friends: I am happy to join the e-Agriculture discussion group. I wish to emphasise the need to mandate open access to all publicly funded research in my first submission to the list. As those of us working in the development sector have come to realize, communication is the key for bringing about social change. According to Professor M S Swaminathan four types of communication or knowledge flows are important in the context of development: Farmer-to-Farmer, Scientist-to-Farmer, Farmer-to-Scientist and Scientist-to-Scientist. Early studies in ICT-enabled rural development carried out by Balaji and colleagues of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation MSSRF) in the villages of Pondicherry in southern India had clearly shown that farmers often learn from their neighbours and those who sell farm inputs such as fertilizers much more than from government officials appointed to help them. This kind of learning results from farmers exchanging experiences. The South-South Exchange Traveling Workshops conducted by MSSRF for development workers from Asia, Africa and Latin America is based on the idea that when development workers from far and near travel together from village to village and meet with local communities and development workers they learn far more (through experiential learning) than they would by reading or attending conventional classes. The Scientist-to-Farmer transfer of knowledge occurs when farmers come to know of develoments from extension officers and through media programmes meant for farmers (say radio broadcasts, newspaper columns on agriculture, etc.). Here experts communicate useful information (and knowledge) to the farmers. I am told that this kind of knowledge transfer played an important role in India during the late 1960s and 1970s when India's Green Revolution took place. Even today there are many low-cost magazines in many languages in India as well as a number of farm-related programmes in the electronic media. The agriculture column in The Hindu, one of India's leading dailies, has a large following. The Farmer-to-Scientist link does not occur very often, but its value cannot be ignored, as pointed out by Prof. Bruce Alberts, former President of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Scientists can reorient their research to reflect the concerns of the farmers, only if they know the concerns in the first place. These three types of knowledge flows can be facilitated by telecentres, as has been shown by the village knowledge centres and village resource centres set up by MSSRF. Indeed, in many of these resource centres, the local communities are bringing out a twice-monthly newsletter with the support of MSSRF. The knowledge centres also gather and disseminate information relevant to the local communities from a variety of sources. The MSSRF project team works closely with many partner organizations - including agricultural universities, research laboratories, field stations, veterinary colleges, extension officers, fisheries departments, commodity exchanges, the local and wholesale markets, and so on - to gather information. In addition, the project organizes several skill-building programmes with the help of external experts. As the GKP emphasises, knowldge sharing and building partnerships have to go hand in hand. So far so good. But in a society that is becoming increasingly knowledge dependent, it is imporant that the experts who help the farmers, fishermen and the common citizens keep abreast of the latest developments. It is for this reason the expert-to-expert (or Scientist-to-Scientist) exchange of knowledge assumes great importance. It is for such exchange scientific conferences and journals were invented in the first place. From 1665, when the first scientific journals began publishing, the scientific journal has become the single most important method of scientists announcing their findings and communicating with the rest of the scientists. Needless to say, the journals have played a key role in the growth of science (and knowledge). For nearly four centuries these journals depended on Gutenberg's technology - print-on-paper. Unfortunately, there is a proliferation of journals and no one can keep track of all that is published - for two resaons, viz. the sheer volume and the prohibitive costs of many journals. The 1990s saw the emergence of new technologies that have already revolutionized the way we communicate. I am talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Exchanging knowledge among scientists need no longer be expensive. As physicists had shown, even before the Internet was born, scientists could deposit their work in electronic archives so other scientists could access them whenever and wherever they want. That is the essence of open access. Today there are about a thousand OA archives (or repositories) around the world. Some are subject-based central archives such as arXiv (for physics and related areas). Others are institution-based decentralised archives such as the one at the Indian Institute of Science, Banaglore. Although the benefits of open access are claer aand easy to appreciate, not all scientists deposit their resaerch papers in OA archives. It is somewhat like people not giving up smoking even though they know full well smoking is harmful to them and can even kill. That is why funding agencies and institutions performing research should mandate open access to all research publications resulting from public funding. Six of the seven research councils in the UK as well as other donors such as the Wellcome Trust have such a mandtae in place. The CGIAR should mandate open access to all research papers and reports published by scientists in all CGIAR laboratories. We are told that CGIAR is moving in that direction. We are looking forward to the day when actually the full texts of every paper published by CGIAR scientists is on OA repositories and can be searched and downloaded by anyone interested. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]