Ramblings Archives - Page 2 of 2

The Importance of Being Open

Should scholarly publications be absolutely freely available, or should they only reach those who have the funds to pay for subscriptions to the journals where these articles are published? There are as many nuanced opinions on this question as there are scholars, but with the ubiquity of the internet and the rising costs of journals, the issue is one that merits some thought and discussion.

Almost all the research that is typically done at the University is publicly funded, through the Government of India via various ministries, or by other public funds. Should the results of such research not be made available to as many as possible? These questions are central to a book that I reviewed in Current Science (Bangalore) some years ago, “The Access Principle. The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” by John Willinsky. Parts of the review are excerpted below.

At the heart of the book is a simple idea, that ‘a commitment to scholarly work carries with it the responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible’. This is in part so that knowledge that is created can be disseminated in a manner that the largest numbers of people have unfettered access to it, but there is more to it than just that…

The issues that Willinsky deals with have wider ramifications. For instance, who ‘owns’ knowledge? The scholar who creates it through research, or the funding agency that funded it directly or indirectly, or the commercial publishing house who owns the journal where the research was reported? And how best can it be used for public good, while ensuring that all involved parties do not go unrewarded or unrecognized?

The […] digital revolution is upon us all in a way that demands that such issues be thought about afresh since the modes of preservation of information and the modes of dissemination of knowledge have changed radically in our lifetime. For one thing, most journals of any quality are now online. Furthermore, many of them are ‘open access’, namely the articles they carry can be viewed without a subscription. However, the majority of academic journals have been in existence for a long time now and date back to the pre- digital era. The digitization of this legacy is a related issue, and the manner of the digitization and its consequent costs is relevant.

But issues are more complex in an era of impact factors and journal citations. The most prestigious journals, at least in terms of their perceived rankings, like Nature and Science are neither open access nor are they purely digital. It will be a long time before their influence will wane, so it is important to understand the totality of the access problem.

Today it is commonplace that the majority of scholars in any part of the world access academic information primarily in an electronic manner, and not through the pages of a printed journal. This revolution is similar to that wrought by Gutenberg, who through the printed page freed humankind from the purely oral tradition by offering mass producible books that anyone (with enough money!) could obtain, keep, learn from, and use to advantage.

And it is the complex nature of this revolution that ‘The Access Principle’ addresses through its extensive research. The 13 chapters of the book examine issues ranging from the history to what is copyright, the politics and the economics. Willinsky, like many of us, believes that openness is ‘better’ in an abstract way – at the end of the day its not clear from which quarter the fundamental advances are going to come, and so its best not to deny anyone the requisite opportunities. The more people who have access to knowledge, the more one can maximize the probability of any one of them using some part of it in a fundamental and future altering manner.

The first journals appeared only in the 1600s. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society grew out of the publication of the correspondence between the members of the society thanks to the efforts and foresight of Oldenburg. Despite the reputation for secrecy that surrounds his name, one of the earliest articles was a letter from Newton on ‘the theory of light and colours’. Newton appears to have held the opinion that public exposition of his research was both a duty and a privilege, and in that sense, scientific journals offered an intermediate space between the public book and the private letter.

But journals offer more than just exposure. The process of peer review, the validation, and with time, the prestige of publication – and the vanity – have all contributed to making the dissemination of science a fairly substantial business. And in the details of how this business is run lie some of the more contentious problems of the open access paradigm. Willinsky is quick to emphasize that open is not free – someone, somewhere has to invest in providing access. He lists 10 flavours of open access to underscore this point. For instance, scholars can post articles on their homepages, submit them to e-print archives, or pay a journal to allow open access to their articles. Journals, on the other hand, can subsidize access (as many Indian journals, notably those of the Indian Academy of Sciences, do), use their print versions to subsidize the online versions, allow delayed or partial open access, have a subsidy model in place, and so on. A cooperative movement such as JSTOR has played a very important role in developing tools to digitize old journals in a manner so as to make their content digitally searchable, and the access they allow is not free, but by having a flexible policy as regards revenue, they enable access in a significant manner.

The different chapters of the book are devoted to a variety of issues such as copyright and its consequences, the role of scholarly bodies and their publishing models and imperatives, the economics of open access, the role that this can play in development, and so on. The digital revolution holds within itself considerable promise. Universities, colleges and schools that did not build up physical libraries can, given enough resources, build up essentially a complete repository of the knowledge generated by humankind since whenever. Anecdotal evidence on this count is abundant and genuine, particularly in countries like India where the public investment in libraries is limited.

As a scholar who has devoted the better part of two decades to such matters, Willinsky argues the case for increased openness in scholarly publications with vigour and with wisdom, and without oversimplifying the issues at hand. The commitment to the cause is most evident in his chapter on Rights, where he proposes that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, one that is closely related to the ability to defend other rights. The argument is tenuous but offers an interesting perspective on the ability of increased access to knowledge to have an impact beyond the areas envisioned by the creators of that knowledge. To some extent, the Right to Information Act in India has had a very similar effect – information on one aspect of public life can have consequences on other aspects.

In the end, the most compelling aspect of this book is the simplicity of the basic argument. Scholars should see that their work reaches the largest number of people and should make all efforts to ensure this. This is their dharma. Academic administrators should see that scholarly work is supported in a manner so as to have this wide reach. And this is their karma. In the long run, inclusivity is clearly more in the public interest than exclusion in any form, especially in a globalized world, and the Open Access movement can help us along this path.

The karma of the University administration can be fulfilled with just a little effort. Along with the Gapps crew, we are setting the subdomain archive.uohyd.ac.in where scholars can upload their working papers, conference papers as well as their near final preprints in a UoH Archive which is an OAR (Open Access Repository). This is simple enough to operate- anyone with an @uohyd.ac.in account can upload a document which can then be accessed by anyone, inside the University or across the Universe…

The scholarly world is a-changing. This week, October 21 to 27 is International Open Access Week 2013. Celebrate! Upload a paper onto the UoH Archive!

PS: For the moment, send contributions to qohe571tigi@post.wordpress.com as an attachment. Watch this space for updates…

Turbulence

The other day, at a book release at our neighbouring Central University, MANUU, I heard the chief guest quote Allama Iqbal. Apparently (or so I gathered) when his son was setting off for higher studies in London, the great poet said to him: … خدا تجھے کسی طوفان سے آشنا کر دے کے تیرے باہر کی موجوں میں اضطراب نہیں (Khuda tujhe kisi toofan se ashna kar de, ke tere bahr ki mojon mein iztirab naheen).

I’ve looked for translations, and while none of them captures the nuance of the Urdu, the closest I could find is May God grant you a storm! The voyage of your life is on too placid an ocean…

Literally, though the verse reads in translation, “May God bless you with some storm, because the waves in your ocean (of self) are devoid of agitation (turmoil)”. There is the resonance with Shakespeare, when Brutus talks of the “tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; […] And we must take the current when it serves“, as well as the famous Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times!

The appositeness of the advice is something I have had occasion to reflect upon, as we pass through these interesting times. We at the UoH have such great privileges- our campus, its freedoms, its autonomy- and one cannot but feel that we should be doing something more. More what, one might well ask, so to turn the question around, is what we do enough? Just enough, barely enough or well enough? These are questions for which there are many answers, so all things considered, I think it is preferable that we have the occasional iztirab, a little anxiety, a little uneasiness. A state when we are not too comfortable is more conducive to self-examination, and thereby one hopes, to more discussion, creativity, and thereby to evolution.

But not too much discomfort, though! In the fluid case, in some ways the most interesting situation is that of intermittency, when there is smooth flow much of the time, interrupted by staccato bursts of turbulence. As much as we need the iztirab to evolve, we also need some undisturbed period to think, and to consolidate… But that is not a luxury one can always be assured of! There are enough forces at work and play both inside the University and outside it, that make this an ongoing challenge.

The images of the turbulent waves above are by artists whose work has been very inspirational: the iconic and familiar print by Hokusai and closer to home, the wave by Krishna Reddy, the great printmaker who lives in New York and who taught for many years at NYU.

Déjà vu

I’ve been having something of a writer’s block these past couple of weeks. Partly due to a sense of ennui as the blog enters its third year and I feel that the issues I want to discuss often border on the same old same old… But I must recall Larkin again- the there and that of been there done that are no longer where they were or what they were, and so its best to begin afresh. With a request for your indulgence if it seems like some of this has been said before.

For reasons that are too obvious to mention, I have been worrying a lot about our campus these past few weeks. Since the rains have been good to us, it is a corollary that the campus is very green, but it also becomes painfully evident that we need to constantly maintain it. Pruning, clearing, cleaning, culling… And picking up litter- there seems to be no spot on the campus that is free of plastic or paper waste. There are some simple and straightforward rules, banal enough to not be worth reiterating, but it seems they must. Respect nature. Don’t litter. And don’t expose yourself to danger.

I recall a conversation I had with Meenakshi Mukherjee, at one time on the faculty of the Department of English at the UoH. She was a good friend during the many years when we both were at the JNU- as it happened we moved there at roughly the same time. One day when I met her at Ganga Dhaba, apropos of nothing particular (more than usual that is) she said to me, you know, our campuses are the new colonies. Explaining herself, she added, it is like we academics create an enclave that is removed from the rest of the country, where different rules apply.

I have often thought about what she said, not just this but many other things (she introduced me to the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, for one. And encouraged me in my misguided efforts to learn Portuguese for another: learning a language is a very pure skill, she told me, but I’m still not sure what she meant…).

I feel that she was essentially right in her perception that a university campus is a special place and a special space, but also that in such enclaves there is a lot of privilege, and it is all too easy for us to slip into a colonial mentality.

This post is not just about littering or preserving the (physical) environment, it is also about the more general question of how we behave on the campus. For instance, there is a lot of helmet-less driving of two wheelers on campus. Seeing three students on a two-wheeler is not that uncommon. Some of the driving tends to be rather rash, and a positive danger, not just to others but to the driver as well. The traffic rules that apply elsewhere should apply here as well… Similarly, in public spaces Smoking is a No-No and Consumption of Alcohol is a BIGGER No-No.

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There are the laws that apply in the country, and then the special rules of the campus itself, and both need to be respected. This is not to interfere with personal choices, but there are laws that apply to educational establishments, and infringement of these draws some very unwelcome attention as we have seen in the past weeks.

The campus is always under threat, it seems. We have many well-wishers and much to be grateful for. But there are also others who are not slow to sit on judgement, others who are quite happy to show up all our weaknesses. Preserving and protecting the campus space is a full-time job, and its a job for all of us. It is a huge responsibility that we all have, to keep this place as one where generations of students can come to learn, and generations can use the freedom and the opportunities that this space offers to grow and develop.

Aneesur Rahman Day

The computational physicist Aneesur Rahman was born in Hyderabad on 24 August 1927. Widely known for his seminal contributions to the field- he is often termed the “father of molecular dynamics”- Rahman was a pioneer in the area of computer simulations- his 1964 study of liquid argon started a field that has grown from strength to strength. By 1970, for example, there were 34 papers on the subject in the Physical Review journals alone that were on molecular dynamics, and in 2012, this number had grown to 2751!

The UoH will celebrate this coming Saturday, 24 August 2013, as Aneesur Rahman Day, at ACRHEM, bringing together researchers from all over the country who work in the area of molecular simulations to discuss their work, share their research.

Rahman died in 1987 after a career that took him from Osmania University, Hyderabad to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, to Argonne National Laboratories in the US where he worked for 25 years. He then moved to the University of Minnesota where he was Professor of Physics and a Fellow of the Supercomputer Centre. His education had been at the Universities of Cambridge and Louvain (where he got his Ph. D. in 1953).

Our colleague Professor Kalidas Sen of the School of Chemistry was kind enough to share some details of Rahman’s life and work from where I got the above information, and also learned of the few papers that he published from Osmania, a composite image of which is on the left (taken from Prof. Sen’s presentation).

The American Physical Society now annually awards the Aneesur Rahman Prize for outstanding achievement in computational research. I hope that each year, the Anees Rahman Day will similarly bring outstanding researchers who use molecular dynamics simulations in their work to our campus, to celebrate the life and contributions of this great Hyderabadi!

The convenor for this year’s meeting is Dr G Vaitheeswaran (write to him for any information) and the announcement and programme is downloadable from the (new) What’s up? UoH site.

My hovercraft is full of eels: నా హోవర్ఁక్రాఫ్ఠ్ అంతా ఈలు చేపలతో నిండిపోయింది

In 1971 or thereabouts, with what now seems to have been considerable prescience, I purchased a copy of the modestly priced “Telugu without a Tutor” by H. R. Rao (Sahitya Siromani, Etc.) from Higginbotham’s bookstore in Madras. My aim at that time, if I recall correctly, was to learn enough Telugu to appreciate some of the more common carnatic music compositions. That never came to pass, and for 40 years the book languished, unread.

I brought it with me to Hyderabad when I came here two years ago, but it still is something that I only dip into, since the book was written in another age when there were rupees and annas, and when the pace of life was very different. There is a charm to it, of course, and I can now easily find my way around the Aden dockyard, should I be surrounded by Telugu speaking lascars… It does not have the infamous నా postillion పిడుగుపాటుకు చెయ్యబడింది phrase, but there are similar gems on many pages.

In recent weeks I have taken to learning some conversational Telugu, and my progress is hastened by having a tutor, a conscientious one at that. Each day I struggle with adi and idi, the specious similarity with Tamil and my decaying language module that confuses nenu baagunnaanu with genki desu. Hopefully in some time I will be able to understand, and to an extent, be understood, but I think that with passing years, learning languages gets more and more difficult.

And then there is the seductiveness of technology. Searching for some phrases the other day, I came across the Omniglot site which lists the very useful translation of “My hovercraft is full of eels”: నా హోవర్ఁక్రాఫ్ఠ్ అంతా ఈలు చేపలతో నిండిపోయింది (naa hoavarkraapht aṅthaa eelu chaepalathoa niṅdipoayiṅdhi). Ah! to live in a Monty Python universe where this was a common enough occurrence….

The Four Year Transform

This post has been a while in the mulling, and several news items in yesterday’s newspaper (The Hindu, 11 May 2013) that seem to be of considerable importance as far as we are concerned has prompted me to write.

One item focussed on the comment of the Visitor, the President of India, who said at the convocation of the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow, that he was unhappy with the education given by Central Universities. His drawing attention to the quality of the education, the employability of the graduates is germane, and since he comes hierarchically at the top of the pyramid of all Central Universities, it is necessary for us to take cognizance of the comment. The report adds, editorially, that higher education must be made affordable for students, especially from economically weak background. It should be brought closer to the population by innovative techniques and knowledge-sharing.

The need for innovation seems to be at the heart of a second news item, on Delhi University’s ambitious four-year undergraduate programme that is apparently now a reality with the Executive Council on Thursday approving all the courses, examination schemes and amendments to university ordinances that are required to introduce the new structure from this July onwards. July 2013, that is. This move has also prompted a number of academics and organizations to ask the Visitor’s intervention in this matter, since DU’s decision to implement a four-year undergraduate programme has far ranging consequences.

The central issue is the nature of undergraduate education in India, its form and shape in the near future. Since this has quite obviously an impact on the nature of graduate education, on employment and employability, there is a need for all of us to be engaged in the debate, and not just leave it either to politics or to the powers that be, no matter where they be or what they are.

As is quite well known, the four year format is the norm in the US, and the merits of a flexible curriculum in the US university system as a whole is well documented. Having the youth enter the workforce at the age of 22 or 23 is also desirable, so a degree that would enable the majority to get jobs at this age would be quite welcome. However, the US system has its own internal consistencies, its own system of checks and balances that have been worked out over a long period.

Even in the Indian context, the four year undergraduate programme is not new- the various academies of science have a Science Education Panel that has this structure as an explicit recommendation, and indeed the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore has started a four year programme in the sciences last year. However, the numbers involved are, at the moment, small, and what is offered is a B. Sc. (Honours) degree.

A third news item on the same day, reported that the Government “would not interfere in the Delhi University’s decision to introduce a four-year undergraduate course, but would look into the concerns expressed by some sections. Any decision on deferring the programme by a year would be taken by the University, which was an autonomous institution, it clarified.“

My concerns are less about the nature of the four year programme at Delhi University, and the voices of doom that assure “chaos and academic disaster” at Delhi University if this is implemented from July 2013, and more about what it means to the rest of the country. There have been many op-eds in the papers recently that are specific to the DU experiment, as well as many other blog comments and it is clear that the overall curriculum is not as well thought-out as it might have been. There have been as many voices on the side of change and that is really an internal debate.

When a large and influential university such as DU- and as Indian universities go Delhi University is one of the largest (about 4.5 lakh students) and very very influential- makes such a fundamental change in the structure of it’s undergraduate programme, the MHRD, and more importantly, the University Grants Commission, should be concerned. Very concerned.

There are many ways in which this affects all of us in general, and the UoH in particular. DU students will not get the B. A., B. Sc., B. Com. (or their Honours variants). Instead, the exit options that are being chosen for the Delhi University students is at the end of the second year is that of an Associate Baccalaureate, at the end of the third year, a Baccalaureate, and after four years, a Baccalaureate with Honours in his/her major discipline subject or a B.Tech. degree.

When the Minister for HRD says that “We should not be seen as dictating to them or questioning their wisdom. If they feel comfortable to go ahead, we do not want to come in the way,” one wonders why this coyness? Why not question the wisdom? And is the comfort really as widespread as it is made out? When the Government is so deeply involved in the functioning of Universities- most notably by the manner in which funds are given, or to the point, not given in time- why should the HRD ministry not comment on what is surely one of the more revolutionary moves that has been proposed in the Indian University system? Especially one that appears to be as hastily implemented as this.

It is not about university autonomy and whether the Delhi University academic and executive councils have followed procedures while endorsing the programme. As the President has remarked, for the majority, a University education is really about employability, and the various degrees that DU has put on the platter do not appear to offer any advantage over what exists now, while it does promise to increase the costs of a degree by at least 33%, if not more. And the cost of additional infrastructure (that does not exist in most colleges as of now) is another factor that should be viewed in the context of the low funding that most colleges have in the first place. It is therefore inexplicable why the UGC, which certifies all degrees, has not entered the debate so far.

The change in the school educational system from the 11 year pattern to an 10+2 pattern was an equally momentous one, and while it was generally good for education all around, one system that did not benefit from it was the network of polytechnic institutions in the country, which remain to this day a poor option for those that pass Class 10. I mentioned this in my talk at the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram, at the recent Centenary Celebrations India Today: Looking Back, Looking Forward conference when I had to speak in a session on Science and Education, and was asked specifically to focus on Science, Education and Research: Problems and Prospects. I mentioned that this has resulted in very poor inputs into the industrial and manufacturing sector. Similarly, the introduction of new and poorly conceived degrees should be viewed with some concern, and the employability of persons with two years of college seems, at this time, to be in considerable doubt.

This also impacts two issues that affect us more. The mobility of students has been viewed in recent times as highly desirable and indeed necessary from a purely academic point of view. This move by DU will make it very difficult for their students to move to another university for their subsequent degrees. At the UoH we have greatly benefited by having DU undergraduates enter our Masters programmes. Where the Bac. (Hons) or B. Tech. are going to fit in our system is a moot question. And would they come? And vice versa, when our Masters’ students go to DU, where do they fit in? And even later, will we employ them? Will they employ our graduates?

More to the point, what does this say for undergraduate education in the country as a whole? It is not generally feasible to have parallel systems that are radically different when the numbers involved are so huge. (The business schools are, on this scale, minuscule, and it hardly matters if one institution offers certificates and another offers diplomas- in the end, they both offer brand names and enable very lucrative jobs.) The move by DU will naturally affect all other universities directly or indirectly. Our own five year Integrated Master’s programs are continually being reviewed, and one question that we have been asking is whether there could (or should) be an exit after the third or the fourth year. Maybe it is time to factor in the ongoing changes in the rest of the country into our own discussion as well.

Water, water

As the summer hits us, newspaper headlines such as “Hyderabad’s twin sagars left to dry and disappear” have become all too common. The campus water situation is alarming, and it really needs everyone’s attention. I got a mail recently from a concerned student who had an earnest plea: Please make our wardens and their supporting staff realize their duties.

K Hostel, for instance. Water fills the tank, and then overflows throughout the night, and here are pictures taken at various times to document the fact… As the student says, “You are intelligent enough to calculate the amount of water wasted. Please increase your efforts to bring the university members from their research laboratories or offices to see our daily issues more closely.”

Wardens. Staff. Students… This is our problem, our campus, and it should be our common concern.

Please act! Don’t just watch a tap drip! Like the logo from a conservation advocacy site says, Every drop counts…