Info tech and scholarly communication in the Third World

["Prof. Arunachalam" <arun@indy.iitm.ernet.in>]

[WHILE this talk is not strictly speaking on the topic of this list, we
nonetheless thought it important to pass on.  The Libicense-l Moderators]

_________________

Friends:

Here is the text of a talk I gave at an international conference of editors
held at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 7-11 June 1998. I welcome your comments.
Thanks.

Arun
Subbiah Arunachalam


Science Communication for the Next Millennium: Ninth International
Conference of the International Federation of Science Editors, Sharm
El-Sheikh, Egypt, 7-11 June 1998

Information technology: What it means for science communication 
in developing countries

Subbiah Arunachalam
Visiting Professor, Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology, CHENNAI 600 036, India
[Fax: 91-44-2351319.    Email: arun@indy.iitm.ernet.in]

In an interview she gave to a British newspaper immediately after she won
the Nobel Prize for literature, the Princeton University professor Ms Tony
Morrison said that it seemed as if writing about the life and
sensibilities of the Blacks didn't really co unt.  It was not thought
important enough to merit attention. It was peripheral. It is the same
with doing science (or working in any other area of scholarly pursuit) in
the developing countries. One's work goes unnoticed.  One who works under
adverse conditions in the developing countries needs to achieve a lot more
to win some recog nition than those who work under much better conditions
in the developed countries. Not surprising. After all, we live in an
unequal world. Immediately following the Prague conference of medical
editors (September 1997), New Scientist commented in an edit orial (1
November 1997) that when it came to choosing manuscripts for publication,
editors of reputed international journals would more likely select the one
from Harvard in preference to the one from Hyderabad.  Even though both
manuscripts may be of com parable quality. Harvard any day is a safer bet
than Hyderabad! 

	Technology tends to exacerbate this inequality and further
marginalize scientists on the periphery. The Internet, or for that matter
any technology, does not come without its attendant problems. History has
repeatedly shown that technology inevitably enh ances existing
inequalities. Take for example, scientific research in India. It is very
important for researchers to get to know what is happening around the
world as well as to let others know what they are doing. Information is
key to the growth of know ledge and dissemination of information is
crucial for the scientific enterprise. And information is disseminated
through communication channels. In pre-Independent India, when scientists
of the caliber of C V Raman, Meghnad Saha, J C Bose and S N Bose mad e
their first-rate contributions to knowledge, the main vehicle for
transmission of knowledge was the scholarly journal, and there were far
fewer journals then than now. Scientists around the world were almost at
the same level as far as accessing information was concerned. True that
Raman and his Indian colleagues received the journal issues a few months
later than their European colleagues - the time it took for the boat to
cross the seas. Today there is a tremendous prol iferation of journals and
many of them, especially those published by commercial firms, are out of
reach for libraries in the poorer countries. The best academic science
library in India, viz. the Indian Institute of Science library receives
less than 2,1 00 serials. In the United States and possibly Europe, many
university libraries subscribe to upwards of 50 or 60 thousand journal
titles! On top of it, today many primary journals and secondary services
have gone electronic, and most physicists get to kno w of the latest
developments from preprints circulated through the Los Alamos network on
the Internet. Current awareness services such as Current Contents Connect,
abstracting services such as SciFinder of Chemical Abstracts!

Service, and multidisciplinary citation indexes such as Web of Science
are available on the Web. At an enormous fee of course. Now even primary
journals are accessible through password control on the web, such as under
the Science Direct service of Elsevier. To access information in cyber
space, one first needs access to t he corresponding electronic technology. 
Often technology diffuses rather slowly and today most scientists and
scholars in the developing countries do not have access to the new
information technologies. As a result, one's performance can be (and is) 
affected, not necessarily because one is a poor physicist or chemist but
because one has poorer access to electronic means - be it CD-ROM, online
or the Web - of getting the information needed. 

Accessing through CD-ROM offers capabilities that are not possible with
the print form, and accessing through the web offers capabilities that are
not possible with the CD-ROM form. As a recent editorial in Science (17
April 1998) pointed out, "Digital publishing has much to recommend it over
print publishing for practical if not for esthetic reasons. Uncomfortable
tradeoffs are involved, to be sure, but the gains include ease of access,
rapid delivery over great distances, and hypertext links from indexing
services and bibliographic cita tions to the full text of cited
documents." Hardly any laboratory in the developing world has web access
to these databases. How can scientists working in these laboratories be
equal partners in the worldwide enterprise of knowledge production? Thus
the transition to electronic publishing from print will certainly widen
the gap between the developed countries and the developing countries. 

Most developing countries, especially those with large populations, do not
have the necessary infrastructure (computer terminals, networks,
communication channels, bandwidth, etc.) and will take a long time to have
it in place to be able to take part as e qual partners in the worldwide
enterprise of knowledge production and dissemination.  According to Bruce
Girard, former director of Latin America's community radio Pulsar, 95% of
all computers are in the developed nations; ten developed nations,
accountin g for only 20% of the world's population have three quarters of
the world's telephone lines. Teledensity in India today is about 1.5 lines
per 100 persons. Till 1994, it was less than one per 100 persons. And most
of the telephones are concentrated in the metropolitan cities. Many
scientists do not have telephones on their desks; those who have cannot
make calls outside their towns/cities, let alone overseas calls. Many
universities do not have Email or Internet facilities.

Some have 1.2 or 2.4 kbps connections. With such low bandwidths and poor
terrestrial telephone connections, one can at best send and receive Email
messages but cannot surf the net or do online searches on the Internet. 
The simple truth is the information superhighway is not bringing the
fruits of cyber space to all. There are far too many people in the
developing world who have not been touched by the information and
communication revolutions - the have-nots and the know-nots who risk being
always behind.  A number of journals, especially in the STM area, are
receiving manuscripts by Email, getting them reviewed by Email, and so on. 
Some journals are available only in the electronic form. Editors of such
international journals will naturally be reluctant to use referees from
developing countries, even if they are exceptionally competent in their
fields, simply because it may be extremely difficult to reach them
electronically. Nor for that matter, many developing country scientists
will be able to publish t heir work in these electronic journals. 

	The United Nations is greatly concerned about the imbalance in
access to communication facilities. The UN's Administrative Committee on
Coordination issued a statement on Universal Access to Basic Communication
and Information Services in April 1997 in w hich it comments:

	"We are profoundly concerned at the deepening mal-distribution of
access, resources and opportunities in the information and communication
field. The information technology gap and related inequities between
industrialized and developing nations are wide ning: a new type of poverty
- information poverty - looms. Most developing countries, especially the
Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are not sharing in the communication
revolution, since they lack: 

* affordable access to core information resources, cutting-edge technology
and to sophisticated telecommunication systems and infrastructure; 

* the capacity to build, operate, manage, and service the technologies
involved; 

* policies that promote equitable public participation in the information
society as both producers and consumers of information and knowledge; and
* a work force trained to develop, maintain and provide the value-added
products and services required by the information economy. 

We therefore commit the organizations of the United Nations system to
assist developing countries in redressing the present alarming trends." 
While communication revolution is perceived as a liberating influence,
what is most likely to happen is that in many developing countries
(including India, I am afraid) scientists and scholars will be among the
last to be reached by the revolution. Therefore the relative disadvantage
they suffer (in the matter of access to information and knowledge) will
only increase. The speedy transition to electronic publishing will make it
much easier for scientists and scholars in the developed countries to
interact with colleagues and members of their invisible colleges. My major
worry is that the (current) low level of information and communication
technologies and internet access prevailing in the developing countries
might lead to the progressive exclusion of a majority of scientists and
scholars in these countries from the collective international discourse
that is essential for making progress in new knowledge production. Even
now, when much publishing takes place in print, participation by India and
other developing countries in high Impact journals [such as Science, Cell,
Journal of the American Chemical Society] is very low.  The already
existing gulf in the levels of science and technology performed in the
developed and the poorer countries will be widened further, and that could
lead to increased levels of brain drain and dependence on foreign aid of a
different kind (knowledge imperialism). 

	In an earlier era, a brilliant Indian mathematician, Srinivasa
Ramanujan, who was a genius but who had not gone through a conventional
training programme, was nurtured in the intellectually stimulating
ambience of Cambridge University, thanks to the visi on of Prof. G H
Hardy. While such individual initiatives may still be welcome to overcome
real and apparent handicaps, what we need to overcome the current crisis
is a far more organized and systematic programme of action. Early
introduction of satellite- based high bandwidth Internet access to
tertiary educational institutions and research laboratories at low cost
and differential pricing for information [journal subscriptions and access
to databases] to developing countries are high on my agenda. On both
fronts, I am not happy with what is happening. For example, India can
afford to invest in Internet provision to the 100 or so cities and towns
where most of the nation's research laboratories and universities are
located. B!  ut this has not happened. On the contrary, different agencies
in the telecom sector are quarrelling with one another. Indeed, this is
characteristic of the Third World: it often takes far too much time for
things to happen or to translate something from the realm of the possible
to reality. As for differential pricing, both publishers of primary
journal and database producers are reluctant. In one rare exception, the
Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, offers its Science
Citation Index at 50% discount to most developing country subscribers. 
Even then it is perceived as too costly!  I would not be surprised if very
soon the gulf between the scientifically advanced nations and the others
widen even further, leading to further reducing the r ole of the
developing countries in the enterprise of knowledge production,
dissemination and utilization. I sound pessimistic. So did Tony Morrison. 


About the author:

Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) is an information consultant based in Madras
(now renamed Chennai) in South India. He has been associated with the
Indian academic and scholarly communities for over three decades. He has
been an editor of scientific journals [I ndian Journal of Technology,
Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research, Indian Journal of Chemistry,
Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and Pramana - Journal of
Physics], a science writer, a researcher in chemistry, a teacher of
information science, a librarian in a national laboratory, the executive
secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the editorial
boards of scientific journals.  Currently he is a Distinguished Fellow in
the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and a part-time Visiting Professor
in the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. His research interests
include science on the periphery, scientometrics, and information access.
He has recently completed a literature-based study on mapping science
in India. He has more than 40 papers to his credit and is on the editorial
boards of six refereed international journals. He has delivered more than
twenty invited talks in international conferences. His forte is his
knowledge and u nderstanding of the Indian scientific and scholarly
community and their work. He is a member of both the Indian and the
International Science Writers Associations.