SLA Global 2000 Conference, Brighton, UK, 16-19 October 2000

SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM
Distinguished Fellow
M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
Chennai 600 113, India
arun@mssrf.res.in

Toni Morrison, Princeton University professor and the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, once said that writing about the life and sensibilities of the Blacks did not count. It was not considered important enough to merit attention. It was peripheral.

It is the same with doing science in developing countries. One's work is hardly noticed or quoted by others. One's papers rarely get published in high impact and visible journals. After years of doing research under rather difficult conditions, one still finds oneself in the category of also-rans.

New Scientist, the British weekly that is read avidly both by scientists and by intelligent laymen, once commented in an editorial that when it came to choosing a manuscript for publication editors of reputed scientific journals would more likely select the one from Harvard in preference to the one from Hyderabad, even though both manuscripts may be of comparable quality.

Let us admit it! There is this concern about prejudice in all walks of life and science is no exception.

There is another equally disturbing problem, viz. unequal distribution. Indeed, as pointed out by Davidson Frame years ago, the distribution of science is tremendously skewed, even more skewed than the distribution of wealth among nations. The situation has not changed much since Frame wrote his perceptive article in the Seventies. If anything, the situation is worsening in many fields. A quick survey of major databases such as the Science Citation Index, Mathsci, Biological Abstracts, Medline and INSPEC databases reveals that less than ten countries account for more than 80% of the world's published literature. More than a 100 developing countries put together account for less than 10% of the literature in S&T. Much of the science these countries perform is derivative and is considered peripheral to mainstream science carried out in the advanced countries. [I must admit that People's Republic of China is doing exceptionally well in recent years.]

Scientists and scholars, in general, crave for two things: publish and publish in quality journals; and be cited very often by other scientists and scholars around the world. These are the two things that play a key role in all aspects of their professional lives, such as awards and rewards, tenure, and prestige. In both these aspirations, scientists from developing countries have not been able to do well.

Indeed, to be able to do the same kind of work and attain the same levels of fame and recognition, scientists in developing countries have to put in much greater efforts and work much harder than their counterparts in the advanced (or mainstream) countries.

American sociologist Harriet Zuckerman and Hungarian scientometricist Tibor Braun told me years ago that there was no need for invoking a conspiracy theory. If one's work was not noticed it was not out of deliberate intention to neglect one's work but often it was because others had in fact not known about it. In their view the Mertonian norms hold good to a very large extent.

Let us move from sociological observations to the historical. From 1665 when the first professional journals were established almost simultaneously in France and England till very recently, exchange of knowledge was largely mediated by printed journals. There were fewer journals then and they were sent to subscribers in distant parts of the world by surface mail and later by airmail. But today there is a plethora of journals and much information transfer in the advanced countries takes place electronically, often through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Most secondary services and primary journals are now accessible electronically.

The transition from print to electronic has not merely increased the speed of delivery but has made it possible for end users to seamlessly move from one article to another thanks to developments in technology and the many agreements between database producers such as the Institute for Scientific Information and the Chemical Abstracts Service on the one hand and primary journal publishers on the other, both commercial and not-for-profit.

In the print only era, no doubt there were differences in scientists' ability to access information. As most journals were published in Europe and journals were sent out to distant countries by sea mail, scientists like C V Raman in India received the journals several months later than their European counterparts.

In the electronic era, the gap has widened. Not only has the number of journals and the volume of research have expanded manifold, but all the information can now be transmitted almost instantaneously. But large sections of scientists and scholars in most developing countries do not even have the basic email facility what to talk of high bandwidth Internet and web access. When they have access it is painfully slow, intermittent, and enormously expensive. Add to this frequent power cuts. In contrast, virtually every scientist in the advanced countries will have high bandwidth access to the Net. Despite all the talk about the serials crisis, dwindling library resources and cost escalation, the number of journals subscribed to by academic libraries in the United States is at least an order of magnitude higher than the number subscribed to by the best academic libraries in developing countries. There are many universities in North America that can boast of subscriptions to upwards of 30,000 journals. The Tata Memorial Library at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, considered to be one of the best science libraries in India, receives only about 1,500 journals. The situation in Africa is even worse. Most libraries in sub-Saharan Africa have not subscribed to any journal for years. Scientists in many African universities often have to rely on what they are told by newspapers, by friends or by Time magazine. How can Indian and African scientists compete with scientists in USA and Western Europe when there is such a vast difference in their ability to access information, either through print media or electronically? It is like running a hundred meters sprint with one's feet tied.

We have always lived in an unequal world, but now the gap is widening fast. Virtually every new technology tends to exacerbate the inequalities that separate the rich from the poor. The newer and more potent the technology the greater its ability to increase the inequalities. The new information and communication technologies, left to their own devices, will surely widen the knowledge divide or the disparities in people's capacities to do science and technology and their ability to use them to their advantage. Thanks to men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, we have abolished skin-colour-based apartheid, but are letting the new ICTs to create an information-access-based apartheid. But if we learn to manage them properly, the very same technologies can also become our allies in the equity movement.

As has been evident from our own Foundation's experience in using ICTs for alleviating poverty in rural India, intelligent human intervention alone can help us realize the advantageous potential of new technologies.

What are the intelligent ways in which new ICTs can be used to promote S&T and scholarship in the developing world? First, thanks to the Net, long-distance collaborations in research can be established and sustained easily. Right now the extent of international collaboration in different areas of knowledge is tremendously skewed. Most international collaborations in scientific research occur among the G7 and OECD countries. Some smaller countries, particularly Israel, take full advantage of the synergies gained through international collaboration with advanced countries, especially in new biology and physics. Among Asian countries, in the past few years China is emerging as one of the most sought after partners for R&D collaboration, especially by the ASEAN countries and the Asian Tigers. Despite being a member of the G7 Group and the OECD, Japan is not collaborating with other countries in research as much as other rich countries do.

Developments in ICTs can help develop sophisticated research programmes involving a high degree of real-time data collection and analysis feeding back into the experiment. But such studies are mostly performed in the advanced countries of the West, and when performed at all in developing countries it is mostly with the help of equipment imported from those countries. The much hyped software capability of India and China is hardly reflected in this sector.

New ICTs facilitate virtual conferences. Here again for want of high bandwidth net connectivity, most developing countries are excluded.

Two of the most significant problems faced by scientists and scholars in these countries are:

• Inadequate access to information, and
• Lack of visibility.

Knowledge production is not just a cognitive activity. It has also a social dimension. It is a collective international enterprise. Every scientist and scholar draws upon the work of others. In the words of Newton, one stands upon the shoulders of giants to be able to see further. It is the information generated around the world that is referred to as the shoulders of giants.

With the advent of electronic transfer of information, especially through the Internet, one would think that access to information would be democratized. But it has not happened so far. Indeed, contrary to expectations, commercial publishers, mostly working out of North America and Western Europe, have come up with practices that would make electronic access even more costly than access in the print-only era.

But there are ways by which we can still work towards more equitable distribution of scientific and scholarly information, through intelligent application of ICTs. And different players can play their roles in making the transformation possible. Let me list some initiatives that have been taken in the past decade.

Publishers in the advanced countries can and should play a role. A few years ago, the British Medical Journal, now known as BMJ, threw its pages open to anyone who has Internet access (http://www.bmj.com). Now scientists from poor countries can access electronic editions of all the journals published by the BMJ Publishing Group including Clinical Evidence. Access to primary research articles published in BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is free to all.

Societies can play a role too. The Association of Research Libraries, USA, has come up with an initiative called SPARC. Under this initiative professional societies are encouraged to publish low-cost journals in areas where commercial publishers currently rule the roost. In return, the societies are assured of a minimum number of subscribers - the member libraries of ARL. In another initiative, Bioline International (http://bioline.bdt.org.br), a not-for-profit consortium of well-meaning scientists, help produce electronic versions of developing country journals so they have a better chance of being accessed worldwide. African Journals Online (http://www.inasp.org.uk) is another good example. In Latin America, they have the Scientific Electronic Library Online (www.scielo.org). But all these are only minor modifications to the existing system.

In my view, significant improvements are possible only when institutions are rethought. Indeed, this whole business of publishing scientific and scholarly research has been rethought some ten years ago. I am talking about the physics eprint archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. Here scientists from around the world are encouraged to file their papers - as soon as the first draft is ready - electronically. All the preprints are accessible electronically through the World Wide Web. Anyone who reads a preprint can comment upon it and the author can modify the paper and submit a next version. In principle, any number of versions is possible. After a while, the author can submit it to a professional journal. Once the paper is officially accepted/published in the journal, that information will also be included in the Los Alamos server. To facilitate ease of access by scientists around the world, there are 15 mirror servers - one of them at Chennai at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Many thousands of physicists around the world use this service and so far no major problem has cropped up. Physicists have another preprint server, the HEP SPIRES server at Stanford. Lawrence at NEC Research, Princeton, NJ, USA, has established a server for computer science and related areas. This service provides access not only to full texts of papers but also to citation information (in much the same way as Science Citation Index). Early this year, two more Open Archives initiatives came into being, both for life sciences, one in the USA (PubMedCentral, NIH, Bethesda, Md) and the other at EMBO, Germany (E-Biosci).

I suggest that scientists in developing countries use the existing Open Archives as well as start some of their own. For example, India is the second largest producer of research papers in many areas of agriculture, next only to the United States. Indian agricultural scientists could start a preprint (or eprint, as it is often called) archives and invite the rest of the world's scientists to deposit their papers. Developing country scientists could also bring pressure on their governments and academies of science to support high bandwidth Internet services for researchers.

Paul Ginsparg, the man behind the Los Alamos physics eprint archives, Stevan Harnad, the founder of Cogprints, an archive for cognitive sciences, and several others are currently working on interoperability of different archives. They met last year at Santa Fe and this year at San Antonio and Lisbon to take these initiatives forward. Ironically, there was hardly anyone from the developing countries in these meetings! Indeed, such initiatives would benefit developing country scientists more than they would scientists from the advanced countries. I am afraid developing countries may miss great opportunities to bridge the gap in the area of information access; in an earlier era they had missed taking advantage of the Industrial Revolution and had to pay a heavy price.

What are the benefits of such OAIs? If properly run, they can solve both the problems of access to information and visibility. As most papers will be available on the OAI server, one need not subscribe to expensive commercial journals. That takes care of the access problem. As most papers of the world are in the archives, there is a greater possibility of work from developing countries being noticed by the rest of the world. In the print-only regime, many developing country scientists found it difficult to place their papers in high impact journals that would enhance their chance to be noticed, as many of them levy page charges or have very high standards for acceptance. The journals they publish in have very few subscribers and are rarely, if ever, noticed by scientists in mainstream countries.

Another initiative I would recommend is for developing countries to enter into agreement with major database producers to provide countrywide electronic access to important databases. Such agreements are in place in many countries. But then, we should make sure that scientists and scholars in developing countries have the hardware and bandwidth that would permit them to take full advantage of the new arrangement. Unfortunately, many developing countries are rather slow to implement such programmes. Take the case of India. There has been much talk, for about two years now, about providing high bandwidth access to academic institutions and government laboratories through a network called Sankhya Vahini. They are still talking about it. One is not sure when the project will get going.

To have the potential is one thing. To translate into reality is entirely another. The ability to make this translation quickly is what separates the First World from the Third. China seems to be graduating fast. When will the rest of the developing countries do?

It is pertinent here to draw attention to a suggestion made by Bruce Alberts, the visionary President of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. His suggestion is that even if it involves heavy subsidies developing country scientists should be provided with high bandwidth Internet access so they could take part in exchange of information so very fundamental to the growth of science. Organizations such as the US National Science Foundation, Unesco, World Bank, the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, and the governments of rich countries should step up aid for improving information access in poor countries. The NSF and Japan's Science and Technology Agency have funded, a few years ago, the establishment of high bandwidth Internet access in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

If IT is increasingly becoming the defining paradigm of our times, it is imperative that we learn to use it as an ally in the equity movement. The question before us is "Can we retain the virtues of olive tree societies while taking advantage of the Lexus technologies?" Do we have reasons to hope that the electronic revolution that is currently widening the information gap will eventually narrow, and perhaps even abolish, the gap?

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Brenda Corbin of the U.S. Naval Observatory for inviting me to speak at this conference and organising financial assistance for my participation.

About the Author

Subbiah Arunachalam is an information scientist and scientometricist. He is on the editorial boards of Current Contents (PCES edn), Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, Current Science, Indian Journal of History of Science, and DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology. He is an advisor for the Information in Practice section of BMJ, and a member of both the Indian and the International Science Writers Associations. He has been an editor of scientific journals, teacher of information science, and secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is a Distinguished Fellow at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, India, and on the Advisory Board of the Virtual Medical University, Hyderabad, India. His earlier assignments include editor of scientific journals at the National Institute of Science Communication, New Delhi; Head, Library & Information Services, Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, India; and Visiting Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He has delivered invited talks at more than thirty international conferences and published about 50 papers.

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