Open Access to Knowledge and Information: scholarly literature and digital initiatives - the South Asian scenario

World Digital Libraries 1(1): 77–78 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Open access was initially projected as a publishing model parallel to commercial publishing model for scholarly communication to check spiralling prices of journals. The philosophy behind this movement was that global and unrestricted access to literature is essential for knowledge growth and knowledge generation. National and international bodies provided impetus to this movement by coming out with declarations/statements of principles and action plans aimed at enabling freedom from copyright restrictions and other such restrictions that are coming in the way of free and open access including cost, time, space, language, and digital divide. Internet being the main medium for disseminating open access resources, lack of information infrastructure is construed as a country-specific restriction to access global knowledge. Hence, freedom from digital divide is equally important. Budapest Open Access Initiative was the first formal open access movement launched in February 2002. It is time to judge to what extent this movement and the later open access initiatives have been successful in World Digital Libraries 1(1): 77–78 enabling freedom from restrictions. To begin with, let us consider freedom from copyright restrictions. Journals from commercial publishers still continue to remain protected by copyright restrictions. The situation is no different with regard to other restrictions. We are still far away from our goal of universal access to global information. However, open access has come to stay as medium for digital access to resources that are out of copyright restrictions. This is because open access movement has been successful in catalysing digitization activity, digitizing out of copyright content, and making this content available for global access via Internet. Open access by default has become the channel for storing, preserving, and protecting traditional knowledge and heritage cultural resources, which are on the verge of extinction. India has emerged as the leading player amongst South Asian countries for preserving and protecting out of copyright material and heritage cultural resources. This message is very much evident from the recently brought out publication titled Open Access to Knowledge and Information: scholarly literature and digital Book review Open Access to Knowledge and Information: scholarly literature and digital initiatives – the South Asian scenario Anup Kumar Das UNESCO Office, New Delhi Reviewed by S M Dhawan*