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Information Poverty - The story

How the Internet is failing the developing world

by Subbiah Arunachalam


One of the promises of the information revolution was that it would increase the opportunities for all people to share knowledge. But what if you don't happen to live in a developed country? Subbiah Arunachalam argues that the current lack of access to the internet for scientists in the developing world is creating a new form of poverty - information poverty - which is making it harder for them to stay abreast, let alone catch up with their colleagues in the developed world.

To be a scientist in a developing country is to be on the periphery of world science - one's work goes unnoticed. A scientist in a developing country, who invariably works under adverse conditions, needs to achieve a lot more to win recognition than those who work under much better conditions in the developed countries. Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, we live in an unequal world. A New Scientist editorial revealed that when it comes to choosing manuscripts for publication, editors of reputed international journals are more likely select one from Harvard in preference to one from Hyderabad, even though both manuscripts may be of comparable quality (1). Harvard any day is considered a safer bet than Hyderabad!

Technology tends to exacerbate this inequality and further marginalize scientists on the periphery. History has repeatedly shown that technology inevitably enhances existing inequalities.

In pre-Independent India, when scientists of the calibre of CV Raman, Meghnad Saha,
JC Bose
and SN Bose made their first-rate contributions, the main vehicle for transmission of knowledge was the scholarly journal, and there were far fewer journals then than now. Whilst it's true that most journals were published in Europe and Raman and his Indian colleagues received the journal issues a few months later than their European colleagues - the time it took for them to arrive by boat - scientists around the world were almost at the same level as far as accessing information was concerned.

Today there is a tremendous proliferation of journals and many of them, especially those published by commercial firms, are too expensive for libraries even in the West, let alone poorer countries. Thanks to increasing subscription prices, Indian libraries are cutting down on the number of journals and secondary services. The best academic science library in India, located at the Indian Institute of Science, receives barely 1,500 serials, including those received gratis and on exchange. In contrast, many university libraries in the United States subscribe to upwards of 50,000 journal titles!

The situation in Africa is even worse. A Nigerian professor once told the journalist Seun Ogunseitan, "When you call some of us scientists, we laugh at ourselves. We know we can no longer make contributions to science. I do not know what my colleagues in Kenya or London have found, for example. So I cannot carry out an experiment and believe I am on the path to an original contribution to the sciences. If I have been giving generations of students the same notes for the last ten years, I should not call myself a scientist."

Says Ogunseitan, "Many people in our universities are not sure what is the state of science. Scientists often have to rely on what they are told, for example, by newspapers, by friends or by Time magazine. How can such people ever become authoritative and confident scientists?"(2)

Today, many primary journals and secondary services have gone electronic. As an editorial in Science pointed out,

"Digital publishing has much to recommend it over print publishing for practical if not for aesthetic 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 citations to the full text of cited documents."(3)

Some of these web-based journals and services are available for a fee that that most university and research laboratory libraries in developing countries cannot afford. Others, such as the Los Alamos e-Print archive for physicists, are offered as a free service.

But to access information in cyberspace one first needs access to the corresponding electronic technology, and most scientists and scholars in the developing countries do not have access to the new information technologies. When 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, and will further marginalize the already marginalized scientists and scholars in the developing countries.

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Most developing countries, especially those with large populations, do not have the necessary infrastructure to be able to take part as equal 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, accounting for only 20% of the world's population have three quarters of the world's telephone lines. In comparison, 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 do cannot make calls outside their cities, let alone overseas calls.

Many universities in India do not have e-mail 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 e-mail messages but cannot surf the net or do online searches. The simple truth is that the information superhighway is not bringing the fruits of cyberspace to all. Not yet. There are far too many people in the developing world who have not been touched by the information revolution - the have-nots and the know-nots who risk being always behind.

Those who have access to new technologies are much better placed than before. But the point is that the vast majority of scientists in developing countries do not have access to these technologies. In contrast, virtually every physicist in the United States and the UK will have access to an Internet/e-mail terminal. The relative disadvantage of developing country scientists becomes obvious.

A number of journals now receive and review manuscripts by e-mail. 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, will many developing country scientists will be able to publish their work in these electronic journals.

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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 which 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 widening: 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."(4)

While the information 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 will only increase.

The speedy transition to electronic publishing is making 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 low level of information and communication technologies in the developing countries will lead to the progressive exclusion of a majority of scientists in these countries from the collective international discourse that is essential for making progress in new knowledge production.

Even now, when the majority of publishing takes place in print, participation by India and other developing countries in high-impact journals such as Science, Cell and the 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. In other words, knowledge imperialism.

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In an earlier era, the 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 foresight of Professor 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, namely:

  • the early introduction of satellite-based high bandwidth Internet access to tertiary educational institutions and research laboratories at low cost; and
  • differential information access pricing for developing countries.

On both fronts, I am not happy with what is happening. For example, India could easily afford to invest in high-bandwidth Internet provision to the 100 or so cities and towns where most of the nation's research laboratories and universities are located. But this has not happened, although we go through the motions and give the impression of being serious.

What is actually happening is disheartening. Government departments set up committees, file reports and do not act, whilst the different agencies in the telecom sector who have to implement and deliver solutions merely quarrel 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 in Philadelphia offers its Science Citation Index at a 50% discount to most developing country subscribers. But even then it is perceived as being too costly! It is heartening to note that the Association of Research Libraries in the United States is taking steps to publish less expensive quality journals in collaboration with like-minded societies to save scientists from being held to ransom by greedy private publishers.

If we agree that 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, that information is key to the growth of knowledge, and dissemination of information is crucial for the scientific enterprise, then scientists in the developing world are currently being starved of opportunities and vital resources. I would not be surprised if very soon the gulf between the scientifically advanced nations and the others widens even further.


References

1. It's not what you know: If there are biases in scientific publication, editors must take the blame. (Unsigned editorial). New Scientist, no. 2106 (1 November 1997), p.3.

2. Groen, J., Smit, E. and Eijswoogel, J. (eds). The Discipline of Curiosity: Science in the World. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990, pp. 19-25.

3. Edelson, Alan M. On the future of scholarly journals. Science 279 (April 1998), p. 359.

4. International Telecommunication Union. World Telecommunication Development Report 1998 -- Universal Access. Executive Summary. March 1998, p.3.

This article is based on a talk delivered by the author at "Science Communication for the Next Millenium: Ninth International Conference of the International Federation of Science Editors," in Egypt, June 1998.

 

Earlier Stories
? 1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/infopoverty/story.htm