Eduardo R. Saguier

Scholar Associations

Ref.: Academic Censorship in the Peripheral World

Dear Chairman:

I have the honor to address you in order to install among social scientists one of the most glaring civil and human rights violations experienced in the electronic age by researchers and scholars in less developed countries: the boycott of the rights to practice scientific research, to communicate and be scholarly informed.
As is worldwide known, since the Renaissance, scientific knowledge is experiencing an irreversible and unbridled fragmentation; and since the hegemony of Neoliberal policies, an increasing privatization process. Paradoxically, to cope both universal phenomenons, while in the First World students and researchers suffer an increasing information overload that intoxicates their harts and minds causing them deep stress, anxiety and scepticism, in the less developed world (LDW) students and scholars are subject to information anaemia and electronic garbage pollution. The strong need to break this triple symptom (illness, apartheid and censorship), and therefore the need to revert the fragmentation, privatization and concentration trends, that are undermining academic freedoms and the formation of an electronically enlightened global elite, is becoming every day more demanding, to such a degree that an appeal for an international solidarity has become imperative.
This letter is submitted with the purpose of promoting debate among communication, information and human rights scientists as to what extent the practice of scientific research should or should not be regarded as a fundamental civil and human right, to what degree electronic information for academic study should be subject to democratic deliberation and scientific priorities rather than to a colonization process run by market forces and business profits, and how the scientific institutions of less developed countries could reach the electronic connections and the paid electronic licenses to periodical journals published online. It is my hope that unlimited access to electronic information firmly combined with more democratic intellectual practices and philosophical debates have to be raised and endorsed as legitimate demands in the struggle against knowledge fragmentation, commercial-academic censorships and new types of monopolized and established or fixed knowledges and on behalf of academic freedoms, extended democracy, and the principles of open communication and education and equal opportunities worldwide.
The relevance of these online and full-text electronic journals for the progress and integration of scientific research and for any country that wants to engage in science and research activities as a platform for an economic, social and cultural takeoff (such were the cases of Ireland and Finland) should be considered obvious. However, scholars find themselves in circumstances similar to those experienced by the most backward and oppressed European and Middle East countries during the Renaissance --when Gutenberg invented the printing press-- being condemned to continue using parchment, papyrus and clay tablets. Moreover, the amazing electronic censorship to which scholars are subjected by corrupt governments has relatively increased in the recent times because the number of paid subscriptions to online Databases has skyrocketed while the percentage of free access scientific sites have dramatically decreased.
Moreover, the contradiction and the hypocrisy of less developed governments could partially be undone if superfluous expenses be punished, and if their budgets could be reassigned. Adversely, research institutions permanently suffer budget cuts and incur extra expenses, that should be reallocated. Research institutions in less developed countries have sistematically boycotted the paid subscription to those online Databases, monopolized by multinational electronic editors, such as J-Store, Pro-Quest, Elsevier, Carfax, Sage, Kluwer, Blackwell, II Mulino, Swets Backsets Service, Frank Cass, Chadwyck-Healy, Bell Howell, Gale´s Ready Reference Shelf, Project Muse, CERN Library, Spring Harbour Laboratory Press, Allen Press, MALMAD, and Medline among many other Databases.
However, governments in these less developed nations persist in giving priority to the resolution of the financial gap with institutions of international banking, without any commisseration to the scientific and cultural censorship we are experiencing, condemning our scholars to practice a marginal and obsolete science, unable to compete with the cutting edge research of central countries. This contradictory practice and this hypocrisy in discourses, that no crisis can justify, looks down on science, leads to a persistent brain drain, and makes it impossible for young scholars living in the First World to return to their countries of origin.
As one of thousands of isolated scholars in less developed countries, the obstacles and difficulties to reach and challenge international organizations, multinational electronic editors and corrupt governments are infinite and overwhelming. Therefore, I got convinced that this is not merely an academic or legal issue, as has been presented by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), but essentially a political issue and that one way to raise it successfully and at a global scale is to incorporate this issue in the political agenda by appealing to those who have become internationally acknowledged as perseverant defenders of human rights. Hence, I have sent this message to Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Mary Robinson, Edward Kennedy, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, the world statesmen to whom any scholar and research institution in less developed nations could trust the defense of these new kind of rights.
Also, I have sent this message to hundreds of Associations, Academies, scientific institutions, and communication, information and education departments at European, Australian and Northamerican universities; and to associations, journals, newspapers and discussion forums and portals that belong to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe. However, I am conscious that a successful international campaign should be summoned collectively.
Finally, I appeal to your solidarity, urging you to debate within your Forum and among your colleagues any kind of ideas and strategies susceptible of helping this struggle.
Yours truly,
Eduardo R. Saguier
Senior Researcher (CONICET, Argentina)
<a href="http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=130901" target="_blank">http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=130901</a>

[ September 02, 2002: Message edited by: Eduardo R. Saguier ]</p>

Coragyps

May I suggest to the moderators that a copy of this be kept here, slightly OT though it is, and copies be sent to Political Discussions and Science and Skepticism?

Eduardo R. Saguier

Dear colleagues;

Saguier's essay proposes to consider as a human right violation the lack of access to academic information that scholars in Third World countries or in impoverished emerging markets are suffering. Although I aggree that this is a major problem--a problem that makes it almost impossible narrowing the gap that separates scholarly work in central and peripheral countrie--there are other priorities that should be considered first. In the country that Dr Saguier and I live, extreme forms of poverty and malnutrition are the most pressing issues of the moment. A dramatic devaluation of the local currency has increased 50 to 70 percent the price of food and has left many of our countrymen and women in situation of destitution and inability to buy enough nutrients for their families. This is the most important human right we should try to preserve at this moment. I believe that the real anaemia is more threatening that an "information anemia".
Secondly, I would not rush to equate the uneven distribution and access to electronic information with a human right violation. We should strive to alleviate the current inequality that separates central and peripheral scholars with regard to their access to electronic databases, search engines, and full-text journals. But presenting the demand as a basic human right does not improve our chances for persuading key actors in this business (for the production and distribution of electronic resources is, whether we like it or not, a business). Nor should be call it "academic censorship." The internet has given many of us (I recognize that many people cannot affort internet connection) the possibility of wiring our ideas and opinions to the world. The real problem is that the best journals in each discipline are getting more expensive every year (in hard currencies, such as the euro or the dollar) and in countries that are subject to exchange rate depreciation universities and research centers find every year more difficult to afford the subscription to these electronic resources. Hence, we need a policy of reasonable subsidy through which the costs of producing and distributing electronic resources are fully compensated, but in addition, there are low entry and subscription costs for countries or universities in trouble in third world countries or in emerging markets undergoing financial collapse. Lower cost access (and in some cases, free-subsidized access) to electronic resources should be a goal to pursue. But the reasons or arguments to support this case are more related with the economics of scale that generates the dissemination of knowledge, the increase in creativity and productivity that could be achieved, and the formation of truly internationational communities working in the resolution of common problems.

Ricardo D. Salvatore (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella)

Eduardo R. Saguier

Nobody can seriously disagree with Ricardo Salvatore that during economic crisis the right to nutrition should be ranking first in any kind of priorities. Notwithstanding, each one of us can freely differ to what extent the right to an open access to electronic knowledge could be considered a human right, a civil right, an academic freedom or a first or second degree right. But the thing is that my message was not addressed neither to establish a hierarchy of priorities nor to build an abstract or angelic definition of human right and censorship concepts.

I do agree with Salvatore that the electronic production of scientific knowledge is nowadays a business and a luxurious privilege subject to costs and benefits, and that the alternatives for its open access should be solved by means of subsidies capable of financing fees, licenses and subscriptions. Similarly, in a recent past when paper journals and books predominated, republican governments resorted to public libraries in order to supply open accesses to those majorities unable to purchase paper resources.

Simply, my message was addressed to awaken the international academic community about the relevance that the periodical electronic knowledge has for the scientific activities and the economic take-off of less developed nations. In his reply to my message, and after acknowledging that the electronic access is a "major problem", Salvatore engages himself in the process of doubting about to what extent the open access initiative should be considered a priority in the scholarly agenda of the peripheral world. Surprisingly, for Salvatore, to insist in characterizing the denial of an open access as a human rights violation attempts against the chances of persuading "key actors" in this business. But Salvatore does not define who are those "key actors". Apparently, he is referring to the chief-executive officers of multinational electronic companies. However, in my message I have been explicitly referring to the corrupt governments of the peripheral world, who could not be persuaded at all about the advantages of scientific knowledge.

First, the discussion about the priorities that should rule in countries under severe economic crisis and deep political corruption must not be considered something obvious or redundant. For instance, even in the midst of very severe structural crisis, such as sanitary and transportation collapses, cutting edge technologies like computer tomography and air transportation have not been subordinated to the acquisition of more elementary or less modern technologies.

Secondly, to subordinate the "politically correct" characterization of the scientific deficits to the persuasive capacity to convince "key actors" resembles the appeasement tactics implemented in the past by naïve political leaders. On the contrary, I believe that the deep differences existing in today´s world, referring to the most elementary needs or to the more sophisticated scientific knowledge, could not remain subject neither to the economic forces of a global international market nor to the waiting strategies for the enlargement of the economies of scale.

Justly, the political responsibility of a scholar elite strongly committed to the success of science and knowledge worldwide should rest on its capacity to discuss and struggle without giving up. In general, persuasive and gradual strategies have been the antecedent of the most shameful surrenderings.

Truly yours,

Eduardo R. Saguier (CONICET, Argentina)

Eduardo R. Saguier

I agree with Saguier that the academic censorship in countries like Argentina, has been dramatic during the last ten years. As a young scholar I have seen how a few universities in Argentina has access to electronic journals and online databases creating an "an unfair distribution of cientific knowledge". I also agree with Salvatore that countries facing dramatic economic crisis must be aware of other issues like starvation and unemployment, but to discusss to what extend rights to be informed about the cientific progress is in fact an important issue that Saguier has put on debate. I think that Saguier is traying to raise some questions like, could the distribution of cientific knowledge be subjected to markert orientated notion of property rights?. Who has the moral right to distribute the human knowledge according to the hidden forces of supply and demand?
Being myself a young scholar in Argentina I have notices how these inequalities in the distribution of "academic resources" affect the professional develepment of thounsends of students, creating a tremendous gap in terms of access to updated information.

Gaston Wright (Alberta, Canada)

Eduardo R. Saguier

Fernando A. Iglesias replies Salvatore

Like Argentine representative of the World Citizen Foundation and a member of the scientific community (I’m a professor at the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires, Argentina) I wish to express my full agreement on the question raised by my conational Eduardo E. Saguier in these pages on the issue of open access to data base’s information.
Particularly, I see the problem in the perspective of the lack of a democratic world order. In fact, the results of the lack of free access to basic information for researchers and scholars of the undeveloped countries are a strong gap within what is known --in an euphemistic way--as “the international science community”. It shows one of the unavoidable aspects of the present globalization, over determined by the economy and by the complete absence of a democratic world frame, where basic Human Rights (like access to information) are subdued to the powers that control the real world: First World’s politic powers of national states and global economical-financial power.
The obsolescence of the national democratic institutions is showed by this process. Only a World Parliament could fix new global rules on the use of new modern informatic technologies that could introduce a political democratic logic in a field now subjected to a one-dimensional and unidirectional version of Globalization. Only a World Justice Court could act in the new problems raised by the not-territorial development related to high technologies, that have overcame in many ways the national frame of democratic policies.
In a world where basic needs of a half of Humanity who survives with less than two dollars per day are violated daily perhaps this could be considered just a marginal question. On the contrary, the increase of the gap between rich and power countries is being strongly determined by this kind of problems. In the name of modern political principles a strong intervention of political leaders and scholars on the issue raised by Saguier should open the way for a more democratic and equal world.

Fernando A. Iglesias (World Citizen Foundation)

Dr.GH

Dear colleague,

I personally agree with you in a general sense, but I also agreed with Martin Scribner (my editor at Elsevier that when I proposed an electronic journal) that a way was needed to support the costs (including salary for writers and production staff). The journal was ultimately brought out as a print Journal in 1988, edited by Jeff Johnson. I also have had warm relations with Sage, and their ‘Alta Mira’ subsidiary, and others that you mentioned.

Because I am currently teaching at the Art Institute of California, I too lack free access to science journals, print or electronic. My personal costs are exceeding $150 / month when including personal book purchases.

So, I wish you well in your effort to open a free port into the scientific literature. I also hope that you will leave a backdoor open that I can use.

[ September 02, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]</p>