What is the ocean of knowledge in India
Answers
Explanation:
The sum total of all scholarly and scientific works is a vast ocean of knowledge. To create new knowledge, all must swim in that ocean, building on the existing stock of wisdom. We all stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before us.
But in our modern world, much of that knowledge is held in the hands of a few large corporations, particularly the British-based company Reed Elsevier, which asserts absolute control over a large portion of scientific journal articles, extracting the efforts of scientists all over the world and then claiming absolute ownership over their work. This new-age East India Company had the astounding revenues of GBP 6.895 billion (Rs 62,000 crore) in 2016 and the even-more astounding profit margin of 39% for its scientific publishing arm.
The non-profit organisation Crossref estimates there are 94,841,081 scholarly works in existence, including journal articles and books. There are a total of 56,726 journals in existence, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association or the Indian Journal of Scientific Research. Much of that knowledge is locked behind expensive pay walls, with an individual paper often costing Rs 1,941 (US$30) and institutional access for universities often running into millions of dollars per year. Even at those prices, access is subject to stringent limitations on use.
In 2011, a young graduate student in Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan grew frustrated with being unable to access the scholarly works she needed to pursue her studies and created a web site called Sci-Hub, based in Russia, which has now accumulated a trove of 67 million journal articles. Sci-Hub makes this information available to all at no charge.
Response to Sci-Hub
Response to Sci-HubSci-Hub has proven to be wildly popular, particularly in schools and countries without access to the expensive subscription services available to those lucky enough to attend the fancy schools such as Harvard and Oxford. Over 200,000 papers are downloaded every day directly from the site, and many of those downloads are in turn shared widely among people in the same class or department. The largest group of users are in China, which downloaded 24,938,665 papers last year.
The second largest group of users of Sci-Hub are from India, which downloaded 13,143,462 papers last year. These are no random downloads, the students of India make systematic and regular use of Sci-Hub. Other countries in the top 10 include Brazil, Iran, Indonesia and Russia. Also in the top 10 are the US, France, and the UK, because students in those countries are evidently frustrated with how difficult it is to access and use information from the antiquated and purposely limited systems provided by the vendors than from Sci-Hub.