-- please visit www.uottawaglobe.ca, see discussion on library access in global health and development discussions.

I was fortunate to be exposed to some interesting history that led me to abandon a notion of ‘western knowledge’, and in fact decide that what was Western was increasingly proprietary approaches of knowledge. If we trace any disciplines’ knowledge there is a seamless transmission, even through paradigm shifts, and the development of a branch of science rests on the collection of knowledge from vast sources. In my undergrad, I kept being taught the history of philosophy as tracing from the Greeks, then stalling in the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance picking it up from Aristotle/Ptolemy, restoring humanism and rationalism leading through the Enlightenment to the modern era. This is a view of the history that places the tradition and its ownership squarely in the West.

In reality, the Renaissance relied heavily on Muslim sources like Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al Ghazzali, Tusi etc, and in the height of scholarship in Muslim Spain, North Africa, Persia and the Middle East, and these scholars worked of the Greek ones, as well as benefiting from the Silk Road trade routes through Central Asia, India, China and the Far East. Trade routes also spanned the Indian Ocean, from China, down the coast of East Africa and even the ports of Great Zimbabwe. The contributions of indigenous nations are also overlooked, because authorship of the ideas are attributed to colonial writers. The national wealth from which a tax base funds research for industry, science, medicine and the rest follows the same pattern of extraction of material resources, and the colonial period, while not being the first of its kind, was the most vast empire the world has seen, and its activity was anathema to human rights, especially self-determination. My argument is also by restorative justice given a more balanced history of knowledge, and even continued ‘stolen authorship’.

So, we’re basically hoarding knowledge that was developed by the world’s peoples, the same peoples we got the wealth from by stripping self-determination from them, and then costing access to it at a price they can’t afford.

I tried to explain this to my international human rights law professor, but she doesn’t agree with me, and tried to dissuade from writing my paper on A2K in reference to international human rights. Basically, I’m going to develop the arguments from A2K and write a briefing paper to the Canadian government as to why subscriptions should exhaust copyright when they’re sold to Canadian university libraries. Therefore, the university can pay for the right to host the subscriptions and have them available for free to everyone. The increased cost in traffic to databases should come out of the foreign aid budget in coordination with technical assistance projects to Southern universities for VSAT access. I want to use as part of my argument, historical rights to the global body of knowledge for all peoples, as a matter of restorative and natural justice.

Any comments on the validity of the argument, or help would be appreciated!

Arif