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In addition to offering a comprehensive overview and fair insight over more than twenty five years into the relations between two South Middle Powers, namely South Africa and Malaysia, this book also discusses them within their respective regional structures and evaluates their respective diplomatic and commercial connections. It also explores issues that have generally be neglected by International Relations specialists and, in this regard, it gives attention to cultural contacts that bring to the fore the critical role of non-state actors in international affairs. Since the ideas espoused by South Africa and Malaysia's political leaders are rooted in their specific national and broad regional philosophies, the study also unpacks the notions of the 'African ways' vis-à-vis the 'Asian ways' in maintaining and sustaining state-to-state relations within the two regions. This book, which uses Critical Theory as an appropriate framework that takes full cognisance of various developments in International Relations, will be of interest to scholars and researchers in both the Social Sciences and the Humanities.

A year after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was released in 2002, the seeds of the Open Access movement were sown in India. However, the momentum had not gained as it has should have been in the country and in the region, South Asia when compared to Europe and Latin America. In the recent past, with the initiatives of the individuals, communities of practice, institutes and the funding agencies (both private and public) there was an acceleration in the progress of Open Access. The countries, especially in South Asia viz., Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka etc., have now communities of practice advocating for Open Access to the public funded research. And this region now has policies and infrastructures in place for opening up access to the public funded research. For example, in India, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Council of Agricultural Research has adopted policies for Open Access and had also made available suitable infrastructure. It is now mandatory for all the doctoral degree scholars to deposit their thesis as per the directive of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India. Efforts are also being made to deliver all the openly available resources through a single platform called National Digital Library of India. However, there is no mandatory national policy formulated by any of the countries in South Asia. While there is no problem in deposition of the whole or part of the thesis by the scholars in a publicly available repository, the deposition of journal articles along with or without data in public repositories has had some conflict. Still, researchers and the research managers of the institutes or universities are not clear about the legal issues of sharing the research outputs immediately. There is a very low filling of the repositories with full-texts in India even when there is a policy and infrastructure in place. The possible ...