Open Access Environment Research Articles

Conjunctive surface water and groundwater management in a multiple user environment

The conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater is practiced worldwide as a measure to address water supply uncertainty. This paper focuses on a scenario in which an aquifer is open to multiple users and examines the impact of such an open-access environment on the stabilization function of conjunctive management. We construct a non-cooperative stochastic dynamic game model where multiple users utilize groundwater intake from a common aquifer as a complement to fluctuating surface water. We also propose a simpler baseline applicable to dynamic environments to compute the benefits of the stabilization function when users are unable to adjust groundwater intake to surface water uncertainties. We then apply the model to the real-world case of the water supply environment of the Cao’e River in China. Simulation results show that open access leads to diminishing stabilization values as higher pumping costs due to declining stocks lead to a weakening of users’ incentive to utilize groundwater flexibly. Furthermore, the stabilization function itself is destabilized as the number of users increases. This is because greater groundwater intake and a decline in stocks amplify variations in pumping costs caused by different patterns of surface-water fluctuation.

Enhancing the Understanding of the EU Gender Equality Index through Spatiotemporal Visualizations

The Gender Equality Index allows analyzing and measuring the progress of gender equality in the EU and, therefore, the relation between men and women in different domains, such as Health, Work or Money. Even though the European Institute for Gender Equality has created some visualizations that are useful to look at the data, this website does not manage to make graphs that allow for observing the spatiotemporal variable. This article enhances the understanding of the index with spatiotemporal visualizations, such as cartograms, heatmaps and choropleth maps, and some strategies focusing on analyzing the evolution of the countries over the years in an open-access environment. The results show how the application created may be used as an addition to the EIGE website.

A mentored hands-on training model for scaling up implementation and intervention research in India: “connecting the dots”

Despite the high burden of mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), less than 25% of those in need have access to appropriate services, in part due to a scarcity of locally relevant, evidence-based interventions and models of care. To address this gap, researchers from India and the United States and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) collaboratively developed a “Grantathon” model to provide mentored research training to 24 new principal investigators (PIs). This included a week-long didactic training, a customized web-based data entry/analysis system and a National Coordination Unit (NCU) to support PIs and track process objectives. Outcome objectives were assessed via scholarly output including publications, awards received and subsequent grants that were leveraged. Multiple mentorship strategies including collaborative problem-solving approaches were used to foster single-centre and multicentre research. Flexible, approachable and engaged support from mentors helped PIs overcome research barriers, and the NCU addressed local policy and day-to-day challenges through informal monthly review meetings. Bi-annual formal review presentations by all PIs continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling interim results reporting and scientific review, also serving to reinforce accountability. To date, more than 33 publications, 47 scientific presentations, 12 awards, two measurement tools, five intervention manuals and eight research grants have been generated in an open-access environment. The Grantathon is a successful model for building research capacity and improving mental health research in India that could be adopted for use in other LMICs.

SGHRP: Secure Greedy Highway Routing Protocol with authentication and increased privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks.

VANETs are networks of connected intelligent vehicles that can communicate with each other, as well as with infrastructure and fixed roadside equipment. As a result of the lack of fixed infrastructure and open-access environment, security is crucial when sending packets. Secure routing protocols have been proposed for VANETs, but most are focused on authenticating nodes and creating a secure route, without considering confidentiality after the route is created. Using a chain of source keys validated by a one-way function, we have proposed a secure routing protocol called Secure Greedy Highway Routing Protocol (GHRP), which provides increased confidentiality over other protocols. As part of the proposed protocol, the source, destination, and intermediate nodes are authenticated using a hashing chain in the first stage, and in the second stage, one-way hashing has been used to increase data security. In order to resist routing attacks such as black hole attacks, the proposed protocol is based on the GHRP routing protocol. The proposed protocol is simulated using the NS2 simulator, and its performance is compared with that of the SAODV protocol. Based on the simulation results, the proposed protocol performs better than the mentioned protocol in terms of packet delivery rate, overhead, and average end-to-end delay.

Is the electricity cross-subsidization policy in India caught between a rock and a hard place? An empirical investigation

Functioning of the Indian electricity sector is often found to be characterized by policy-level inconsistencies and meddled with political interference at all levels of governance. The objective of this study is to analyse the effect of reform-based policies and regulations and political environment on the cross-subsidization process in India. A panel data econometric technique is used as an empirical strategy to establish such a linkage, covering 18 Indian states over 10 years. Findings reveal that a favourable open access environment has become a game-changer for industrial and commercial consumers to migrate from the state grid to other sources - preferably to renewables - leading to greater renewable energy penetration. This has implications for cross-subsidies. In addition, it emerges from the analysis that it is crucial for distribution utilities and state regulatory commissions to be independent in their functioning. Greater reliance on the state exchequer by the distribution utilities could endanger their autonomy; whereas the lack of financial independence of SERCs could negatively impact their abilities to operate independently. Finally, it is found that the process of cross-subsidization is not always based on the hard logic of expanding welfare, rather it is motivated by the entrenched political goals and ambitions. This is in tune with findings from earlier studies.

Modeling and stability analysis of cyberattack effects on heterogeneous intelligent traffic flow

The platooning of connected automated vehicles (CAVs) will have a dramatic impact on the future market. The open-access environment is available to share travel information among CAVs to format vehicular platooning, but makes cooperative vehicle platoons vulnerable to suffer cyberattacks. Cyberattacks are classified as bogus messages, replay/delay, and collusion attacks and affect the transmission of information on CAVs. Besides, heterogeneous traffic composed of different vehicles will be an extremely common form of traffic, including mixed operations of different models such as cars and trucks. Meanwhile, different car-following combinations influence the overall stability of heterogeneous traffic flow dynamics. This paper proposes a novel intelligent driving model considering cyberattacks and heterogeneous vehicles. In addition, this model integrates dynamic communication topology, which is a time-varying function determined by the communication range and the distance between vehicles. Through linear stability analysis, the stability conditions of the model are derived. On the other hand, numerical simulation was performed, and the results validated that under cyberattacks high proportion of cars and the information accepted from cooperative vehicles ahead can efficaciously enhance traffic stability and safety. Inversely, the proportion of car-following pairs and response/delay time will destabilize mixed traffic. From the perspective of platoon operation, the perniciousness of cyberattacks on CAV platoon is demonstrated, which lead to different levels of dangerous traffic behavior: unnecessary delay, congestions and potential collisions. The numerical results verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.

Trusted Blockchain-Based Signcryption Protocol and Data Management for Authentication and Authorization in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are the industrial cornerstone of intelligent transportation system (ITS), which are widely used in traffic management, automatic driving, and road optimization. With the expansion of the scale of the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and smart vehicles (SV), VANETs will produce a large amount of data. In the open access environment of VANETs, the security of information transmission and the authenticity of user identity need to be considered when different vehicles communicate. In order to solve the cybersecurity risks of large-scale deployment of VANET, this paper proposes a trusted blockchain-based signcryption protocol and data management (TB-SCDM) for authentication and authorization (A&A) in VANETs. In the existing attack model, TB-SCDM can ensure the confidentiality and undeniability of information, as well as can effectively resist 51% attacks, eclipse attacks and double-spending attacks, etc. Through benchmark analysis, this scheme has higher computing efficiency and lower storage cost compared with other existing schemes.

Scientific and technical information's restoration in the open access environment through smart search engines

Open access is one of the topics that attracted the researchers interest as it is a turning point for the recovery of technical and scientific information’s recovery which requires a set of tools and technical skills. This study aims to discover the main problems of information’s recovery within open access in addition to the inventory of the most important smart search engines and to know the strategies of information’s recovery. The study adopted the descriptive analytical approach, and came out with a number of important conclusions, the most important are : Searching for scientific and technical information in the open access environment has become a very difficult and the researcher does not know which of them is more useful. Relying on the common ranking of sites, smart search engines in its work, depends on semantic web applications, most notably XML, RDF and ontology, users can quickly find specific search results through smart search engines without having to become experts in search engines or have a well-defined strategies for searching within the open access environment. The study also showed that the semantic scholar search engine deals with open sources more efficiently than traditional search engines through its ability to discover these sources and display them to the beneficiary in a distinctive way.

Authenticated Secure Quantum-Based Communication Scheme in Internet-of-Drones Deployment

The rapid advance of manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) has led to a rise in the use of their civilian and commercial applications. The access of these drones to controlled airspace can be efficiently coordinated through particular layered network architecture, often referred to as the Internet-of-Drones (IoD). The nature of IoD, which is deployed in an open-access environment, brings significant safety and security concerns. Classical cryptosystems such as elliptic curve cryptography, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Diffie-Hellman are essential building blocks to secure communication in the IoD. However, with the rapid development of quantum computing, it will be easy to break public-key cryptosystems using efficient quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm. Thus, building quantum-safe solutions to enhance IoD security has become imperative. Fortunately, quantum technologies can provide unconditional security solutions to protect data and communications in the IoD environment. This paper proposes a quantum-based scheme to prevent unauthorized drones from accessing a specific flight zone and authenticates the identities and shared secret messages of involved entities. To do so, we used a quantum channel to encode the private information based on a pre-shared key and a random key generated in session. The involved entities also perform mutual authentication and share a secret key. We also provide the security proofs and analysis of the proposed scheme that indicates its resistance to well-known attacks.

An Enhanced Privacy Preserving, Secure and Efficient Authentication Protocol for VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted growing interest in both academia and industry because they can provide a viable solution that improves road safety and comfort for travelers on roads. However, wireless communications over open-access environments face many security and privacy issues that may affect deployment of large-scale VANETs. Researchers have proposed different protocols to address security and privacy issues in a VANET, and in this study we cryptanalyze some of the privacy preserving protocols to show that all existing protocols are vulnerable to the Sybil attack. The Sybil attack can be used by malicious actors to create fake identities that impair existing protocols, which allows them to imitate traffic congestion or at worse cause an accident that may result in the loss of human life. This vulnerability exists because those protocols store vehicle identities in an encrypted form, and it is not possible to search over the encrypted identities to find fake vehicles. This attack is serious in nature and very prevalent for privacy-preserving protocols. To cope with this kind of attack, we propose a novel and practical protocol that uses Public key encryption with an equality test (PKEET) to search over the encrypted identities without leaking any information, and eventually eliminate the Sybil attack. The proposed approach improves security and at the same time maintains privacy in VANET. Our performance analysis indicates that the proposed protocol outperforms state-of-the-art protocols: The proposed beacon generation time is constant compared to a linear increase in existing protocols, with beacon verification shown to be faster by 7.908%. Our communicational analysis shows that the proposed protocol with a beacon size of 322 bytes has the least communicational overhead compared to other state-of-the-art protocols.

Editor's Note

On this Halloween, we investigate daunting barriers to government transparency, such as exhorbitant fees and eery silence. We also celebrate two years of the journal's existence, providing two dozen excellent peer-reviewed research articles in an open-access environment.

Alternative Criteria of Voltage Stability Margin for the Purpose of Load Shedding

Abstract: Voltage instability takes on the form of a dramatic drop of transmission system voltages, which may lead to system disruption. During the past two decades it has become a major threat for the operation of many systems and, in the prevailing open access environment, it is a factor leading to limit power transfers. The objective of this paper is to present new method of under voltage protection with maximum utilization of system capabilities.

Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme With Fine-Grained Error Location for Cloud-Based VANET

As an emerging technology, cloud-based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) can significantly improve the efficiency of transportation systems by alleviating traffic congestion and optimizing resource management. However, since the information transmitted in VANET is distributed in an open-access environment, security and privacy are now becoming vital concerns, especially when attackers own more and more resources. Recently, many tamper-proof devices (TPD)-based authentication schemes have been proposed to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, while most of them are dependent on ideal TPDs with very strong security assumptions. Moreover, when the aggregate signature verification fails, these schemes can do nothing but discard the aggregate signature completely, which makes them impractical in VANET. To address the above concerns, we propose a more realistic TPD-based authentication scheme with privacy-preserving features for cloud-based VANET. Specifically, the off-line self-updating method is utilized to update the data in TPD periodically to resist side-channel attacks. Furthermore, an efficient fine-grained error location algorithm is designed to quickly detect all invalid signatures within a problematic aggregate signature scenario. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing ones in terms of security, computation delay and communication overhead, thus more suitable in practical cloud-based VANET environment.

Voltage instability identification with modified L-index using synchrophasor data

<p>In the prevailing open-access environment, one of the limitations for power exchanges has been voltage stability. The study of voltage stability necessitates a complete network representation. In this paper, the advantage of the dynamic behavior of generators is considered by incorporating dynamic models for generators. It has been shown dynamic models resulted in more accurate results compared to the conventional PV buses or ideal voltage source models that are used in most of the voltage stability studies. Moreover, the traditional L-index is augmented by incorporating real-time and synchronized phasor data collected from the optimally located phasor measurement units (PMU) in a wide-area measurement system (WAMS) to estimate more accurate voltage stability margins. Simulation studies carried out on IEEE 9-bus and IEEE 14-bus systems under various system conditions. It has been demonstrated that the inclusion of dynamic models and synchrophasor data from WAMS significantly improves the precision with which voltage stability analysis results are obtained.</p>

Developing a Model of Indian Women Library Association to Support Open Access Environment in Academic Libraries in India

Short article – no abstract.

Effects of graded-index and Poisson's ratio on elastic-solutions of a pressurized functionally graded material thick-walled cylinder

In this study, the effect of graded-index and Poisson's ratio on the elastic-numerical solutions of an axisymmetric functionally graded material (FGM) thick-walled cylinder under internal pressure in-plane strain condition is presented. We assumed that the cylinder is made up of two different linear elastic materials and the volumetric fraction varied continuously and gradually through the radial direction. The thermo-mechanical properties are considered to be temperature-independent (TID) and defined by using the rule of mixture. The effects of the graded-index and Poisson's ratio on the stresses, strains and radial displacement are presented. The governing equations of an FGM cylinder are solved by using the non-linear shooting method and the Runge-Kutta fourth-order algorithm. The numerical solutions are obtained by writing the code of the governing equation in python open-access environment software package. The analytical solutions of a homogeneous cylinder are performed to validate the numerical solutions of an FGM cylinder. The results are presented in graphical form. The results show that the graded-index and Poisson's ratio have remarkable influences on the response of stresses, strains, and displacement distributions across the radial direction. But, both graded-index and Poisson's ratios have insignificant impacts on the radial stress of a pressurized FGM cylinder. Furthermore, the graded-index has a great significant effect on the material properties variations through the radial direction.

Secure-Reliable Blockchain-Based Data Access Control and Data Integrity Framework in The Environment of Smart City

The most important concern of smart cities and electronic governments that provide their services through smart applications and modern technology is security, reliability and privacy management. Therefore, it has become an effective research area. The open access environment that the Smart City idea offers suffers from the issue of data access and integrity rights. Encryption, Sequence Detection, and other traditional techniques may be somewhat unable to maintain the required level of security. In this paper, we suggest a practical framework based on blockchain technology and how its positive advantages will be reflected to provide a secure, reliable, integrity and controlled data access system. The main idea presented by the research is to manage access rights and protect privacy according to blockchain strategies. The analytical results showed a high level of protection, decentralization and reliability of the proposal based on blockchain technology and its advantages.

Determination of Hydroxymethylfurfural Content (HMF) in Fresh Bee Honey Produced in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) by HPLC DAD Method

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Determination of Hydroxymethylfurfural Content (HMF) in Fresh Bee Honey Produced in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) by HPLC DAD Method

earth and environment journals, environment journals, open access environment journals, peer reviewed environmental journals,open access,juniper publishers,ournal of Environmental Sciences,juniper publishers journals , juniper publishers reivew

Nitrogen and Carbon Characteristics of Sludges from Formic Acid and Sodium Hydroxide Pulping of Kenaf Stem

earth and environment journals, environment journals, open access environment journals, peer reviewed environmental journals,open access,juniper publishers,ournal of Environmental Sciences,juniper publishers journals , juniper publishers reivew