Richard Poynder, Why India Needs Open Access, Open and Shut, May 5, 2006. Part I of an interview with Subbiah Arunachalam. Part II will be published later. Excerpt:
RP: In an article you published on Open Access last September in the Asian information newspaper Access you said "papers written by Indian scientists, often with support from Indian taxpayers’ money, are not seen, read or cited by other Indian researchers." What is the problem here?
SA: The issue is quite simple: research performed in India, and funded by Indian taxpayers, is reported in a few thousand journals, both Indian and foreign. Since some of these journals are very expensive, many Indian libraries - including sometimes the author's own institutional library - are not able to subscribe to them. As consequence, other Indian scientists working in the same, or related, areas are unable to read these papers. This is a problem common to all developing countries.
RP: How can Open Access resolve these problems for Indian researchers?
SA: If all these papers were published in OA journals, or if the authors made them freely available on the Web by self-archiving them - either in institutional OA archives or in central archives like arXiv and CiteSeer - then the problem would vanish.
RP: As your answer implies, there are currently two main ways to provide OA to research literature: the Gold Route (in which OA publishers charge researchers, or more usually their funders, to publish papers, and then make those papers freely available on the Web), and the Green Route (where authors continue to publish in traditional subscription-based journals and then self-archive their papers themselves on the Web). In a paper you published with US-based OA advocate Peter Suber in World-Information City last October, you argued that self-archiving is the best route for Indian researchers. Why?
SA: I would point out that not all gold route OA journals charge authors (or indeed their funders) a publication fee. Currently, for instance, not a single Indian OA journal charges author-side fees. But to answer your question: I believe that OA archiving is a better option because it would allow us to achieve 100% OA more quickly. Today there are not many Gold OA journals, so compelling authors to publish their work only in the few OA journals that currently exist would not achieve the same effect, in the short-term at least....[But the choice between green and gold] is not an either or question. Both publishing in OA journals and setting up institutional archives, or repositories, are important for Indian scientists. Moreover, the cost of setting up and maintaining an institutional archive is actually quite low, and certainly affordable for most Indian research institutes and universities....
RP: You say that no Indian OA journal charges author-side fees?...How then do these journals make ends meet?
SA: Almost all of them charge a subscription for the print version of the journal - which, by the way, is always much lower than the subscription prices of journals produced in the West. Some of them also carry advertisements; and some get grants from the government....It is worth pointing out that publishers can also benefit from embracing OA, as my friend Dr D K Sahu [CEO of the Bombay-based private company Medknow Publications] has convincingly shown with the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (JPGM).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/05/2006 09:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
