A small but growing number of Indian journals are moving to the free open access format of internet publishing.
"Many leading journals published in India are already open access. These include the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, Indian Council of Medical Research and the Calicut Medical College," Subbiah Arunachalam, a prominent Indian campaigner for open access, told IANS....
Both the government of India-run National Informatics Centre and the Mumbai-based private firm MedKnow publish open access journals on behalf of about 75 societies.
"India publishes about 100 OA journals. Actually, these are [dual-edition] journals - print plus electronic, with the print version sold against a subscription. No Indian journal charges a fee from the authors for publishing papers," said Arunachalam.
In Mumbai, the MedKnow model, run by a young medico, D.K. Sahu, who opted out of practising medicine and chose publishing, is considered an innovative model by standards in India and beyond.
Beyond individual journals, OA is making its impact at the level of repositories too.
About 30 institutions have set up their own institutional open access repositories using free software and open source software such as EPrints and DSpace.
The Indian Institute of Science (IIsc) was the first to set up the IISc EPrints archive, which has over 8,000 records.
The National Institute of Technology at Rourkela is the only Indian institution to have mandated open access for all faculty and student research publications.
There are three subject-based central repositories - one each for library and information science, medicine (NIC) and catalysis (Indian Institute of Technology at Madras)....
Meanwhile, the National Knowledge Commission has recommended mandating open access to all publicly funded research and the recommendation is now with the Prime Minister....
Groups like the Indian National Science Academy have also been looking deeper at the potential of OA.
The Indian Academy of Sciences is reportedly planning to place all papers by all fellows, past and present, on an open access archive. But such plans take time to implement....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/13/2008 08:17:00 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.
