Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, July 04, 2008

The compelling argument for OA to Indian research

'Open access can vastly help Indian science', India PR Wire, July 4, 2008.  Excerpt:

Can India make the most out of its investments in scientific research to spur its growth and promote domestic talent through the Open Access route, a global expert in the field says.

India could easily make its scientific research widely accessible for greater impact at very low costs, thus helping take its research forward, Open Access proponent Steven Harnad has said....

His comments came in the respected Bangalore-based Current Science journal, widely influential among the scientific community....

'There are plenty of institutional repositories in India, and they are cheap to create because the software is free. But they are mostly empty, because self-archiving has not been mandated,' Harnad contended....

Proponents of Open Access argue that prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply, particularly over the last decade. So, most universities, also in the affluent West, can no longer afford subscriptions to all of the journals that their academics need....

Harnad argued that universities, research institutions and research fund providers 'the world over' are at last beginning to require researchers to deposit on-line drafts of articles for their peer-reviewed journals in their institutional repositories.

Such deposits of academic journals would not result in costs or copyright issues, he noted.

This, he suggested, would make available all of India's research output to the rest of the world, and, in exchange, India would have open access to 'the research output of the rest of the world'.

Current Science had recently suggested in an editorial that Indian academic institutions are finding it 'exceedingly expensive' to have a well-stocked library of science journals.

The editorial termed the pro-Open Access argument 'compelling', saying it was a 'new wind' blowing over the 'turbulent world of science publishing'....

CommentApparently Stevan's piece isn't yet online.  The most recent issue of Current Science online is from June 25.  See the update below.

Update.  Stevan's piece was published in the May 25 issue:   How India can provide immediate open access now.  (Thanks to D.K. Sahu.)  It's a letter to the editor responding to the editorial of P. Balaram in the April 10 issue.   (Also see my comment on Balaram's editorial.)  From Stevan's letter: 

Balaram’s editorial devotes most of its space to the problem on research accessibility and usage being restricted by costs and copyright. It briefly mentions, but does not clearly explain the simple, proven solution: mandated self-archiving....

Universities, research institutions and research funders the world over are at last beginning to require researchers to deposit on-line drafts of their peer-reviewed journal articles in their IRs. Deposit itself is neither a cost nor a copyright issue, nor is it complicated. All institutions and funders need to mandate deposit of the final refereed electronic draft, the ‘postprint’, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Sixty-two per cent of journals are already ‘green’: they have already formally endorsed making the postprints open access (OA) immediately upon deposit. For the remaining 38% of journals that embargo access, the postprints can be deposited as closed access, and the IRs have a button that allows users worldwide to semi-automatically request a postprint and authors to semi-automatically provide a single copy to the requester with one keystroke....

Journal cost-recovery models and copyright policy are irrelevant [to OA archiving]....