India's main publicly-funded scientific research agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has announced a set of measures to make its research publications open access.
Last month (6 February) Naresh Kumar, head of CSIR's Research and Development Planning Division wrote to the directors of CSIR's more than 40 laboratories with a list of directions for making CSIR-generated knowledge open access.
Each laboratory is asked to set up its own institutional open access repository compatible with the more than 1,000 repositories across the world. They are also asked to make their research findings available either by depositing them in such a repository or by publishing them in open access journals. CSIR journals are also requested to become open access.
The next step is to create awareness among CSIR scientists by holding in-house training and hosting a conference on open access later this month (24 March).
Samir K. Brahmachari, director-general of CSIR, says that the open access scheme won't be easy to implement as there are many technicalities involved, including the sheer number of articles. He says that CSIR publishes about 4,000 articles in over 21 journals annually.
The official decision to opt for open access publication was taken on Open Access Day last year (24 November). Two CSIR journals have already become open access.
Subbaiah Arunachalam, a Chennai-based information consultant who was involved in formulating the recommendations, says CSIR is the only scientific council in India to have taken such a policy decision....
PS: Also see our post on the CSIR decision, and all our past posts on CSIR.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/15/2009 12:50:00 PM.
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.
