India's premier publicly-funded research organization is pushing to make all research published at its institutions open access. But its pleas are falling on deaf ears, critics say, as individual laboratories have been slow to take up the charge.
Last month (Feb. 6), the head of research and development planning at India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Naresh Kumar, sent a memo to the directors of CSIR's 42 labs urging that "all research papers published from all CSIR laboratories be made open access," either through online repositories or by publishing in open access journals. Kumar also recommended that the 20-odd journals published by CSIR's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) be made open access.
It is now up to the directors of the various labs to decide whether or not to implement the policy. Subbiah Arunachalam, an information consultant based in Chennai who was involved in formulating the recommendations, said that "whether this will actually happen is anybody's guess."
"The uptake [of open access policies] is rather slow in India," Arunachalam told The Scientist . "[The CSIR directors] will not take it seriously at all. I know these guys. For them, this doesn't look important." The directors don't necessarily see the benefits of open access publishing and claim that the infrastructure is too difficult to implement, he said.
Arunachalam and leading policymakers and academics are meeting today (Mar. 24) at the CSIR offices in New Delhi and again Thursday (Mar. 26) at the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore to discuss the merits of open access publishing and online institutional databases.
Indian scientists who publish their work abroad often can't even access their own papers, said Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, who directs the online publishing service Bioline International and will be speaking this week at the Indian conferences. "By putting these articles that are published elsewhere in some sort of repository, they become available to scientists in their own countries and elsewhere," he said....
While deliberations take place, Chan thinks that India can take guidance from recent open access efforts in developing countries elsewhere. "If India can learn from these existing projects then they don't need to reinvent the wheel," he said.
Last month (Feb. 19), the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) announced a two-year pilot project to make one of the country's leading journals, the South African Journal of Science, open access with no page charges for any scientists -- not just South African ones -- publishing in the journal....
The Biannual National Research Survey, released by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), provides a searchable online database containing a summary of all research conducted partly or wholly in the country before 2007. The QNRF plans to update the repository every two years....
"A lot of Middle Eastern countries are realizing that open access is a good way of promoting their research and attracting attention," said Chan. Asian countries have been slower to warm up to open access, he notes, but they're starting to come around....
[Zuoyan Zhu, a developmental biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan and the former deputy head of the National Science Foundation of China] is currently preparing a report for the CAS to assess the impact and logistics of making some or all of the Science in China journals -- China's premier English-language journal series -- open access. He expects to submit the report before the end of year. Kumar, however, doesn't want India's CSIR to wait that long. "It is requested that the open access activities are implemented at the earliest [possible date]," he wrote at the end of his appeal to the CSIR directors.
PS: Also see our past posts on OA initiative from India's CSIR.
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.
