Raja Simhan, Take it, it's free, The Hindu Business Line, June 28, 2004. An overview of OA, especially in India, based on interviews with Leslie Chan, Leslie Carr, and Subbiah Arunachalam. Excerpt: "While even well endowed institutions in developed countries find it difficult to retain journal subscriptions, the situation in developing countries, including India, is worse. Besides, researchers in the rest of the world do not really read much of the work that Indians do. Further, if Indian scientists publish their papers in expensive journals, even their Indian colleagues do not read them, as not many institutions in the country subscribe to these costly journals, says a scientist....Open Archiving will help developing country scientists by making their work instantly available to the rest of the world's scientists. Easy availability will lead to greater use, and more citations, visibility and prestige. The idea of open access is yet to pick up in India, and a few more institutions are now trying to set up open access servers." (PS: This article's heart is in the right place. But it makes some elementary errors not attributable to Leslie, Les, or Arun, such as understating STM journal prices by more than an order of magnitude and confusing OA with OAI and OAIster. But look past them because they don't affect the picture of OA initiatives in India and the needs they will serve.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/27/2004 03:58:00 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.
