...This workshop, essentially meant to address the needs of agricultural researchers in India, was hosted jointly by ICRISAT, a CGIAR institution, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
About twenty participants - including the vice chancellor of an agricultural university, editors of agricultural journals, scientists and librarians of agricultural universities and the laboratories of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research attended the workshop. Dr P M Bhargava, vice chairman of India's National Knowledge Commission gave an inspiring opening address. Societies where knowledge flowed freely were far more prosperous than societies where knowledge was withheld, he said. He expressed his full support to open source software, open standards and open access to scientific and scholarly literature and told the gathering that the National Knowledge Commission had recommended open access to scientific and scholarly research publications, especially those resulting from publicly funded research projects, to the Prime Minister....
The workshop was inaugurated by Dr J D H Keatinge, Deputy Director General of ICRISAT....
The workshop was largely conceived by Jai Haravu, a former librarian at ICRISAT and now an information management consultant, and Johannes Kaizer of FAO, Rome. Johannes spoke about the initiatives of the AGRIS network and how AGRIS network can help India develop an open access agricultural information network. Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow spoke on how we could convert Indian agricultural journals into open access 'feeless-free' journals. He provided evidence from MedKnow journals to show that going open access indeed helped in increasing the number of subscribers to the print version apart from attracting more papers, especially from outside India, and citations and visibility.
Subbiah Arunachalam provoked the participants by asking them if Indian Institute of Science, National Institute of Technology and several CSIR laboratories could set up interoperable institutional archives what prevented ICAR laboratories from setting up their own archives....
Dr A R D Prasad of the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, spoke about the need for OA repositories....
Dr Mitali Ghosh Roy of ICAR gave an overview of the publication activity at ICAR. The day ended with a lively audio conversation with three distinguished OA advocates, viz. Peter Suber, Leslie Chan and Peter Ballantyne. Questions from the participants included concern about depositing papers when the copyright resided with the journal publisher, subject-based central repository vs institutional repository, loss of subscription revenue at a time when the Ministry supporting the journal is keen to increase income from subscriptions, etc....
A working group spent an hour in the evening to draw up an action plan....
It looks to me that at last the agriculture sector in India will make a beginning and within the next six months a few institutions may set up their own interoperable OA archives and upload annual reports, newsletters, theses and conference papers. But archives with refereed research papers and OA journals may take a little longer.
Update. Also see Subbiah Arunachalam's comments on the workshop.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/07/2006 09:27:00 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.
