[LIS-Forum] Re: [eGovINDIA] Sun to publish Web services software source code / The move by Sun comes almost two weeks after the company published the source code for its Solaris operating system that is used to run large computer centers

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

I see many postings in this (eGovIndia) list on open source software, but 
hardly any on open access to scientific and scholarly literature. As you may 
be aware, most research in India, be it in universities and other higher 
educational institutions or in research laboratories, is funded by the 
Government. It is only logical that publicly funded research should be made 
available to everyone. Unfortunately, most Indian researchers WANT to 
publish in journals published by COMMERCIAL publishers operating out of the 
western countries. And many of them succeed in getting their papers accepted 
by these foreign (commercial) journals. What is more, Indian authors 
surrender their copyright to these journals. Effectively our government (and 
Indian taxpayers) are funding research whose results are under copyright of 
commercial publishers in the West! These publishers sell their journals at 
enormous subscription prices, of the order of 2-20 thousand dollars a year. 
And Indian libraries, at least some of them, subscribe to these expensive 
journals.

Of course there is an alternative. The government and funding agencies can 
adopt a policy whereby results of all publicly funded research would be 
required to be published in open access journals (no subscription for the 
electronic version) and be deposited in interoperable open access archives.

There are a few thousand such open access journals and about 500 such 
archives around the world (as of now). All the journals published by the 
Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and Current 
Science Association are open access journals. MedKnow Publications of Bombay 
also publishes several open access journals (in the area of medicine). There 
are also a few Indian archives. The most well known is the Eprints archive 
at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A good example of an Indian 
central archive (where any researcher can deposit his/her paper) is OpenMED 
of NIC.

Members of this list should lend their support to the setting up of many 
more interoperable institutional archives in India and to persuade journal 
publishers in India, both in the government and in the private sector, to 
make their journals OA journals.

The advantages of open access are many and have been well documented. If 
need be  can write about them some other time.

Subbiah Arunachalam