[LIS-Forum] OA repositories in India

Mon Jun 6 11:15:01 IST 2022

About the Indian medical research community in India.
Some of the most well informed Indian researchers are medical researchers.
Added to that they also write and communicate very well (in English). To
name a few I have known personally, Valiathan, Sunil Pandya, Samiran Nundy,
Sanjay Pai, Peush Sahni, ...

Some of the better run Indian S&T journals are medical journals (e.g. NMJI,
IJME in both of which I have published and am grateful to the editors and
referees who improved my script and also the content, and the many journals
my friend D K Sahu published under the MedKnow banner).

The community is open to welcoming ideas from others. At a meeting of the
IMA Southern India chapter(?) held many years ago (at Hotel Savera in
Chennai), they had a 3hr session of talks by non-medicos such as M S
Swaminathan, public cause lawyer Sriram Panchu and, despite the lowly
status, yours truly.

Recently, as part of a campaign to promote preprinits as the new normal in
scholarly communication, I had a discussion with a few medical researchers
and editors and I enjoyed every moment of it. Of course, I have not been
able to convince them yet, but the exchange was pleasant throughout and it
was a learning experience for me. The doctors I spoke to are well informed
about developments in OA.

In the past two years, thanks to the pandemic, OA uptake among biomedical
researchers picked up at a pretty fast pace around the world so much so
even the commercial publishers made Covid-related papers OA.

Awareness is not the problem. Callousness of authors who perform research
with taxpayers ' support but give away all the rights to publishers and the
HEIs and RPIs which permit such things to happen are.  Also the Govt
agencies who fund such research but not insist/mandate OA for all
publications resulting from their support are.

In your training programmes, you may, if you are convinced, introduce a
short presentation on why it is unethical and immoral to publish publicly
funded research in paywalled journals. Tell them a company called Elsevier
is SELLING unedited manuscripts to whoever wants to buy them. There is an
ongoing discussion in Twitter. The author could have made it freely
accessible to all by placing it in a repository!

Best wishes.

Subbiah Arunachalam

On Sun, 5 Jun 2022, 18:55 Vasumathi Sriganesh, <vasu at qmed.ngo> wrote:

> Dear Dr Arun and other professional colleagues:
>
> I meant to respond to Dr Arun's comments earlier, but somehow missed doing
> so. Better late than never!
>
> First - I am delighted to hear about several initiatives that Dr Arun
> wrote about. Kudos to all of them
>
> Then the comment:
>
> I am surprised to hear this comment on lack of awareness. Among Indian LIS professionals,
> the two favourite topics are open access and scientometrics (as is evident
> from the large number of journal articles and mentions in CVs).
>
> Dr Arun - what I meant about lack of awareness and training - is based on
> my communications with the medical professionals by and large. Could be
> pretty biased, but I am saying this after plenty of interactions. I
> completely agree that the Science communities and several others are
> obviously different - specially after all your mentions
>
> But in the medical community, I am afraid that it is not the same. We have
> lots more to do - to promote self archiving
> Vasumathi Sriganesh
> QMed Knowledge Foundation
> A-3, Shubham Center, Cardinal Gracious Road
> Chakala, Andheri East, Mumbai 400099, India
> Tel: 91-22-40054474    Mob: +919867292230
> Email: vasu at qmed.ngo  Web:www.qmed.ngo; www.qmedcourses.in
> MMC Speaker Code - MMC/MASS/00030/2016
> Member: Academy of Health Professions Educators
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 10:15 PM Subbiah Arunachalam <
> subbiah.arunachalam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 12:56 PM Vasumathi Sriganesh <vasu at qmed.ngo>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Great work Dr Francis!
>>>
>>> It is unfortunate that self-archiving is almost non-existent.
>>>
>>
>> You mean, in India. Is it a commentary on Indian researchers?
>>
>>> I believe that librarians need to train users to do that, only because
>>> most users are not even aware of the possibility.
>>>
>>
>> Academics cannot cite lack of awareness as a reason for inaction. With a
>> little effort one can learn how to self-archive. Hundreds of INDIAN
>> physicists and computational biologists have been depositing their
>> preprints in arXiv for years. Most of them picked up Linux, Tex, LaTex and
>> other software necessary for their work on their own.
>>
>>>
>>> This leads me to what Dr Arun says:
>>>
>>> Such librarians should be recognized and that is what we at the Electronic
>>> Publishing Trust for Development did
>>>
>>>
>> Dr Jayakanth and colleagues at IISc are doing what they have been doing
>> simply because those who publish the papers have not been forthcoming to
>> self-archive. At ICRISAT, Hyderabad, Dr Balaji planned and piloted the IR
>> very well and it later became the model for ALL other ICGAR institutes.
>> Balaji was not an M Lib Sci, but an IITK alumnus who chose to work at two
>> NGOs before he came to manage knowledge resources at ICRISAT. He invited
>> two OA champions to sensitize the scientists through a half-day workshop,
>> and later arranged for a long dinner meeting for the Deputy Director
>> General with one of the world's leading OA experts, Dr Alma Swan, the
>> author of the 2012 Unesco OA Policy Guidelines (
>> unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002158/215863e.pdf).
>> <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002158/215863e.pdf>  who had come
>> to speak at a session on OA I had put together at the annual meeting of the
>> Indian Science Congress Association. Dr Murari Tapaswi set up the IR at
>> CSIR-NIO, Goa. CMFRI has a well-run repository, set up by Mr Edwin Joseph,
>> with help from Muthu Madhan, who was also recognized by the EPT. Please
>> see https://epublishingtrust.blogspot.com/.
>>
>>>
>>> While I have not *worked* *in a library* for years, I believe I am not
>>> wrong when I say:
>>>
>>>    - Librarians need to do lots of training
>>>    - They need to be recognized for efforts like the IISc archives.
>>>
>>> As for training programmes, as early as 2004 MSSRF organized two
>> back-to-back three-day workshops by Dr Leslie Carr and Prof. Leslie Chan,
>> and later on many have been conducted by Prof. ARD Prasad of DRTC, Francis
>> Jayakanth, Muthu Madhan, MG Sreekumar and others.
>>
>> While the institutions might internally recognize them, the awareness of
>>> such activities needs much wider circulation, so that other institutions
>>> involve their libraries in a similar fashion. I do not see much of
>>> this. What can we do to increase these aspects?
>>>
>>
>> I am surprised to hear this comment on lack of awareness. Among Indian
>> LIS professionals, the two favourite topics are open access and
>> scientometrics (as is evident from the large number of journal articles and
>> mentions in CVs).
>>
>> Arun
>>
>>
>>> Vasumathi Sriganesh
>>> QMed Knowledge Foundation
>>> A-3, Shubham Center, Cardinal Gracious Road
>>> Chakala, Andheri East, Mumbai 400099, India
>>> Tel: 91-22-40054474    Mob: +919867292230
>>> Email: vasu at qmed.ngo  Web:www.qmed.ngo ; www.qmedcourses.in
>>> MMC Speaker Code - MMC/MASS/00030/2016
>>> Member: Academy of Health Professions Educators
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 11:40 AM Francis Jayakanth <francis at iisc.ac.in>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sir, As I previously stated, approximately 90% of IISc papers have been
>>>> uploaded to the repository, with nearly 80% of those containing full texts.
>>>> The library does most of the uploading. Self-archiving is almost
>>>> non-existent.
>>>>
>>>> A Request a copy button is displayed next to any full text file that is
>>>> not publically available. Those who are interested can get a copy of the
>>>> paper using that button. Almost every day, the library receives many
>>>> similar requests.
>>>>
>>>> With regards, Francis
>>>> ________________________________
>>>> From: Subbiah Arunachalam <subbiah.arunachalam at gmail.com>
>>>> Sent: 23 May 2022 23:46
>>>> To: LIS-Forum <lis-forum at ncsi.iisc.ernet.in>
>>>> Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] OA repositories in India
>>>>
>>>> External Email
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, May 23, 2022 at 9:56 PM Francis Jayakanth <francis at iisc.ac.in
>>>> <mailto:francis at iisc.ac.in>> wrote:
>>>> To date, about 55,500 Indian Institute of Science (IISc) articles have
>>>> been uploaded to the IISc's institutional repository, ePrints at IISc (
>>>> eprints.iisc.ac.in<http://eprints.iisc.ac.in>).
>>>>
>>>> IISc has roughly 62K items in the Scopus database, which spans the
>>>> years 1908 to 2022. So, the ePrints at IISc repository has a bit more
>>>> than 90% coverage of IISc publications. In terms of full-text inclusion in
>>>> the repository, it's somewhere between 80 and 85 percent.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks very much Francis for making this information public. [I wish
>>>> other IR managers in India make available such information about their
>>>> repositories.] I have often heard that the IISc repository has only
>>>> metadata (or bibliographic details) and NOT full texts. Also, I have heard
>>>> people say that it is NOT a genuine OA repository as the content there is
>>>> not 'author self-archived' but drawn from a database. Does that really
>>>> matter as long as I as a user can access the full papers? What is your take
>>>> on 'not being a genuine OA repository'? As for me, as long as a repository
>>>> provides the full texts of papers, users need not worry about how they came
>>>> into the repository in the first place. Yes, it would be ideal if authors
>>>> self-archive. Unfortunately, even more than two decades after Harnad's call
>>>> to researchers of the world to self-archive, if many scientists in India
>>>> (and also elsewhere) do not bother to self-archive in institutional
>>>> repositories, then an intermediary (say a librarian) has to do the
>>>> archiving. Such librarians should be recognized and that is what we at the
>>>> Electronic Publishing Trust for Development did in your case several years
>>>> ago.
>>>>
>>>> Arun
>>>> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658
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>>>
>>
>> --
>> Arun
>>
>> http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658
>> http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009
>>
>>
>>
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