Friends:
While welcoming the policy statement that emerged from the Bangalore workshop on electronic publishing and open access and which developing countries and their funding agencies could adopt, someone commented that "we should work jointly to ensure that policy makers from the government should be involved in the movement if any declaration has to be implemented in a developing country", and "how can a declaration be implemented without involving policy makers from the government." I am sure people who want to bring about a major transformation would know this.
It would be naive to expect policy makers such as Prof. C N R Rao, Dr R Chidambaram or Dr R A Mashelkar to attend a two-day workshop on open access. We did invite senior officials of DST, DSIR, DBT, etc. but they could not attend (for valid reasons). But policy makers - members of the Science Advisory Council, for example - attended and spoke at the workshop.
What is relevant is that policy makers have been involved for a very long time. Pardon me for confining myself to what I have been doing. I have been speaking to key people in the Ministry of Science, Office of the Prinicipal Scientific Adviser, the Science Advisory Council and the Academies ever since I took interest in promoting the culture of open access. To give a few examples,
I have had many conversations (mostly by email and occasionally face-to-face) with Professor M S Valiathan, then President of INSA. He signed the Berlin Declaration on behalf of INSA, he convened a one-day meet on open access at the Annual Meeting of INSA held at NCL, Pune, and invited me to speak as well as to suggest names of other potential speakers, and made all INSA journals open access.
I have been talking to Prof. N Balakrishnan, who is not only the Associate Director of IISc but also an important person in Indian science and higher education policy circles. He set up India's first super computer centre and India's first institutional archive and is heading the internationally known Million Books Digital Library programme.
I have been talking to Prof. N Mukunda, Editor of publications of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a former chiar of the INASP advisory board. We even attended a open access conference at Unesco together a few years ago where I introduced him to Abel Packer, the key person behind SciELO and BIREME. It was then we extended an invitation to Abel to come to India, and it took four years for him to actually visit us! The Indian Academy made all its 11 journals open access.
I have been talking to the members and advisors of the National Knowledge Commission and the NKC is likely to recommend adoption of OA for publicly funded research.
I have spoken to the secretaries and senior officials of DST and DSIR many times about the need for mandating open access. I have addressed a meeting attended by many members of the SAC-PM and the PSA to the GoI and argued in favour of open access.
I have been alerting DBT and the coordinators of the Bioinformatics Centres for the past five years about the need for adopting OA. I have spoken to NAAS and the top brass of ICAR about the need for adopting OA.
I am also in touch with policy makers in other developing countries, international organizations and funding agencies.
The B'lore meeting was held at IISc with the cooperation of IASc and was attended among others by Prof. Balakrishnan and Prof. Gadagkar and several other Fellows of the Academies.
I am talking to people at all levels - from the level of technical assistants and officers who actually set up and maintain OA archives to Directors of institutions and Secretaries to the Government of India and Presidents of Academies.
I am not the only one who is trying to promote OA in India and the developing world. There are many others and all of us recognise the importance of working together. In fact I have coauthored papers with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop, and Leslie Chan. As the governments happen to be the major providers of funds for research in all developing countries, we need to persuade them to mandate. How can we neglect or ignore them? Besides we believe in sharing knowledge (that is why we are ready to hold workshops and spend so much time and energy in disseminating news on current developments) and building multi stakeholder partnerships.
[Incidentally, for an earlier workshop (held at Hyderabad as part of the Science Congress) we even sought some funds from DSIR and NIC, but did not get any. (Our application to DSIR was filed rather late.) We were very hopeful of getting some funds from NIC, as they were actively engaged in open access initiatives, but did not get any. Then we approached OSI and a Bombay-based good samaritan, and both of them agreed very readily to support the travel of three speakers, and ICRISAT provided free accommodation.] . This time around, but for the timely intervention of a DSIR officer the Chinese participants would not have made it to the Bangalore workshop.
To conclude, rest assured we have been working with policy makers both within and outside the government and we will continue to do so. I wonder how anyone could have got the impression that we are not involving policy makers from the government.
Best wishes.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
Friends:
While welcoming the policy statement that emerged from the Bangalore workshop on electronic publishing and open access and which developing countries and their funding agencies could adopt, someone commented that "we should work jointly to ensure that policy makers from the government should be involved in the movement if any declaration has to be implemented in a developing country", and "how can a declaration be implemented without involving policy makers from the government." I am sure people who want to bring about a major transformation would know this.
It would be naive to expect policy makers such as Prof. C N R Rao, Dr R Chidambaram or Dr R A Mashelkar to attend a two-day workshop on open access. We did invite senior officials of DST, DSIR, DBT, etc. but they could not attend (for valid reasons). But p
olicy makers - members of the Science Advisory Council, for example - attended and spoke at the workshop.
What is relevant is that policy makers have been involved for a very long time. Pardon me for confining myself to what I have been doing. I have been speaking to key people in the Ministry of Science, Office of the Prinicipal Scientific Adviser, the Science Advisory Council and the Academies ever since I took interest in promoting the culture of open access. To give a few examples,
I have had many conversations (mostly by email and occasionally face-to-face) with Professor M S Valiathan, then President of INSA. He signed the Berlin Declaration on behalf of INSA, he convened a one-day meet on open access at the Annual Meeting of INSA held at NCL, Pune, and invited me to speak as well as to suggest names of other potential speakers, and made all INSA journals open access.
I have been talking to Prof. N Balakrishnan, who is not only the Associate Director of IISc but also an important person in Indian science and higher education policy circles. He set up India's first super computer centre and India's first institutional archive and is heading the internationally known Million Books Digital Library programme.
I have been talking to Prof. N Mukunda, Editor of publications of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a former chiar of the INASP advisory board. We even attended a open access conference at Unesco together a few years ago where I introduced him to Abel Packer, the key person behind SciELO and BIREME. It was then we extended an invitation to Abel to come to India, and it took four years for him to actually visit us! The Indian Academy made all its 11 journals open access.
I have been talking to the members and advisors of the National Knowledge Commission and the NKC is likely to recommend adoption of OA for publicly funded research.
I have spoken to the secretaries and senior officials of DST and DSIR many times about the need for mandating open access. I have addressed a meeting attended by many members of the SAC-PM and the PSA to the GoI and argued in favour of open access.
I have been alerting DBT and the coordinators of the Bioinformatics Centres for the past five years about the need for adopting OA. I have spoken to NAAS and the top brass of ICAR about the need for adopting OA.
I am also in touch with policy makers in other developing countries, international organizations and funding agencies.
The B'lore meeting was held at IISc with the cooperation of IASc and was attended among others by Prof. Balakrishnan and Prof. Gadagkar and several other Fellows of the Academies.
I am talking to people at all levels - from the level of technical assistants and officers who actually set up and maintain OA archives to Directors of institutions and Secretaries to the Government of India and Presidents of Academies.
I am not the only one who is trying to promote OA in India and the developing world. There are many others and all of us recognise the importance of working together. In fact I have coauthored papers with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop, and Leslie Chan. As the governments happen to be the major providers of funds for research in all developing countries, we need to persuade them to mandate. How can we neglect or ignore them? Besides we believe in sharing knowledge (that is why we are ready to hold workshops and spend so much time and energy in disseminating news on current developments) and building multi stakeholder partnerships.
[Incidentally, for an earlier workshop (held at Hyderabad as part of the Science Congress) we even sought some funds from DSIR and NIC, but did not get any. (Our application to DSIR was filed rather late.) We were very hopeful of getting some funds from NIC, as they were actively engaged in open access initiatives, but did not get any. Then we approached OSI and a Bombay-based good samaritan, and both of them agreed very readily to support the travel of three speakers, and ICRISAT provided free accommodation.] . This time around, but for the timely intervention of a DSIR officer the Chinese participants would not have made it to the Bangalore workshop.
To conclude, rest assured we have been working with policy makers both within and outside the government and we will continue to do so. I wonder how anyone could have got the impression that we are not involving policy makers from the government.
Best wishes.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
