Friends: Here is a short news story on why the Wellcome Trust favours open access archiving. It is time for us in India (and other developing countries) to insist that all publicly-funded research be made available on open access archives - such as the Eprints archive at the Indian Institute of Science. As Robert Terry says, there are two roads to open access: Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Archiving. In India many important journals - those published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, INSA, MedKnow Publications, etc. - are available on open access, although the Academy journals can improve their web presence. The MedKnow journals are technically as good as the best OA journals in the world. But we are rather poor in OAA. The IISc archive and the library and information science repository put together by Dr A R D Prasad at ISI, Bangalore, come to mind readily. In a country with more than 250 universities and several hundred publicly-funded research labs, there are only half a dozen archives as of today. It is a mystery why the other institutions are not having archives of their own. A recent survey by Alma Swan reveals that many researchers are ignorant and there is a need for creating awareness. She also points out that most researchers are ready to deposit their papers in an open access archive if they are told to do so by the head of the institution or the funding agency! May be we should try that - Vice chancellors of universities and Directors of research labs and heads of funding agencies may demand that all researchers place their papers in a publicly accessible archive, preferably one set up at their own institution. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ------------- The Wellcome Trust's commitment to OA Robert Terry, Funding the Way to Open Access, PLoS Biology, March 2005. Excerpt: 'Imagine this scenario. You're the director of one of the world's largest medical research charities, and you receive notification from one of your funded investigators in Africa reporting some exciting progress toward the development of a vaccine for malaria. The work has just been published, so you log onto the Web to do a quick keyword search, and a link to the article is brought up on your screen. Then imagine the frustration when you click on the link to read the message, "Access Denied --access to this journal is restricted to registered institutional and individual subscribers." And there's the rub: this actually happened to the Director of the Wellcome Trust....I now believe it is the funders of research --charities, governments, and other publicly funded bodies such as national research agencies-- who hold the purse strings that can untie scientific discoveries from a publishing market that is no longer serving the community as well as it could. That is why today the Trust is a leading advocate for enabling free access to research literature through support for new publishing models, such as that of the Public Library of Science, and the establishment of publicly accessible repositories, working in partnership with the United States National Institutes of Health-funded PubMed Central....The first Trust-commissioned study described how scientific research publishing has traditionally worked and why it can be described, in economic terms, as a failing market....This then begs the question of what alternatives there are to this traditional system, now that the Internet has become the researcher's tool of choice for searching and accessing the literature. The second piece of research commissioned by the Trust looked at different business models for research publishing, in order to address this question....This study convinced the Trust that the best way forward to improve access to research findings would be through open access to scientific research articles. This essentially means two things: first, that the copyright holder or holders must grant to the public a free, irrevocable, perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, and make derivative works of their research article, in any medium for any purpose (excepting those that constitute plagiarism or other dishonest acts, of course); and second, that a digital copy must be deposited in an open public archival repository (for example, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central)....For a medical charity like the Trust, I believe it is our duty to actively encourage the most efficient processes available to maximise the likelihood that the research we fund will have the greatest possible health benefit.' Robert Terry is Senior Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust. Friends: Here is a short news story on why the Wellcome Trust favours open access archiving. It is time for us in India (and other developing countries) to insist that all publicly-funded research be made available on open access archives - such as the Eprints archive at the Indian Institute of Science. As Robert Terry says, there are two roads to open access: Open Access Journals (OAJ) and Open Access Archiving. In India many important journals - those published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, INSA, MedKnow Publications, etc. - are available on open access, although the Academy journals can improve their web presence. The MedKnow journals are technically as good as the best OA journals in the world. But we are rather poor in OAA. The IISc archive and the library and information science repository put together by Dr A R D Prasad at ISI, Bangalore, come to mind readily. In a country with more than 250 universities and several hundred publicly-funded research labs, there are only half a dozen archives as of today. It is a mystery why the other institutions are not having archives of their own. A recent survey by Alma Swan reveals that many researchers are ignorant and there is a need for creating awareness. She also points out that most researchers are ready to deposit their papers in an open access archive if they are told to do so by the head of the institution or the funding agency! May be we should try that - Vice chancellors of universities and Directors of research labs and heads of funding agencies may demand that all researchers place their papers in a publicly accessible archive, preferably one set up at their own institution. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ------------- The Wellcome Trust's commitment to OA [A] Robert Terry, http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030097 Funding the Way to Open Access , PLoS Biology , March 2005. Excerpt: 'Imagine this scenario. You're the director of one of the world's largest medical research charities, and you receive notification from one of your funded investigators in Africa reporting some exciting progress toward the development of a vaccine for malaria. The work has just been published, so you log onto the Web to do a quick keyword search, and a link to the article is brought up on your screen. Then imagine the frustration when you click on the link to read the message, "Access Denied --access to this journal is restricted to registered institutional and individual subscribers." And there's the rub: this actually happened to the Director of the Wellcome Trust....I now believe it is the funders of research --charities, governments, and other publicly funded bodies such as national research agencies-- who hold the purse strings that can untie scientific discoveries from a publishing market that is no longer serving the community as well as it could. That is why today the Trust is a leading advocate for enabling free access to research literature through support for new publishing models, such as that of the Public Library of Science, and the establishment of publicly accessible repositories, working in partnership with the United States National Institutes of Healthfunded PubMed Central....The first Trust-commissioned study described how scientific research publishing has traditionally worked and why it can be described, in economic terms, as a failing market....This then begs the question of what alternatives there are to this traditional system, now that the Internet has become the researcher's tool of choice for searching and accessing the literature. The second piece of research commissioned by the Trust looked at different business models for research publishing, in order to address this question....This study convinced the Trust that the best way forward to improve access to research findings would be through open access to scientific research articles. This essentially means two things: first, that the copyright holder or holders must grant to the public a free, irrevocable, perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, and make derivative works of their research article, in any medium for any purpose (excepting those that constitute plagiarism or other dishonest acts, of course); and second, that a digital copy must be deposited in an open public archival repository (for example, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central)....For a medical charity like the Trust, I believe it is our duty to actively encourage the most efficient processes available to maximise the likelihood that the research we fund will have the greatest possible health benefit.' Robert Terry is Senior Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust.