Friends: Why OA is important and why should we embrace wholeheartedly in India? Pleae listen to what Mike Taylor says. 1. First his talk at ESOF 2014 a few days ago. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdxOMIA1B3Q&google_comment_id=z12myjlbzvarfzs2223qdpbpyzqfelpcd
2. "TheWellcome Trust says http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Polic... “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions.” We need more funding and hiring bodies to make such declarations. Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals." -- Mike Taylor, Bristol University, UK, in *Discover*. < http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/02/21/its-not-academic-how-publi...
3. "Happily, we now live in a world that has much better tools for research. It’s a truism that the internet has changed everything, but the scale and pervasiveness of that change is not always recognised. It isn’t just that papers can be sent instantaneously anywhere in the world, cutting out the need for publishers’ distribution networks. It isn’t just that entirely new groups now have access to research: patient groups http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/supporters/patient-groups/index.shtml, unaffiliated scholars working into their retirement http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418859&c=1 , small businesses http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/10/06/the-scholarly-poor-industry/, GPs and dentists http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/10/05/the-scholarly-poor-dentists/, enterprising schoolchildren http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168, thinktanks http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/10/07/the-scholarly-poor-the-climate-code.... It isn’t even just that access to research is literally a life-and-death matter for developing-world scientists. It’s more than this. When the barriers to access dissolve, mystique evaporates with them. Read an interesting newspaper article about a scientific discovery? Click the link, see the paper. Researching the evolution of dinosaurs and find yourself wondering about recent changes in how evolution is taught? Go look at some papers. Don’t even stop to think about it: they’re at your fingertips. Most importantly, as Cameron Neylon has outlined http://cameronneylon.net/blog/15264/, modern science is increasingly about networks rather than individuals. Much important new research is based on synthesis and large-scale analysis – text-mining, induction across a huge corpus of data, and so on. This is the kind of work that computers can do with astonishing efficiency when they have free access to information. At the moment, we don’t know what kinds of discoveries await this analysis. History teaches us that discovery is often serendipitous. In a world full of computers analysing massive data sets for patterns no-one has yet seen, the chances are very good we’ll see breakthroughs. At web scale you can manufacture serendipity." -- Mike Taylor, University of Bristol, UK, in *The Independent.* *<**http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/09/the-future-of-academic-publishing/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/09/the-future-of-academic-publishing/* 4. And finally, the Open and Shut interview Mike gave Richard Poynder. *<http://poynder.blogspot.in/2013/07/open-access-where-are-we-what-still.html http://poynder.blogspot.in/2013/07/open-access-where-are-we-what-still.html>* *Arun* -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.