Friends: I was asked to speak to public librarians of Tamil Nadu about open access (in the context of public libraries) and I thought I would look at what I have been saying in the past twenty odd years. Looking back, I felt I owe a great debt to Richard Poynder who through a series of email interviews got me to articulate my views in a cogent fashion. Here are some of the interviews. http://poynder.blogspot.in/2006/05/why-india-needs-open-access.html http://poynder.blogspot.in/2006/05/open-access-science-in-which-no-one-is.ht... http://poynder.blogspot.in/2010/05/letter-to-cgiar-in-support-of-open.html http://poynder.blogspot.in/2014/06/open-access-in-india-q-with-subbiah.html In one of them, he asked me about the unfinished tasks: RP: What still needs to be done, and by whom? SA: I will restrict my reply to India. The heads of funding agencies — almost all of them agencies of the Government of India — should mandate OA and insist that research institutions set up institutional repositories. Currently, I am in conversation with two of these agencies with regard to developing an OA policy for them, and I sense a positive outcome. The Indian parliament should enact a law requiring that research papers (and the associated data) resulting from public funding are made open. As I noted, Argentina already has such a law. India should introduce one too. Fellows of all academies should send memoranda supporting open access to the Ministers of Science and Technology, Human Resource Development, Health and Agriculture. I am in touch with the President of one of the academies to this effect. Citizens in India should form a Taxpayers Alliance for Open Access, and university students should form a nationwide “Students for open access” forum. For OA advocates specifically the priorities should be to: (1) convince the large number of researchers of the need to adopt OA, and of the need to retain certain rights in their work, rather than surrender them all by signing the copyright agreements that publishers put in front of them, (2) convince the directors of research laboratories and vice chancellors of universities to set up interoperable institutional repositories, (3) lobby parliamentarians to enact legislation requiring that all publicly funded research is made openly accessible, and of course, (4) join forces with like-minded people, and those who can bring knowledge and skills that we do not have. I am thinking, for instance, of experts in copyright law and Creative Commons — scholars like Lawrence Liang and activists like Sunil Abraham. We in India should be part of the international OA movement and learn from the experience of others. I realize much of what I what I wanted to happen have not happened. We all need to work to make them happen. Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.