Friends:
Here is a brief report from Prof. Stevan Harnad on the status of OA archives
around the world. In India we have been talking about OA archiving and
digital libraries and their advantages for a few years now, but Prof. Harnad
could find only six archives from India! Brazil has 14 and China 6. We have
conducted several workshops (at MSSRF, IISc and other institutions) and at
least 150 people have been trained to set up such archives. INSA devoted a
whole day at their Annual Meeting at Pune (December 2003) to a brainstorming
session on open access. Both Prof. Valiathan and Dr mashelkar (the immediate
past and the present Presidents of INSA) are great supporters of open
access. We have world class experts (to name only a few, Rajashekar at NCSI
and Prasad at DRTC) who are willing to help anyone who wants to set up an
archive. Chennai-based The Hindu and Frontline have carried well-researched
articles and an editorial on open access. And yet we have not established
more than half a dozen archives. Both researchers and librarians in India
need to introspect. Before the end of the year we should have at least a
hundred archives in India.
Even in physics and astronomy, where there is a central international
archive (arXiv) with a mirror site at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences
in Chennai, only a small fraction of Indian physicists deposit their papers.
It is difficult to understand why.
A few days ago Churchill Brothers' prolific striker Ghanaian Yakubu Yusufi
was interviewed in The Times of India about the sad state of football in
India. When asked about facilities, he asked "What facilities? There are
none." The grounds are aweful and maintenance very poor. He went on to say
that at least half a dozen players could play in the Second Division Leagues
in Europe or UK and gain valuable experience, but either they were happy
with the money they got here or THEY LACKED GUTS.
Are we in science and information profession in India content with status
quo or do we lack guts to do something new? We can certainly not complain
about lack of facilities. The top few hundred higher education and research
institutions have the necessary equipment, connectivity and human resources.
On the OA journals front the situation is somewhat better. All journals of
both the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy
are open access. MedKnow Publications in Bombay brings out more than twenty
open access journals in the area of medicine, and their production quality
and web presence are comparable to the best in the world. NIC provides open
access to about 30 journals. And the ICMR jounal is open access. I am told
that NMJI will soon go open access. There may be others.
But we need to strengthen OAA in India and other developing countries. I
have tried hard to bring together leading researchers, policy makers and
Academies of India, China and Brazil to talk about OAA. The meeting is yet
to take place. We could invite representatives of the Inter-Academy Council,
the Inter-Academy Panel and the Wellcome Trust as well as experts such as
Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber, Leslie Chan and Melissa Hagemann to such a
meeting. If these three leading countries take to OAA in a big way, then the
rest of the developing world will adopt OAA readily.
Best wishes.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad"
Here are some recent data on the state of Open Access Eprint Archives Worldwide (Registry created and maintained by Tim Brody, Southampton University):
(1) The Institutional Archives Registry http://archives.eprints.org/ recently updated, now indexes 388 archives in 39 countries. (OAIster harvests from 405 archives, but some of those are not OA Archives.)
(2) For most OA Archives the Registry tracks their monthly growth in number of articles. There are also summary analyses by categories: * Research Institutional or Departmental (169) * Research Cross-Institution (49) * e-Theses (55) * e-Journal/Publication (32) * Database (8) * Demonstration (39) * Other (36)
(3) The top 10 countries (10 tied for 10th place) are: 1 United States (114) 2 United Kingdom (51) 3 Germany (28) 4 Canada (26) 5 Sweden (17) 5 France (17) 6 Australia (16) 6 Netherlands (16) 7 Brazil (14) 8 Italy (13) 9 India (6) 10 Spain (4) 10 Japan (4) 10 Denmark (4) 10 Hungary (4) 10 Finland (4) 10 Belgium (4) 10 China (4)
(4) The most widely used OAI-creating software packages: * GNU EPrints v2 & v2 (161) * DSpace (65) * CDSWare (3) * ARNO (2) * Fedora (1) * DiVA (1) * other (various) (155)
Time-plots of the growth in the number of archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=analysis
Time-plots of the growth in the number of articles in each archive (if an archive's data is missing, it means it is not yet celestial-compliant: please contact the archive administrator to urge them to correct this so their progress can be tracked): http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?page=all
If your institution has -- or you know of -- OAI-compliant OA archives, please register them at: http://archives.eprints.org/index.php?action=add
If your institution has an OA self-archiving policy, please register it at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
For further information on institutional OA self-archiving, see: http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/presentations.html and http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h... Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://romeo.eprints.org/ http://archives.eprints.org/