From Biobytes, Vol. 1, 18 December 2006 [http://biobytes.bicmku.in/]
A Perspective on Open Access Publishing
Subbiah Arunachalam Email:
arun@mssrf.res.in
Much of research in India in the fields of science,
technology, agriculture, medicine, social sciences,
economics, etc. is funded out of taxpayers' money. A
few years ago, a DST report quoted a figure of about
75% for the share of publicly funded scientific
research. However, the findings of these research
programmes, usually in the form of research papers
published in refereed journals, are not easily
accessible even to Indian scientists at large let
alone the public, for the simple reason scientists
publish their research papers in a wide variety of
journals published from many countries and no library
in India or for that matter anywhere in the world can
afford to subscribe to all these journals. Also, some
journal publishers fix their subscription prices at
astronomical levels.
As a consequence research published by scientists at
the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai, which
would be of great relevance to researchers say in a
university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by
the university scientists. Both groups receive funds
from the same source, viz. the Indian Government, and
yet what one does is not easily accessible to the
other. What is more it need not be. The authors at the
Tuberculosis research Institute may publish their
papers in any journal they want to. But if, at the
same time, they also place the papers in an
interoperable institutional open access archive (or
repository) anyone with an Internet connection can
access it. This is precisely why enlightened
institutions such as the Indian Academy of Sciences
and the Indian Institute of Science are subscribing to
the idea of open access. All eleven Academy journals
are open access. Anyone anywhere in the world can
access any paper published in these journals - full
text and not just abstracts - through the Internet.
The Indian Institute of Science is maintaining an open
access repository of full text papers and they are on
their way to placing every paper published by the IISc
faculty and students in this repository. Currently
they have more than 5,000 papers. CERN, the Centre for
Nuclear research in Geneva has placed more than 75,000
papers in its repository. Many Indian physicists have
been placing their research papers - both preprints
and postprints - in an international repository called
arXiv. But a vast majority of Indian scientists are
not making their papers available via open access.
What can we the common people, the taxpaying public,
do? Well in the USA they have an organization called
the Alliance for Taxpayer Access; please see
http://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:5584.334940148/rid:24ef8cfe58...
for details. They have over 75 institutional members
and they are fighting for open access to all publicly
funded research. Through their advocacy, the Alliance
members hope to change not only the US policy but also
the attitude and behaviour of individual scientists.
Enlightened Indians in all walks of life could form a
national organization similar to the US Alliance for
Taxpayer Access and persuade the government to mandate
open access all research publications resulting from
public funding. The Alliance could write to major
funding agencies and apex bodies (such as DST, DSIR,
ICAR, ICMR, DAE, DRDO, Dept of Space, Department of
Ocean Development, UGC, etc.), the Science Advisory
Council to the Prime Minister and the science
academies and professional societies urging them to
adopt a comprehensive open access policy in India. In
the US a bill is at an advanced stage of discussion in
the Congress and in the UK six of the eight Research
Councils have already announced their support to open
access. The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest funders
of life science research, has mandated OA for all
papers resulting from their support. Surely we in
India can open up the scientific and scholarly
literature.
Subbiah Arunachalam
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The presentations made at the workshop on electronic
publishing and open access: developing country
perspectives, Bangalore, 2-3 November 2006, are now
available at