Dear Friends, I happen to visit Knowledge Commission Website < http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/ > yesterday. There I came come across a report submitted by "Working Group on Open Access and Open Educational Resources" < http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_open_course.pdf
It talks of two things – Open Educational Resources and Open Access. While I am happy that it mentions that India has done well in regard to Open Access. However I am disappointed with its annexures. These annexures provide exhaustive lists of various resources, but fail to mention any resource from India. It mentions PubMed (From NLM of US) but ignores IndMED – http://indmed.nic.in - the Indian bibliographic database indexing Indian Medical Journals and providing access without any restriction. Even the 38 full text journals available from medIND – http://medind.nic.in are ignored. It lists Bioline - an Open Access repository but fails to mention OpenMED@NIC - http://openmed.nic.in and other 24 Indian Open Access Repositories. It mentions Open Access publishers like BioMED but ignores Indian Open Access publishers like MedKnow. Interestingly it lists subscription-based service from Science Direct but fails mention work being done by Informatics, especially OpenJGate. Does not even talk of Vidyanidhi project – perhaps the first modern Digital Library concept from India. This Document lists Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam as one of its members – however it appears Prof. Arunachalam himself is ignorant of this report (Check out his reply to discussion on this topic at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oadl/). Then, should we believe that the report has been written by some Post Graduate student without consulting the working group member 'experts'? Well we have an example of "Mashelkar committee on Patent Law" which had to be withdrawn when it was found to be a case of plagiarism < http://www.hindu.com/2007/02/22/stories/2007022206751200.htm >. I hope this is not the case here. Perhaps the Open Access concept has not been understood as yet. --Sukhdev Singh. http://www.sukhdevsingh.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.