Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 11:41:10 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
" What was the primary objective of the Chennai workshops, and what do you think has been achieved/will be achieved as a result?" The primary aim of the workshop was to help Indian research laboratories and hihger educational institutions set up their own interoperable institutional archives and to raise the awareness of researchers (faculty, students and laboratory scientists) and librarians on the need for and usefulness of self archiving. Thanks to the dedicated and competent faculty, we hope we have achieved considerable success. The 48 participants [25 in the first workshop held during 2-4 May and 23 in the second held during 6-8 May] are now exposed to the concept and philosophy of open access (both open access journals and open access archives), the Eprints software [incorporating OAI interoperability protocol and all the important modules] and examples of both open access journals and open access archives. From our experience with the first workshop and the feedback received from participants, we made some changes in the second workshop which placed much greater emphasis on actually loading the eprints software on to a Linux server. Particiapants of the workshop actually loaded a few papers and created the metadata. We hear that already within a week after the workshops, Mr Madhan of National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, has set up a server at NITRKL. The National Chemical Laboratory has also begun work on archiving papers by its scientists. I expect to see at least a dozen archives up and running in the next four months. It is not just me. The OA workshops and the OA movement in India is backed by some very important people. Prof. M S Valiathan, President of the Indian National Science Academy, and Dr R A Mashelkar, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, have extended their support. Soon INSA is likely to set up an archive for papers by ALL FELLOWS of INSA. The INSA Fellows constitute the cream de la cream of Indian science. Prof. M S Swaminathan and Prof. P Balaram, two of India's most respected scientists addressed the particiapnts and motivated them to adopt OA. After three months, I plan to do monitoring and evaluation; I or someone else such as Dr T B Rajashekar of Indian Institute of Science will visit some of the centres and talk to the persons implementng as well as the researchers depositing their papers. Stevan Harnad recently asked which country will be the first to be totally open access; I wish India should try to win this honour! " What further issues still need to be resolved?" The 48 participants have had a good exposure. When they actually start implementing what they have learnt surely they will face some problems. It is for this reason we have set up a discussion group (OA-India dgroup) so they can discuss among themselves. Incidentally, all four resource persons are members of this group. Also we had specially invited a Linux expert (Mr Suil Abraham of Mahiti) who will now be an evangelist for OA in India. We also need to persuade vice chancellors of universities and directors of research laboratories to proactively promote OA archiving in their institutions. We should ensure that they provide a dedicated Linux server and a decent Internet connection for the archive. " What would you envisage being placed in any archives that are created in the wake of the workshops (pre-prints/post-prints/self-archived papers that have been published in traditional peer- reviewed material/papers published in OA journals etc. etc., or something else?)" We have suggested that the archives (or institutional repositories) may be used to place preprints, postprints, PDF versions of published articles (where permited by the journal publishers), theses, etc. Indeed, the IISc archive is moving towards a repository of all publications of the institute. " There seems to be considerable confusion surrounding the topic of OA today (what it is, what needs to be done to achieve it, who should do what etc.). Based on what you witnessed at the Chennai workshops how would you envisage OA developing in India?" Yes. There is confusion. Much of these confusions were cleared by the faculty. Issues of copyright were discussed and participants were alerted to the list of journals permiting authors to archive preprints/postprints/both prepared by Dr N V Joshi of Indian Institute of Science on a request from Stevan Harnad. As and when participants start implementing, they will confront with some problems, and thse will be reflected in the discussion list. " Does OA raise specific issues/have particular implications in the Indian context? If so what, and why?" By placing Indian papers in interoperable archives, we can gain greater visibility for work done in India. But we also need to read papers written by scientists elsewhere, especially in the advanced countries. It is important for us, therefore, that scientists in advanced countries also place their papers in publicly available archives - either distributed institutional archives or centralised archives such as arXiv. The one great benefit I see is that if a large number of Indian papers become available through institutional archives, then institutions in other developing countries will start setting up their own archives. " What implications do you think the workshops will have for a) researchers, universities, and libraries in India, and b) the OA movement at large?" Overall, the OA movement in India will have many beneficial effects. First of all, scientists and research students will gain greater visibility to their work. Which in turn will add to the reputation and image of thir universities (research labs). Librarians, if they take the responsibility of setting up and running the archives, can improve their status among the academic community. The OA movement will make the field level playing for scientists in India and the rest of the developing countries. Already the workshops are being talked about as well organised and there are queries about when we will hold the next set of workshops on OA! My plan is to organise a meeting on OA for policy makers from India, China and Brazil, preferably at our Foundation (MSSRF, Chennai, India) and invite a few senior scientists from Third World Academy of Sciences, InterAcademy Panel and InterAcademy Council apart from policy makers from the three largest developing countries. The Director of the British Council at Chennai, Ms Eunice Crook, who addressed the participants of the first workshop, is looking at enlarging the virtual activities of the British Council Library (rather than the physical aspects) and is thinking of incresaing cross-country flow of scientific and scholarly information through OA archives. Leslie Chan, one of our resource persons, spooke at the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, etc. after the workshops were over. I hear these were very well received and the scientific community in India is getting more aware of the virtues of OA ***** If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks and regards. Arun