Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 11:13:54 +0100 (BST)
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
To: dgcsir@hq.csir.res.in
Dear Dr Mashelkar:
Here is some good news from onr of the largest funders
of biomedical research in the world. CSIR and other
government agencies in India funding and supporting
S&T research may do well to adopt a similar policy --
all papers resulting from public funding must be made
available via open access archives (or published in
100% open access journals).
Early this week I attended a three-day workshop on
networking for higher education and research in Africa
held at CERN. It was a very fruitful meeting where
stakeholders from Africa and Europe came together and
discussed all related issues. Mr Ponraj from
Rashtrapathi Bhavan was there and in his talk he told
about how India is helping Africa in its own way.
Africans are really looking forward to working closely
with India and learning from our experience.
I also attended a few sessions at the WSIS PrepCom-3
and several institutions and groups are interested in
promoting open access to scientific literature through
the WSIS process. I think the time is ripe for India
to (1) go ahead and adopt open access in a big way,
and (2) to provide support to Africa in going ahead
with open access. Africa is looking for low cost
equipment (PCs, routers, etc) and low-cost
connectivity and Internet access. These are areas
India is reasonably well-placed to help. And the
forthcoming WSIS meet at Tunis is a great opportunity
to make an announcement.
We could also depute a team from IISc, Bangalore
(NCSI), to conduct a series of workshops on setting up
OA archives in Africa.
I will be grateful if you could lead India's efforts
in this area.
Regards.
Arun
(Subbiah Arunachalam)
-------
Wellcome Trust OA mandate starts tomorrow
Open Access a Must for Wellcome Trust Researchers, a
Wellcome Trust press release, undated but released
today.
Excerpt:
Next week (October) the Wellcome Trust becomes the
first scientific research funder to insist that papers
emanating from its grant awards are placed in an open
access repository. From the 1st October it will become
a condition of funding, that papers will have to be
posted on PubMed Central (PMC) the free-to access,
life sciences archive developed by the National
Institutes of Health and made accessible within 6
months of publication. To facilitate this, the
Wellcome Trust has with the help of NIH
established a manuscript submission system, through
which papers accepted for publication in a
peer-reviewed journal can be deposited in PMC. From
the 1st October next year all existing Trust grant
holders will have to deposit future papers into PubMed
Central. This delay will allow existing grant holders
time to adjust to the new policy and let us know what
problems if any they may experience, affording us
time to overcome them. During this time the Trust,
working in partnership with other UK life sciences
funders, plans to establish a UK version of PubMed
Central UKPMC.
Wellcome-funded researchers should submit their papers
to PMC via the NIH manuscript submission system and
consult the Wellcome page of manuscript submission
information.
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