Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 10:25:29 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun@mssrf.res.in> Friends: A number of Open Access journals (published by BioMedCentral) are already included in JCR and they have (decent) impact factors. Other Open Access journals like BMJ and Current Science are also indexed in JCR (for a very long time) and are given impact factor values every year. There are hundreds of Open Access journals. The 'Free Medical Journals' site lists close to a thousand titles. The Lund University has started compiling a list of open access journals. Just try a Google or Teoma search and you will find titles in many fields of S&T. In a previous intervention Dr Tapaswi had said that LIS professionals "can only remain silent spectators". I beg to differ. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL, USA) has a strong initiative called SPARC. Please visit the ARL website for more details. Major LIS discussion lists in the USA talk about these issues all the time. Indeed the Open Access movement got a fillip when these librarians started discussing the 'serials crisis' a few years ago. In our own country, people like Dr Rajashekar of NCSI and Prof. Shalini Urs of Mysore University are active in digital library and eprint initiatives. I suggest that organizations such as SIS, IASLIC, and IATLIS promote learning among their members about the pros and cons of Eprint archives (both self-archiving and institutional archiving), and Open Access Initiatives. At the risk of being called immodest, I refer to my paper "Information for research in developing countries: Information technology -- Friend or foe?" in Bulletin of ASIST, Vol. 29, N0. 5, June/July 2003, pp. 16-21. If anyone is interested, I can send electronic copies of this article as well as my presentation at the Volkswagen Foundation Millennium Debate, which also talks about the need for developing country researchers (and librarians) to use ICTs more efficiently. The point is up to the 1990s there was a reason for developing country institutions to keep complaining about the information gap between the rich and the poor countries. Fortunately the advent of the Internet has given us the potential to change the situation and overcome the information inequality. Look at the physicists. Thanks to Paul Ginsparg and friends, virtually every physicist in the world sends his paper to arXiv and often gets valuable feedback and comments from other physicists. No physicist waits for a paper to appear in print in Physical Review, PRL or Pramana. These journals merely serve the archival function. The question is why are the rest of the scientists follow the physicists and make their results openly and easily available to their colleagues everywhere. Why are not our librarians coming forward to set up such archives (as IISc has done)? Subbiah Arunachalam