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 ---------------------- The presentations made at the workshop on electronic publishing and open access: developing country perspectives, Bangalore, 2-3 November 2006, are now available at <www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/OAworkshop2006/>. ___________________________________________________________ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com