Friends, This is in reply to Dr Vyasamoorthy's post dated 15 April. 1. The statement "now India is the third largest contributor of scholarly research* followed by China*" is NOT true. Yes, India is the third largest in terms of number of papers published annually, but China does not follow Indi. Indeed China publishes the largest number of papers among all nations, nearly four times the number from India, as per *Web of Science* (and *Scopus*), followed by the US. 2. The STIP 2020, https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/STIP_Doc_1.4_Dec2020.pdf is still in the draft stage, more than three years after the draft was prepared. The draft was prepared during Prof. VijayRaghavan's tenure as PSA. I know many people who were part of the group that drafted the chapter pertaining to open access. They are knowledgeable and were proud and hapy to contribute to a useful and important task. There were different points of view and intense discussions. But now, looking back, all we have today is a mere draft, not a policy. 3. "The government is also contemplating to adopt “one nation one subscription” to make scholarly research accessible to every Indian without any cost and has started discussions with 70 publishers." The negotiation with the publishers started three years ago. The flip side of the ONOS plan is so far no agreement seems to have been reached and that every year individual institutions are asked to subscribe to journals towards the fag end of the financial year. Some members of this Forum might wish to share their experience. 4. "In India, the open access movement has gained momentum in the last few yearshttps://www.nature.com/articles/nindia.2020.125. Now, it is one of the leading promoters of open access ..." Not true again. By no stretch of imagination can one call India a leading promoter of OA. India was one of the earliest to set up an institutional repository, when IISc came up with its EPrints repository (an IR) in early 2002. How many IRs do we have now? We have more than 1,100 universities, and several hundred other RPIs (research performing institutions) but most of them do not have an IR. Also, look at the per cent of the more than 100,000 papers Indian researchers publish annually that are OA - far below 50% when OA % for the world as a whole is above 50. If we are genuinely and seriously interested in adopting country-wide open access, the minimum we need to do is to (1) mandate immediate open access to at least all publicly funded research not through APC--charging journals but through institutional and global OA repositories, and (2) stop paying APC to journal publishers, especially if the research is funded/supported in some way by public body/agency. With best wishes, Arun
participants (1)
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Subbiah Arunachalam