Dear Friends, Check out the following link where Padmanabhan Balaram, director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India tells K. S. Jayaraman why he favours 'open archives' as the way forward for scientific publishing. http://www.scidev.net/en/features/open-archives-the-alternative-to-open-acce... An extract: -- Why is scientific publishing becoming such a contentious area? "The reason is simple. Much research in countries such as India is publicly-funded. Scientists do the research work and then publish their findings. But journals use these papers to make money. The real question is: do the commercial publishers give enough back to the community that keeps them going?" ... --How is the debate going? "The main debate is between publishers and committed open access advocates. The people who should be really concerned — the working scientists — form a huge silent majority. They either have no view or choose not to engage in the controversy." .. --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.