Dear Jean Claude: Here are some facts about the Indian situation. All journals published by the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences are now OA. Both these Academies receives grants from the Government of India (through the Department of Science and Technology). The Council of Scientific & Industrial Research publishes about a dozen journals from its NISCAIR office in New Delhi. As far as I know none of them is open access and in fact all of them are print journals with a subscription price. A private firm called MedKnow Publications undertakes to publish medical journals, mostly owned by professional societies. Right now they have more than thirty OA titles (although the print version may have a subscription price). The National Informatics Centre, another Government Department, manages the Indian Medlars Centre. This centre also publishes more than thirty OA journals (not owned by them). Besides, NIC-Indian Medlars Centre has set up an archive for full text biomedical research papers and it has more than 600 papers. But the best known Indian archive is the one at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It has more than 2,000 papers. The National Chemical Laboratory in Pune has a repository, but they are concentrating on uploading Ph D theses. The National Institute of Technology at Rourkela has an archive with about 150 papers. For a vast country, what we have achieved so far is miniscule. Close to 75% of research is funded by the Central (Federal) Government in Delhi, and yet most Indian research papers are not easily accessible to other Indian researchers. Open archiving is perhaps the best solution and the government departments that fund research have not yet come forward to mandate self-archiving. It is likely that the University Grants Commission which kind of oversees the universities may come up with an OA policy soon. Regards. Arun --- Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:

Dear Jan,

Indeed, you have missed something.

After our long discussion, Stevan and I, support was defined as follows:

1. Direct transfer of funds to a journal through some governmental or para-governmental body (e.g. a Council, a publicly supported university, etc.)in the form of direct subsidies (e.g. the 140+ journals directly supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research council of Canada);

2 Indirect support, i.e. free access to space, equipment and work time within a publicly supported institution (King and Tenopir mention this as hidden form of publishing support and some publishers have even deemed it "unfair" competition...

Stevan raised the very point you mentioned in yet another attempt brush aside as marginal or irrelevant the possibility of mandating certain categories of publicly-supported journals to OA. I have made it clear in my response that I keep the form of "support" you mention out of the discussion: it really relates to the seller-customer relationship. I would also include in this non-public support the direct transfer of publishing fees (instead of a subscription fee) - e.g. the $3,000 fee practised your new employer.

My point was *not* to try showing that commercial journals are publicly supported; my point was to demonstrate that, in many countries, a (often overwhelming) majority of journals are supported by public subsidies, either directly or indirectly. Because of this, I argue they can be mandated by governments to go OA. Incidentally, Stevan agreed with this proposition (while still maintaining that it touched only a small number of largely irrelevant or inferior journals).

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I've clearly missed something. Whence this discussion? Is there a problem? One could easily make the case that *all* scholarly journals are supported by public money. If not directly,

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indirectly, as all journals get a substantial part of their revenues (often the majority) from publicly funded institutions, who pay for the subscriptions, licences, page charges, reprints, and the like.

That's true for many industries, though. Think of road construction, and, dare I say it, arms manufacturing.

Jan Velterop

On 17 Sep 2005, at 15:20, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:

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A member of the library of the Academy of science of China has responded to my query about public support of journals in her country. here is what she had to say:

As far as we know, all the scholarly journals in China may more or less receive public support. Editorial office of the scholarly journals are always affiliated to a certain institute, school or society, which makes them more credible to readers. The institute, school or society would devote part of their budget supporting the journals. Nowadays more and more journals are turning to self-financing, but

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public support in the form of space, equipment or work-time of employees.

Consequently, the case of China appears clear: all or nearly all scholarly publications in China receive some

Le samedi 17 septembre 2005 à 18:17 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit : then certainly they still receive form of public support.

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In all three cases thus far surveyed - Canada,

Chile, China - we

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find a majority of journals supported by public money. From Chile, we hear that the Chilean situation is replicated across the whole continent.

If this is a marginal phenomenon, we must redefine the word "marginal"...

jcg

-- Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon Dept. of Comparative Literature University of Montreal PO Box 6128, Downtown Branch Montreal, QC H3C 3J7 Canada

-- Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon Dept. of Comparative Literature University of Montreal PO Box 6128, Downtown Branch Montreal, QC H3C 3J7 Canada

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