October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.

Open Access¹ is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.

The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Today, the OAIster search engine provides access to 17,799,314 Open Access records from 1015 contributors. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals. Both INSA and IASc have made their journals open access journals. Indian Institute of Science has an EPrints repository and it has over 11,000 papers and this year, the Institute's centenary year, the number is expected to cross 23,000. NIT, Rourkela, has mandated open access to all faculty research papers. There are about thirty OA institutional repositories in India today. The IITs and IISc have formed a consortium and are making their class lectures open access under a project called NPTEL. These lectures are available in web, video and YouTube formats.

About CCMG-JMI

The Centre seeks to enhance the integration and development of interdisciplinary research into the media in India and South Asia. To this end, various programmes envisaged at CCMG will contribute in the following manner:

1. Methodologically, work at the Centre will examine and seek to develop new approaches both, quantitative and qualitative. This being a recurrent motif across all thematic rubrics pursued.

2. Archiving the measurement and analysis of media production, content and reception takes place in many organisations, but very little of such data is available to researchers, or is analysed comparatively. To address this void, the Centre aims to create an archive of media research data of value to researchers across South Asia.

3. Comparative perspectives across disciplines, mediascapes and regions are of utmost importance to the centre’s body of objectives. Comparative analyses will require reconciling data based on differing calibration approaches rooted in, often, contesting intellectual traditions and policy foundations.

4. Networking will be structured to aid the regular association of media scholars and policy analysts from varied, contiguous disciplines. Equally, the Centre will act as a focal point for dialogues between social scientists, civil society actors and media professionals who rarely are able to share a platform.