Centre for Internet and Society

Withdrawal of Journal Access is a Wake-up Call for Researchers in the Developing World

subbiah — 2023-11-01T12:39:56Z

Guest blog by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop, Subbiah Arunachalam (Trustees for the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development). This article was published in Speaking of Medicine PLoS Medicine community blog on January 17, 2011.

The news that several publishers have withdrawn access to health journals from the academic communities in Bangladesh has come as a wake-up call about the limitations of the HINARI programme. Many on the HIFA-2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015) forum feel this annoucement is a disaster, and that the only way to resolve the situation is to launch a concerted effort to restore journal access to those in Bangladesh.

In our opinion, this would be a retrograde step since, owing to the commercial nature of the journals in question, the same situation will inevitably arise in the future. Donor programmes do nothing to build research capacity, and access is governed by marketing decisions rather than research needs. The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development has been working in partnership with many other organisations (including Bioline International, SciELO, MedKnow Publications, and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) ) to promote the development benefits of open access journals and archived articles in open access institutional repositories.

But in the face of powerful UN organisations (WHO, UNEP, FAO) and commercial publishers of prestigious journals offering ‘free access’ it has been difficult to persuade dependent communities that open access is sustainable and could do much to strengthen research in poorer countries.

We would like to make the following points:

HINARI is primarily about access to knowledge from the North by the South. The underlying assumption that this is all that is needed must be challenged. Using Virginia Barbours firefighting analogy, information about useful techniques involving high tech equipment and sophisticated training may be made freely available on the web, but it may not be applicable to firefighters in poor countries where the infrastructure is missing. The information may be irrelevant and therefore of little use. Meanwhile local knowledge about how to prevent and fight fires (or in our case, carry out new research) is not recorded and shared because of lack of infrastructure. Even when it is recorded and “published”, it is largely inaccessible because of the low visibility of “local” journals. So the sharing of locally relevant research information can never be solved by HINARI, even if accession to all the withdrawn journals (Northern journals) were restored.
The current scholarly communication system is controlled by the North and how knowledge is legitimized, validated, and rewarded is based on criteria set by the North. This structural inequality is a long-standing problem for research and dissemination from the South. It follows that the need for open access is more pressing for researchers and front line health workers in the developing world, because it promises not only access, but participation in research exchange and new forms of knowledge dissemination. Programs such as HINARI have actually slowed down progress towards open access in these parts of the world because – coming with the legitimacy of the UN organizations – they have diverted attention from the need to build truly local and sustainable infrastructure. More importantly, they have diverted attention from looking at alternative mechanisms for knowledge creation and sharing.
Open source digital repository software and journal publishing systems are now widely used and scholars and research bodies in the developing world are starting to take advantage of these tools and share experiences. There are also a variety of sustainability models for the equal distribution of research publications that are beginning to emerge, and these need to be nurtured and discussed more broadly at the local and the national level.
Health knowledge (and indeed all publicly funded knowledge) is a global public good and as such, requires a different funding and global governance system. The current approach, whereby each institution purchases its own subscriptions is one reason why we have a highly dysfunctional system of paying for scholarly publications. At a pre-International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) conference in 2010, Leslie Chan proposed a “1%” challenge” to library directors. If all the major research libraries around the world were to set aside 1% of their acquisitions for commercial licenses into a global open access fund, there would be hundreds of millions of dollars available to support diverse open access initiatives around the world. This is one of many possible scenarios that could solve funding for open access. The dismay felt in many developing countries caused by the announced withdrawal of access to information in Bangladesh signals the need to think differently and collectively.
It should be recognised that when publications are made freely available, usage by developing countries is very high indeed, proving the overwhelming need for all information to be available open access and on a sustainable basis. As an example, the link to statistics of usage of the Venezuelan University de Los Andes institutional repository, see http://goo.gl/S1p9N, shows how important these resources have become. Similarly high usage figures are recorded by organizations provindg an open access platform for local journals, eg SciELO, Bioline International and MedKnow Publications. Pre-open access local journals become post-open access international journals, with records showing that improved submissions, impact and sales of hardcopy versions follow from increased visibility and access.
Where is the leadership of the WHO in this important debate? Where are the other UN agencies? Since open access to all publicly funded research, not only in health, but in agriculture, the environment and all other aspects of research is urgently required to help solve global problems, these organisations should be leading the way.

The following links to websites and articles may be of interest to readers concerned about access to research information by the academic communities in the developing world:

Bioline International

SciELO

MedKnow Publications

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)

Publications

[i] “The chain of communication in health science: from researcher to health worker through open access”. Open Medicine 2009; 3(3):111-119

[ii] “Open Access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2009;87:631-635

[iii] “Access to Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development: Options for Developing Countries”. Ariadne Issue 52 (July 2007).

Competing interests: Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Subbiah Arunachalam are trustees of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, which promotes open access. Leslie Chan is the Director of Bioline International.

Read the original article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/withdrawal-of-journal-access

Q&A on open access with Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore)

subbiah — 2023-11-01T12:41:47Z

Amrit Dhir, a 1L at Harvard Law School, has been working with the Harvard Law School Library on open access activities. He recently had an opportunity to interview Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The interview was published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University on May 5, 2011.

Thanks to the HLS Library for permitting us to share this Q&A!

Amrit Dhir: What is your association with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)?

Subbiah Arunachalam: I am one of the founding members of the Board of the Centre for Internet and Society. Mr Sunil Abraham invited me to join and I agreed as I found the group to be a talented bunch of people much younger to me and interested in questions, the answers to which would be of interest to me.

AD: What has been your involvement with the Open Access (OA) movement for the past ten years?

SA: For the past ten years, I have been literally breathing OA! I always believed that knowledge should be free and open, but my formal engagement with OA began in 2000. That was the year when Eugene Garfield, the well-known information scientist, turned 75. He has been a great influence in my life and so I wanted to celebrate his 75th birthday with a conference. Gene had written hundreds of essays and he had put all of them together in fifteen volumes (Essays of an Information Scientist). What is more, long before the formal movement for OA began, Gene had put all his essays - in fact, all his writings - up on the University of Pennsylvania website.

For the conference, I invited another friend of mine, Alan Gilchrist, Editor of Journal of Information Science, and a world leader in advancing knowledge about thesauri. For the second speaker I invited Stevan Harnad, as I had read his article on scholarly skywriting (which was included in Garfield's Essays). I was working as a volunteer at the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation whose main thrust was development, but my chairman Prof. M. S. Swaminathan helped me raise some funds. From then on I started dividing my time between development and promoting OA in India and the developing world. My prior experience as editor and publisher of science journals (at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Indian Academy of Sciences) was a great help. For one thing, I knew a large number of scientists and academics. For another, as I had no big official position I was free to make statements freely. And I took advantage of both.

In 2001, I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to convene a meeting of editors of Indian S&T journals and convince them of the advantage of their journals going electronic. About 50 editors were trained in two three-day workshops. One of them, Dr. D. K. Sahu is today the world's leading OA publisher who neither charges the authors nor the readers [http://www.medknow.com].

In 2005, the Open Society Institute (OSI) invited me to Toronto to plan a conference. I had proposed to bring scientists from India, Brazil and China and to promote OA in these three countries. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that if OA takes roots in these three countries then it would be easy to promote it in the rest of the developing world. The conference itself was held at the Indian Institute of Science in November 2006, with support from OSI and the Indian Academy of Sciences. It was at this conference, with the help of Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan, that we produced the Bangalore Declaration, which could be used by governments and funding agencies in developing countries to mandate OA.

In January 2006, I organized a full session on OA as part of the Annual Science Congress held at Hyderabad. In 2008, I spoke to Prof. Samir Brahmachari, Director General of CSIR and convinced him of the need to adopt OA. He accepted the idea immediately and opened up all the sixteen journals published by CSIR's publishing arm, NISCAIR. I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to set up a repository for all papers by all Fellows and currently the repository is getting ready and I expect it to be available online in July or August. The Academy took nearly four years, but I am glad it is finally happening.

I have groomed a number of young people to take up OA advocacy and implementation. In particular, Muthu Madhan (now at ICRISAT) has done well. He has helped six institutions set up their repositories. I took him along with me (CIS funded his trip) to the International Conference on Repositories in Amsterdam jointly organized by JISC, SURF and UKOLN in 2009.

I have written about OA both on my own and in coauthorship with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan. I have given interviews to key outlets and spoken at many national and international conferences including two A2K conferences organized by Yale University, several Berlin conferences, and the ICSU-UNESCO conference where I was one of two keynote speakers.

AD: What is the potential of OA, and what makes it unique to India?

SA: OA has tremendous potential not only to India, but to the world as a whole. But its value to developing countries is much greater than to advanced countries, because the serials crisis and the access to knowledge problems are felt far more acutely in developing countries. Currently higher education and R&D (Research and Development) are in an unprecedented expansion phase and therefore we would need huge investments to meet information needs if only traditional methods of access were available to us. As large publishing corporations are raising subscription costs year after year at an unacceptably high rate, Indian researchers and students would benefit if more and more scientists in the West were to make their work OA.

There is nothing unique about OA in India. Whatever applies to India applies to the larger developing countries (China and Brazil, South Africa). That is why I believe these four countries should work together in promoting OA.

AD: What do you see as the future of the OA movement in India?

SA: As far as India is concerned, currently, a higher proportion of Indian work (12.5%) appears in OA journals than the world average (estimated to be between 8.5 and 10%). The two major Academies and CSIR in favor of OA. I and others are trying to persuade other funding agencies and research councils to adopt OA. It is a question of time before OA becomes accepted by at least some of the leading institutions. There are about 40 active repositories, but the number has started increasing.

AD: What are the impediments to realizing that future? Are there any legal concerns or legal obstacles that you anticipate approaching?

SA: There are no impediments. At least I do not see any. You may then ask why the progress is slow. It is largely because of author inertia and general ignorance. Yes, ignorance. Not many scientists really know about what is possible and what is not possible with regard to depositing their papers in a repository. They are needlessly afraid of copyright infringements. Thus all the 'impediments' are imaginary!

When it comes to journals, it is easy. We publish the journals and we decide if we want to be closed or open. MedKnow publishes 150 journals, of which 148 are open. All 11 journals of the Indian Academy are open. Even when they entered into an agreement with Springer [Publishing], they retained the right to keep all of them open on their site!

AD: How would you compare the institutional openness of India and the US to the potential and needs of OA?

SA: I have already explained why I believe OA is far more important to developing countries. But even in the West, the serials crisis is forcing librarians to adopt OA. In the West, prestigious institutions such as Harvard, MIT, NIH, Wellcome Trust, RCUK (Research Councils UK), have adopted OA and that has made a big difference. Now the US Congress is considering the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act). Eventually, all institutions will have to adopt OA.

There is one advantage of institutions in the developing countries adopting OA that may be missed by many. Often research done in the South in problems like SARS, tsunami, HIV/AIDS, climate change will be of global relevance. These issues do not know any national boundaries.

AD: You have spoken of a social mission and a human-rights-based justification for supporting greater OA, particularly with regard to the hard sciences and scientific research. What is the relationship between justice and OA, both on an international scale and as it relates to India more specifically?

SA: A very good question. When Kofi Annan was heading the United Nations, it came up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On top of the list was poverty alleviation. What use is all the science that we do if fellow human beings are unable to even buy food and keep dying of hunger and malnutrition? This is the basis for the argument on opening up of scientific knowledge as an issue of justice. In India, the government has invested millions on R&D in atomic energy, space science, new biology and biotechnology and so on, and yet more than 60 years after we had became a Republic, poverty is rampant, the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and both the number of billionaires and the number of people below the poverty line are increasing every year. All our science and technology have not ensured basic necessities for the poor. We do not use what we know, and what we know is not known widely.

In an excellent article “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector” in 22 Quarterly Journal of Economics 879 (2007), Robert Jensen of Harvard's Kennedy School used the example of how the introduction of mobile phones in coastal areas of Kerala opened up information and brought many benefits to the community as a whole and not just to fishing families.

There is another angle to the urgent need to reduce poverty, viz. the security angle. Two years ago, I was invited to write a short essay on information and livelihood and I began my essay with these words: "We live in a divided world where far too many people live in abject poverty. To help these people get out of poverty is good for the world as a whole, for great disparities in wealth will lead to violence and terrorism and no one can live in peace and harmony."

There is yet another issue. This is related to drugs and pharmaceuticals. Many pharma companies do not want to bring to market products from their latest research because the previous products are still doing well. Profit is the motive, and it trumps public good. Also, Western pharma companies send out scouts to the old world and learn from local wisdom the medicinal value of plants and herbs and take advantage but without sharing the profits with the local people. A clear case of the North exploiting the knowledge of the South. And yet their own drugs are all under patent protection!

AD: Some see Indian civil society and even Indian government insisting on greater transparency and access to information, with such movements as the one behind the Right to Information (RTI) Act as an example. Are you optimistic about such efforts at governmental and legal reform? And, how does it relate to your work and the broader objectives you advocate?

SA: About two years ago, the Department of Biotechnology entered into a partnership with the Wellcome Trust. The was born with a view to providing generous fellowships to scientists at three stages of their careers. One of the features was that all papers published by these Fellows have to be OA. The Minister for science and technology (Mr Kapil Sibal at that time) announced this proudly. I wrote him that he should also make OA all papers by scientists receiving grants from DBT, but he did not bother to reply. There is a lot of political doublespeak. I also wrote to Members of Parliament belonging to all the major parties suggesting that they consider legislation similar to the one which brought OA to all NIH-funded research in the US. No one replied. The RTI Act and the recent happenings on the corruption front (the government yielding to the request of Gandhian Anna Hazare) are indeed very good. And I believe one day the need for OA will be recognized as important and worthy of legal status. But one may also achieve a lot through bottom-up approaches by talking to individual institutions, universities and scientists.

I am not losing hope. I will keep making my requests until OA is accepted as the norm.

AD: How would you call upon American universities and institutes to act or reform in light of the OA measures you advocate?

SA: The larger the number of American universities, research institutions and funding agencies adopting OA, the better it would be for us, as we would have more papers in the open domain. More than that, we could cite their example and convince Indian institutions to adopt OA.

Read the original interview published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam

Open Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe

subbiah — 2013-09-26T06:00:48Z

Researchers face two problems related to information access: making their own research more visible to researchers elsewhere and making worldwide research readily available to them. Open access (OA) can solve both of them.

This article by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was published in Euro Scientist on September 25, 2013.

Open access is particularly important in developing countries, where the research and higher education budgets are nowhere near those in advanced countries. For example, libraries in most universities in sub-Saharan Africa subscribe at best to only a few journals, and are thus forced to do research literally in a literature vacuum.

Elsewhere like in India, some institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, subscribe to a few thousand journals. But many of them go unused. Thus this approach results in non-productive investment of scarce resources. In addition, when developing country scientists publish their work in expensive journals, then all too often it goes unnoticed by other researchers in their own country.

To make OA more widespread, there are two possible routes: OA journals and OA archives. OA journals and archives help to integrate the work of scientists everywhere into the global knowledge base, reduce the isolation of researchers, and improve opportunities for funding and international collaboration. OA, if adopted widely, can raise the profile of an entire nation’s research output.

OA journals

For now, there are already many successful OA journals initiatives in the developing world. Bioline International , for example, hosts electronic OA versions of more than 35 peer reviewed bioscience journals from 17 developing countries. It is backed, among others, by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT), established in 1996. EPT promotes open access to the world’s scholarly literature, and provides an annual award for the best contribution to the advancement of OA in the developing world.

Other worldwide OA initiatives include the African Journals Online (AJOL), which provides free online access to 462 African journals. Latin American initiatives– some of which have overlapping content—include SciELO with 1,013 Iberoamerican OA journals, RedALyC , which supports 809 OA journals and Latindex, with more than 4,600 OA journals. In parallel, India alone publishes more than 400 OA journals. For example, the ten journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the 17 journals published by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research are OA.

With the emergence of OA, many new commercial publishers have sprouted recently. They are publishing OA journals largely to earn through Article Processing Charges (APC). So much so India is considered a leader in publishing predatory OA journals.

Not all commercial publishers are predatory, though. For example,Medknow Publications, a commercial publishing company founded by a paediatrician based in Mumbai, has helped more than 100 OA medical journals make the transition from print to electronic open access. In doing so, they realised that most of them are now doing much better than before in terms of readership, print subscription, quality of editing and production, and as a result a major multinational STM publishing company acquired the company from the founder a few years ago.

OA archives

The trouble is that a lot remains to be done in extending open access. Indeed, there are about a hundred functioning academic papers repositories in India. However, only two of them are backed by a mandate. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), for example, recently came up with an OA mandate for research performed in its own research institutions and for research it funds, but its implementation may take a while. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, has a repository for all papers by all its Fellows, both living and deceased. This is the only science academy in the world to have such a repository. The Academy was also the first in India to adopt OA for its journals. For instance, its physics journal, Pramana, became OA as far back as 1998.

To extend open access further, the archives route appears to be particularly appealing in developing countries. Setting up institutional archives does not cost much. The software needed is absolutely free and the technological infrastructure, such as the server and the internet connectivity, is already available in most institutions.

About a decade ago, I thought that the scarcity of computers and high bandwidth access in many developing countries would put them at a disadvantage. But now prices are falling and the situation has improved. Thus, OA archiving is even more promising than OA journals. It is less expensive, allows faster turnaround, and is compatible with publishing in conventional journals.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/euroscience-september-25-2013-subbiah-arunachalam-open-access-an-opportunity-for-scientists-around-the-globe

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers

subbiah — 2015-02-12T00:28:14Z

A few commercial publishers dominate provision of access to scientific and technical information sought after by researchers around the world. Increasing subscription prices of journals at rates higher than general inflation caused librarians to think of forming consortia, but publishers started selling online journals as bundles, and libraries ended up with many journals their researchers have very little use for. Scientists and librarians adopted open access, but publishers came up with hybrid journals and article processing charges to beat any adverse effect on their profits caused by the fast-spreading open access movement. We compare the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India. We end with a few suggestions.

The article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran was published in the Indian National Science Academy Journals, Proc Indian Natn SciAcad 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929.

Introduction

Scientists in India, as elsewhere, will be happy if their libraries provide them access to thousands of journals. Librarians, even in the most affluent institutions, have only limited budgets and they have to balance between journals on the one hand and books, monographs and reference material on the other, and can subscribe to only a limited number of journals. In the past decade and a half, thanks to generous funding by several government agencies (e.g., UGC, CSIR), librarians formed consortia so they could access online journals at more attractive prices and in large numbers. Also, during the same period, many open access (OA) journals became available and some subscription journals came forward to make articles OA if the authors paid a fee. There also came up a large number of repositories, both institutional (such as the ones at Indian Institute of Science and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute) and subject-based central repositories (such as PubMed Central). As a result, scientists now have much easier access to a much larger volume of current literature. But, it appears that publishers seem to profit far more than scientists. They keep increasing the subscription prices at a rate higher than general inflation. Even affluent institutions like Harvard University are forced to cut down the number of journals they subscribe. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a group of about 125 research libraries in North America, is concerned about this crisis in scholarly communication (or ‘serials crisis’ as they call it) and is working to promote open access as one way to counter it. The publishers continue to make their unusually large profits unmindful of the hardship researchers are put to. In business circles, publishing scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals is considered to be one of the most profitable businesses. Efforts made by groups of researchers to make scholarly communication more cost effective have not met with expected success levels. For example, entire editorial boards of a few commercial journals resigned and started new journals in the same field. But this happened only in a handful of cases and not all of them succeeded. In this paper, we look at what is happening currently in India in the context of the unusually large influence wielded by journal publishers.

Click to download the full text article.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose

A letter to CGIAR in support of Open Access

subbiah — 2023-11-01T12:43:34Z

Professor Subbiah Arunachalam wrote a letter to CGIAR apprising them of the need for, and advantages of making their research output Open Access.

Last week Indian Open Access (OA) advocate Professor Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) organised a letter to the top management of CGIAR — the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. The letter spoke of the need for, and advantages of, making all of CGIAR's research output Open Access.

In doing so, it pointed out that one of CGIAR's research centres — the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India — has already introduced an OA mandate, and this has proved hugely successful.

Since the mandate was introduced, the letter says, OA has grown fast, "and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers."

Yet, the letter adds, today ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate. [After the letter was sent, the signatories discovered that The International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) also has an open access mandate in place.]

Since the ICRISAT mandate has proved very successful, the letter suggests, now would be a good time for other research centres to follow suit. As the letter puts it, "We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory."

The letter adds: "Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA."

CGIAR, we should note, was initially an initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is focused on reducing poverty and hunger, and improving human health and nutrition, as well as enhancing ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership.

Following the Rockefeller initiative it was proposed in 1970 to create a worldwide network of agricultural research centres under a permanent secretariat, and today CGIAR has 64 governmental and nongovernmental members and 15 research centres around the world.

Along with Arun, fifteen other OA advocates signed the letter (including me).

So why target CGIAR? I emailed Arun and asked him to explain the background.

RP: Why did you decide to write a letter to CGIAR?

SA: What one does largely comes from one's own experience. After a long career in scholarly communication — as editor of scientific journals and secretary of a scholarly Academy in India — I spent 12 years as a volunteer with an NGO headed by Professor M S Swaminathan and was engaged in a rural development project focused on poverty alleviation. The letter to the CGIAR top management was a direct result of these two experiences.

RP: Essentially this is a developing world issue isn't it?

SA: Of course. Agriculture is the poor cousin among different areas of research; just the same way the Third World countries are the poor cousins of the advanced countries.

Most people in poor countries depend on agriculture for a living. How can they improve their lives if agricultural knowledge and innovations are privatised or, even if they are not privatised, made so expensive that they cannot afford to access them?

If we want to address the problem of rampant poverty in the developing countries, it is important to make agricultural knowledge flow freely and be easily available to people in the developing world.

RP: The point here is that the traditional method of publishing research in subscription journals means that that research remains inaccessible to most researchers in the developing world, since most research institutions there cannot afford to pay the very costly subscriptions imposed by scholarly publishers?

SA: Correct. The CGIAR laboratories were conceived, largely by the Rockefeller Foundation, with the clear purpose of helping the developing countries, and later on funded by the World Bank, FAO, and UNDP.

Unlike development aid where funds from the rich countries are transferred to poor countries, the CGIAR was set up to transfer knowledge to the poor countries as well as help them be part of knowledge production. The difference is clear: If you want to help someone who is hungry better to teach him fishing rather than give him a fish.

Unfortunately, research findings of CGIAR laboratories often end up as articles in refereed professional journals, most of which are behind toll access. I thought it needed to be corrected.

RP: OA has been a cause for you for some years now hasn't it?

SA: I have been talking about and promoting open access for nearly a decade and indeed it has become a passion. Some of my friends, eminent academics and researchers, refer to me jokingly as "Mr Open Access of India." I found in my friend and former colleague Dr Venkataraman Balaji someone who can actually implement it in ICRISAT, the CGIAR laboratory located in India.

We worked together in holding a half-day symposium on Open Access as part of the annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress Association held at Hyderabad (close to where ICRISAT is located). And we invited Alma Swan from the UK and Professor Pushpa Bhargava, one of India's leading life scientists and humanists, to the symposium. As I did not have any funding support, Balaji hosted all the speakers as guests of ICRISAT.

Then about two years ago Dr Balaji convinced his Director General and the senior management of ICRISAT about the need to adopt OA for all research publications of ICRISAT.

RP: So your letter is the next step in an extended process of OA advocacy?

SA: It is. Long before ICRISAT decided to adopt OA I had met Enrica Poracari of CGIAR at a Global Knowledge Partnership meeting in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok and I had broached the topic of OA and her response was positive. I have been in touch with her ever since then.

I am also associated with IAALD, a worldwide group of agricultural information professionals, and I talked to them about the need for adopting OA. Peter Ballantyne, an old friend of mine from his days at IICD, in The Hague, was the President of IAALD and a few months ago he joined one of the CGIAR laboratories.

I have been sending advocacy letters to all three of them (Balaji, Porcari and Ballantyne) and I got a sense that CGIAR information professionals and knowledge managers were now moving towards OA. So I thought it would help them if some of us activists in the Open Access movement wrote to the top management of CGIAR.

So I decided to draft a letter. I thought if the letter was signed by some of the leaders of the OA movement, it would have a much greater chance of achieving its purpose. I sent it out to about 20 champions of OA and 15 of them readily agreed to be signatories. As I did it in a short time, I might have missed some real champions of OA. My apologies to them.
RP: Why target CGIAR?

SA: Actually I have been writing such letters to many organisations, although mostly Indian organisations and a few international organisations such as ICTP, Trieste.

In India I have written frequently to organisations like the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government, the Department of Science and Technology, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Indian Council of Medical research, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research — with varying levels of success.

But I wrote to CGIAR above all because agriculture is vital for the poor countries of the world. Besides, CGIAR is an umbrella organisation that covers 15 laboratories dealing with virtually all aspects of agriculture. Unlike the physics OA repository arXiv, and the biomedical research archive PubMed Central there is no central repository for agricultural research. And most importantly, one of the CGIAR laboratories has already adopted full Open Access. At the same time many others in the system do not know about it even a year after it began operation.

RP: What would you like people to do in response to the letter?

SA: If by 'people' you mean people belonging to CGIAR, I would like them to implement full OA in each one of their laboratories. I would like agricultural research organisations such as the US Department of Agriculture and major agricultural universities of the world to adopt OA.

I am happy to inform you, after Dr S Ayyappan took over as Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research a few months ago, ICAR is moving fast towards OA. He made their two refereed journals OA and he has assigned a full-time Assistant Director General to implement many OA-related initiatives.

RP: What about other researchers, OA advocates and anyone else who is interested in helping to ensure the free flow of research information in the developing world. What would you propose they do?

SA: Any movement of this kind is like a temple car in India. The more people come forward to pull, the faster the car will move, and the faster it will reach its destination.

All those interested may also write to the Board of CGIAR and the Directors General of CGIAR laboratories recommending the adoption of an OA mandate.

They can also talk to individual researchers and persuade them to make their own research openly accessible.

I understand that knowledge managers in CGIAR laboratories are not averse to the idea of Open Access. If they know that many of us outside the system are also keen that they adopt OA, it will help them move to forward quickly.

Read the original in Open and Shut

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/letter-to-CGIAR