Centre for Internet and Society

On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:35:29Z

This editorial by PLoS Medicine Editors Virginia Barbour, Jocalyn Clark, Susan Jones, Melissa Norton, and Emma Veitch was published in the magazine's March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3.

It has been a couple of months now since the withdrawal of access via HINARI to medical journals in Bangladesh by several publishers caused an upset in the medical publishing world [1]. HINARI (Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative) is a WHO-supported program [2] that partners with subscription-based publishers to allow researchers in the world's poorest countries to access some of their journals under certain conditions (for example, researchers have to access the journal in defined institutions). After much lobbying from researchers, editors, and others following the withdrawal, HINARI access has been—for the time being at least—reinstated, though with a substantial lack of clarity over the longer term plans of a number of the publishers [3]. Although traumatic for the researchers who lost access, the incident has triggered a useful debate on the value of open access (OA; immediate, permanent free access and permanently guaranteed unrestricted reuse, as enshrined in a Creative Commons license [4] and as practiced by publishers such as PLoS) versus free access with no legal rights attached. It is hard to think of a better example to demonstrate the precariousness of this latter type of free access, which can mean that access may be withdrawn for no reason.

Now that the heat of the HINARI debate has died down, it is an opportune time to consider how this dispute, and others like it, can be used constructively to move toward a position where universal OA to the medical literature becomes the norm.

On the positive side, the debate has brought many new voices into the discussion around access, particularly those on the online discussion forum HIFA2015 [5], where the diversity and strength of opinions expressed was most likely the key instrument in ensuring that the publishers' withdrawal from HINARI was not only brought to light, but also largely reversed.

The debacle also allowed constructive discussions around the substantial limitations of HINARI and its inability to provide a long-term sustainable solution to access in the developing world. It also allowed airing of many OA issues, including the difference between free and open access [4]; the logistical difficulties experienced by some researchers in accessing online journals, such as those in locations with low bandwidth; the suspicion of some researchers of online-only journals; and concerns over publication fees.

Thus the argument about how to implement such access, particularly in the developing world, is far from over. The issues above are very familiar to OA advocates. When PLoS Medicine was getting started seven years ago, we encountered many of the same questions from the (admittedly mostly developed-world) authors and readers we canvassed then. The phenomenal growth of OA since then has reassured many of those who initially questioned the model and its sustainability: submissions and publications are increasing each year at PLoS and in other open-access journals, reflecting the increased confidence of authors in this model. OA papers are also highly accessed, though our data suggest that most of this access, and most of the authors, still come from the developed world.

The HINARI incident thus highlights the fact that HINARI is, sadly, still needed both because of traditional publishers who have not yet implemented OA, even in the developed world, and because substantial gaps remain in our knowledge about how OA will work for the developing world. Hence, there is some way to go before this model of publishing can become the norm worldwide. Despite the best intentions of open-access publishers, we have failed to reach out adequately to debate with researchers and readers in the less-developed world about the potential benefits of open access. Instead, as is often the case when the developed world prescribes for the less-developed world, we have assumed that what works well in Paris, London, or San Francisco will work just as well in Addis Ababa, Beirut, or Lima.

Some examples of these active concerns about OA: first, are OA journals being delivered in the best format for readers in the developing world? If print really is better in some places, are we doing our best to ensure that the online journals are optimized for rapid downloading and printing of articles? If access to online journals will be primarily via mobile devices rather than computers, are we delivering the content in appropriate formats? Second, do we understand the reputation metrics outside of Europe or the US that will ensure that the new OA journals are trusted and meet the requirements authors face for academic promotions or other professional needs [6]? Even more importantly, are there OA journals available that cater to the needs of readers and authors across the developing world? Should publishers be helping groups to start their own journals, rather than assuming that the existing OA journals will be accepted?

Medical journals have many roles, but, above all, dissemination of medical information is key. This crucial role was stated clearly back in1997 by Neil Pakenham-Walsh (the founder of HIFA2015) and colleagues, and it is no less relevant now [7]: "Providing access to reliable health information for health workers in developing countries is potentially the single most cost effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care."

Much therefore remains to be done in improving access to health information in the developing world. By providing a logistical framework for open access (by the adoption of appropriate licenses), and by showing what can be done in the developed world with OA journals, OA publishers have done much to make it possible more widely. The next crucial step is to engage with readers, researchers, and authors in the developing world to understand better their information needs so that we don't fall into the trap of pushing information in only one direction. Open access is about facilitating the movement of knowledge—in all directions.

References

Kmietowicz K (2011) Publishers withdraw 2500 journals from free access scheme in Bangladesh. BMJ 342: d196. doi:10.1136/bmj.d196.

HINARI (2011) HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme. Available:http://www.who.int/hinari/en/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Wise A (2011) Elsevier statement on Research4Life. Lancet 377: 377. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

PLoS (2011) Definition of Open Access. Available: http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.php. Accessed 16 February 2011.

HIFA2015 (2011) A Global Campaign: Healthcare Information for All by 2015. Available:http://www.hifa2015.org/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8: 1016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016.

Packenham-Walsh N, Priestley C, Smith R (1997) Meeting the information needs of health workers in developing countries. BMJ 314: 90. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/path-2-global-open-access

Open Access Day

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:45:17Z

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.

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day. Speaker include Prof. Andrew Lynn, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society.

Venue: Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

About Open Access Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open-access-day

Open access conference seeks to free research

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:10:58Z

Article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan in the Indian Express (New Delhi), 26 March 2009

When Newton famously remarked that if he had seen further than others, it was by “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wasn’t just being modest. He was stating the simple fact that knowledge builds on previous knowledge, that the back and forth of ideas is vital for scientific achievement. Though the current proprietory publishing model is stacked against scholars, an emerging open access movement across the world aims to free scientific content - and India has big stakes in it.

A conference in New Delhi brought together open access evangelists including Prof. John Willinsky of Stanford University, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Surendra Prasad of IIT Delhi, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications, and Narendra Kumar of CSIR.

Now, all research papers published from CSIR labs will be made open access, either by putting the full text on freely available institutional repositories or publishing directly in open access journals. Meanwhile, across the world, MIT has become the first university to throw open all its research papers through the online repository software DSpace.

Globally, academic tenure and promotion is traditionally linked to research published in reputed, peer-reviewed journals. These journals are owned by commercial behemoths like Springer and Reed Elsevier, who own stables of journals in various disciplines, and dictate terms to university libraries. But in recent years, journal prices have shot through the roof.

Now, after years of weary negotiation, and empowered by new digital infrastructure, universities are teaming up via free institutional repository systems, to pool and circulate their collective research. In India, institutes like NIT Rourkela have adopted super-archives like DSpace for another reason — to showcase their scientific output to global peers. “NIT doesn’t have the research legacy of IIT or IISC — they needed the visibility,” says NIT director Sunil Kumar Sarangi.

Such a knowledge commons is especially valuable to developing countries — for instance, in agricultural research or public health, it is inexcusable that countries which could benefit most from the scientific debate are left out of the loop, simply because of prohibitive pricing (some journals cost up to 20,000 dollars, annually). This only widens the gulf between the state of research here and the US or Europe.

Even research produced in India with our taxpayer money is sent to big-name commercial journals and all copyright signed away, putting it out of reach for the Indian scholarly community. But all that could change if open access journals become the norm. S K Sahu, who runs MedKnow publications (over 80 open access journals), also busted claims that content on such journals tends to vanish into the ether after a few years online.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-conference-seeks-to-free-research

Panel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge

Admin — 2019-02-22T15:32:46Z

Pranesh Prakash was a panelist and moderator in a panel discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge on October 23, 2018 at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The event was hosted by DST Centre for Policy Research (IISc), Bangalore.

Open Access seeks to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose: to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not prevent students, researchers (or anyone) from getting access to research they need. Open Access, and the open availability and searchability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the practice of medicine to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.

Panelists

Arul George Scaria - National Law University, Delhi
Carl Malamud - Public.Resource.Org
Pranesh Prakash (Moderator) - Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Richard Poynder - Journalist (covering OA movement around the world)
S Nayana Tara - Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Shahid Jameel - Welcome Trust DBT India Alliance

This event was a part of International Open Access week activities planned at IISc Bangalore, organized by DST-Centre for Policy Research at IISc in association with National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Karnataka State Library Association (KALA), JRD Tata Memorial Library, Science Policy Group (SPG) and International Scientific and Technological Education Program (i-STEP).

Read more about the event on Facebook page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge

Lecture on Open Access and Open Content Licensing at ICAR (short course)

Admin — 2018-12-05T16:19:56Z

The ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR) a constituent establishment of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) organised a short course on 'ICTs for Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness in Agricultural Research, Education and Extension of NARES' during November 13-22, 2018 in Bangalore. Anubha Sinha delivered a lecture to the participants.

Read for more information about the programme.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/lecture-on-open-access-and-open-content-licensing-at-icar-short-course

Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published

Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam — 2016-10-29T14:47:52Z

We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.

The research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Subbiah Arunachalam was published in the Indian Institute of Science Repository on October 29, 2016.

More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journals and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch.

We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.

More than two decades ago Harnad posted his subversive proposal to a mailing list in which he called on researchers “to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the internet.”^1,2 Many researchers now make their papers freely available either by publishing them in open access (OA) journals or by placing them in repositories or websites. Indeed, a 2013 report asserted that by 2011 “free availability of a majority of papers has been reached in general science and technology, in biomedical research, biology, and mathematics, and statistics,” and that the number of open access papers has been growing by about 2% a year.³

Journals make papers open access in two ways: OA journals make all papers open access immediately on publication, and hybrid OA journals make selected papers open access. Most OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge to make a paper open access. Current Science is such a journal. Many OA journals – about 26% according to Solomon and Björk⁴ – and all hybrid OA journals levy an article processing charge (APC) to provide OA to a paper. However, according to Crotty,⁵the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC. The APC levied by journals used by Indian researchers is in the range INR 500 (~US$8) - US$5,000.

OA journal publishing, particularly by commercial publishers and in the field of biomedicine, is growing rapidly. According to DOAJ there are 9,192 OA journals as of 2 September 2016 published from 130 countries and one can access more than 2.27 million articles. Currently, DOAJ is growing at the net rate of 6 titles per day.⁶ The Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) lists 14,031 OA journals published from some 140 countries.⁷

Repositories, where full texts of research publications are deposited and made available online, are of two kinds: central repositories, such as arXiv, and distributed (or institutional) repositories, such as the University of Southampton institutional research repository, <eprints.soton.ac.uk>, the first of its kind.

Here we are concerned only with the open access journals which make all content open access immediately on publication. Further, our interest is in papers from India that are published in journals levying APC. The question we are particularly interested in is, ‘is paid open access affordable for India?’ And, even if it is affordable, should we go for it?

We assessed the current status of the use of OA journals by Indian researchers using bibliometric analysis of data gathered from Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). We used this analysis to find out the number of papers Indian researchers have published in OA journals charging APC, leading to an estimate of the amount the country as a whole would potentially have spent on APC costs, and to see if publishing in paid OA journals led to higher levels of citations.

Methodology

We searched for articles, letters, proceedings papers and reviews from India in OA journals

indexed in SCIE in the five years 2010-2014. The search made on 11 January 2016 resulted in

37,122 papers. Of these, 44 papers resulting from five international collaborations (CMS,

ATLAS, ALICE, STAR and FAITH), and appearing in journals such as Physics Letters B, New Journal of Physics, Nuclear Physics B and BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, had a very large number of authors (running to several hundreds). We removed them from the data set as they hindered processing the data. Thus we considered 37,078 papers. We downloaded full bibliographic data for all these and analysed the data using Visual FoxPro and found that Indian researchers have used 881 OA journals in which to publish these papers. We visited the web site of each of these journals during January- February 2016 to find out information on APCs levied by them. Also we classified the journals into 22 major field categories following the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) classification. This classification does not allocate journals to multiple fields. We identified papers in which at least one author was from a country other than India.

Using the same strategy as used for Indian publications, we recorded the number of papers published by 12 other countries and the proportion of OA papers (data gathered on 29 January 2016).

Results

We present here the key findings. Details of our bibliometric analysis are available from the

authors and will soon be presented in a report.

Use of OA journals by researchers – In the five years considered, SCIE had indexed 6,460,105 papers, of which 748,127 (or 11.58%) were in OA journals. In Fig. 1, we present the share of proportion of journal publications which have appeared in OA journals in 13 countries in the 5year period 2010-2014. Brazil has the highest proportion (close to one in three papers), with

India coming a distant second (one in seven papers). That Brazil leads is not surprising. Long before the OA movement began, the funding community led by the São Paulo Science

Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean

Center on Health Sciences Information recognized the need for strengthening the visibility of the Brazilian journals, and initiated the SciELO movement in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1997, which later spread to Chile and the rest of Ibero-America and South Africa.⁸ As Vessuri et al.⁹ have pointed out, a strong sense of public mission among Latin American universities, coupled with the realization that OA improves the presence and impact of Latin American research publications led Latin America to develop its own knowledge exchange mechanisms on its own terms.

Estimates of the proportion of open access papers vary widely depending on the source used and when the estimate was made. For example, by analysing journals indexed in Scopus we found that 4,231 of the 22,460 active titles (as of 6 February 2016) were OA (as seen from DOAJ on September 2015) and were listed in either or both of DOAJ and ROAD.¹⁰ Of the more than

12,000 journals covered by Web of Science, 1,313 journals are OA as of October 2015 as listed

by DOAJ.¹¹ Analyzing data from Google Scholar, Jamali and Nabavi showed that more than 61% of papers were accessible in full text.¹²

Use of journals charging APC - In 2010, Indian researchers had published their work in 479 OA journals, of which 237 did not charge APC. The number of OA journals used by Indian researchers to publish their work is increasing (Table 1). It has risen from 445 in 2009¹³ to 611 in 2014. More than half of the 611 journals levy APC.

Not all journals charging APC have a fixed APC. There are many models. Of the 881 SCIEindexed OA journals which Indian researchers have used, 488 charge a fee: 437 charge a fixed APC, 49 levy page charges, and two charge a non-refundable submission fee. Contrary to

Crotty’s observation that the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC,⁵ Indian authors publish a larger number of papers in non-APC journals. However, papers published in journals levying APC are cited a larger number of times on average.

The APC OA journal used most often by Indian researchers in the five-year period is PLoS One with a total publication count of 2,404 and average cites per paper (CPP) of 7.32. Starting with 78 papers in 2009,¹³ the number increased to 724 papers from India in 2014. Indeed, Current Science, which comes next in the list with 2,334 papers with a CPP of 1.74, was the leader until 2011.

Overseas collaboration - All authors are from India in 30,152 of the 37,078 papers published by Indian researchers in the 881 OA journals; this includes papers in which all authors are from the same institution as well as papers with authors from more than one Indian institution. These papers have been cited 78,722 times for a CPP of 2.61. There are 6,926 papers with at least one author from an address outside India, and these have been cited 39,031 times for a CPP of 5.63.

Indian researchers have collaborated with authors from some 115 countries. Collaborators are mainly from USA (2,191 papers), UK (815 papers) and Germany (708 papers).

Country of journal publication - Indian authors have published in OA journals from 61 countries. More than half (18,781) were published in 48 Indian journals, six of which charge APC. As one would expect, US and UK journals followed Indian journals in the number of papers published: 7,647 papers were published in 149 US journals of which 107 charge APC, and 2,834 papers were published in 172 UK journals of which 162 charge APC. Indian researchers have published

675 papers in 54 Brazilian OA journals of which nine levy APC, 229 papers in 9 Chilean OA journals of which two levy APC, 231 papers in 14 journals published from China of which five charge APC in the five yeras. In these five years Indian authors have published 652 papers in seven Nigerian APC journals. Of these, all but one were delisted from Web of Science after a few years of coverage. Such delisting is all too common. Of the 881 journals studied here, only 263 have been used by Indian researchers in all five years.

Citations to papers published in journals levying APC – Number of papers by Indian researchers in 57 journals charging APC and publishing at least 10 papers from India and has a CPP of not less than 10 are listed in Table 2. Table 3 lists the 10 journals that do not levy APC and have been cited at least 10 times on average in the five years. Three journals, viz. Nucleic Acids Research, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and BMC Genomics, all of which charge an APC of well over US$2,000, have published more than 100 papers from India. In all three journals, CPP of Indian papers are less than CPP of the journal as a whole, and there is a big difference between the CPP of papers written solely by Indian authors and that of those written in collaboration with foreign authors. For example, Nucleic Acids Research has published 138 papers from India (CPP 14.09) out of a total of 6,614. The journal’s average CPP for the 5-year period is 25.29 as against India’s CPP of 14.09. The 80 papers entirely written by Indian researchers has a CPP of less than 10, and the CPP of the 58 papers with foreign collaborators is more than 22.

As many as 92 papers have appeared in 10 OA journals which do not charge APC, none of which are from India, and these have been cited more than 15 times on average. Of the 92 papers, 41 were published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization at a CPP of about 12.5. In contrast, the CPP of the 478 papers published in the journal during the five years is above 15.

Use of mega journals- Indian authors have published 3,100 papers in nine mega journals where the papers are accepted without applying the usual standards of strict peer review if they are perceived to be technically sound (Table 4).

Papers classified by field - It is in Clinical Medicine that Indian researchers have published in the largest number of OA journals (208) as well as contributing the largest number of papers (10,036). They have published in 88 journals in the field of Plant and Animal Science, but have published a much larger number of papers in both Chemistry and Biology & Biochemistry in a smaller number of journals.

Discussion

Over 14.4% of the 37,122 papers from India as seen from SCIE have been published in OA journals. The actual number of OA papers from India will be much larger since, for example,

Scopus is likely to have indexed a larger number of such papers. Additionally, there are papers published in hybrid OA journals and papers published in non-OA journals that are made open access by placing them in institutional or central repositories or freely available through author websites, which indicates that there is a welcome growing awareness of the need for making one’s work OA. Our earlier study¹³ has revealed that some 16% of Indian papers were pulished in OA journals indexed in SCIE 2009, but in that study we had considered all categories of papers from OA journals collected comprehensively from various sources.

Potential spend on APC seen in perspective

We estimated the total APC for all 14,293 papers published by Indian authors in OA journals charging a fixed APC (leaving out 7% of all OA papers charging variable APC). We found there is an average cost of ~ US$1,173 per paper. We compared this figure with the costs on APCs incurred by institutions elsewhere.

From a survey of a large sample of journals listed in DOAJ carried out in 2014, Morrison et al.

reported an average APC of US$964.¹⁴

The Wellcome Trust, which supports payment of charges incurred by their grantees, reported a total spend of about £4.7 million paid for 2,556 papers, published in OA or hybrid journals, in 2013-14 at an average APC of £1,837. Close to 60% of these papers were published in the journals of the five leading publishers, and of these 68% were in hybrid journals. In 2014-15, the

Charity Open Access Fund, comprising the Trust and five other funders, had paid more than £5.6 million towards APCs for 2,942 papers at an average cost of £1,914.¹⁵

In its report dated March 2015, RCUK indicated an average APC of £1,600, based on APC paid for 6,504 papers from 55 universities during the two years 2013-14 and 2014-15. The average APC paid varies from university to university, from £778 for the School of Oriental & African

Studies to £2,248 for Durham University.¹⁶ Over the 15-month period April 2013 – July 2014,

Leeds University alone had paid publishers a little over £270,000, of which about £10,000 was for colour and page charges. For the 166 RCUK funded papers for which APCs were paid during the review period, the average cost of APC was £1,626.74.¹⁷University of Cambridge spent

£936,000 towards APC in 2014. For the 495 RCUK funded papers the average cost was £1,891.¹⁸ Besides this, the university has also supported payment of page and colour charges and has paid for researchers to join memberships that offer a discount for APCs out of the RCUK fund. There is a growing concern in the university if they should be spending so much money on

APCs.¹⁸

Björk and Solomon, in their report submitted to a consortium of European funding agencies in March 2014, had estimated the average APC from a study of journals indexed in Scopus for at least two years to be US$ 1,418.¹⁹

Gerritsma reported that in 2013, the Netherlands had spent €4 million towards 3,314 papers published in OA journals charging APC and in hybrid journals, and indexed in SCIE, at an average APC of €1,220.²⁰

In 2015, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) spent over €418,000 on APCs for 288 papers in Gold OA journals (average €2,376) and €2.38 million on APCs for 913 papers (average €1,453). In addition FWF incurred an expenditure of €273,600 on other costs.²¹

The variation is to be expected, as the sampled journals vary and in the case of India a substantial number of low-APC journals would have been used. Wang et al. have found that the level of APCs varies with the region. European and North American APC OA journals have average

APC of more than US$2000, while Asian, African and South American APC OA journals have average APC of less than US$1000.²²

If we assume that APC was paid in full for all the 14,297 papers (4,775 with foreign collaborators and 9,522 by exclusively Indian authors) published by Indian authors in OA journals charging APC, the total expenditure would be around US$16.75 million. This figure does not include the APC for the other 7% of papers published in journals charging APC on the basis of number of pages, submission fee, and so on. Nor does it include the expenditure on OA papers published in hybrid journals. These journals usually charge much more than journals with fixed APC. According to Björk and Solomon (2014), the average APC for publication charged by hybrid journals published by subscription publishers (such as Elsevier and Wiley) is US$

2,727, almost double that chaged by fully OA journals published by non-subscription publishers (such as PLoS), US$ 1,418.¹⁹ It is possible that APCs for many papers jointly authored with foreign collaborators might have been paid by the other party. Also, in some cases authors might have been granted either a fee waiver or a discount. Allowing for these possibilities, we may assume that the sum spent would still be very high, more than ~US$12 million, or an average of US$2.4 million a year. This amount is in addition to the national expenditure on its academic and research library budget. Data releaesed early this year as part of the Natioanl Institutional Ranking Framework (https://www.nirfindia.org/Ranking) exercise reveal that the academic and library budget is by no means small.

Author pays model has failed

In the initial years of the ‘author pays’ OA journals, the hope was that OA publishing would be cheaper than subscription publishing. Eisen claimed that APC would go down “and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero.”²³ What we see in reality, however, is that the APC charged by PLoS One has gone up from US$1,250 when it was founded in December 2006 to US$1,450 now. The APC charged by PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine has increased from

US$1,500 at launch in 2003 to US$2,900 in 2012, a rise of 93% in nine years.²³ The situation at

BioMed Central is no different. Comparing the APC levied by the 165 BMC titles between 2010 and 2016, Wheatly has shown that for many titles there has been a substantial rise.²⁴ Neylon, a former employee of PLoS had recently conceded that “no functional market is emerging and it

(APC model) might be the wrong economic model.”²⁵

When the high energy physics community and librarians from more than 20 countries negotiated with publishers to make key journals OA, it resulted in a contract with 11 publishers that would ensure they could make 10 journals OA immediately on publication and, in return, continue to make the profits they were making earlier with the subscription model. From its inception in

January 2014, SCOAP³ is making papers available on an OA basis and it charges an average

APC of US$1,165.²⁶ According to Morrison,⁶ “SCOAP ³ nearly doubled in size this past year

(87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents,” and “the Electronic Journals Library added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a

7% growth rate.”

As early as 1999, Rosenzweig²⁷ pointed out that the world of knowledge was being “kidnapped and held for ransom” by commercial publishers who have “turned renegade, exiling themselves from the academic enterprise, and focusing entirely on making the most money for their stockholders” and in the process “restricting the flow of knowledge.” Laakso and Björk have pointed out that today commercial publishers are the most common publisher of OA papers and the number of papers published by them jumped from 13,400 in 2005 to 119,900 in 2011.²⁸ Björk and Solomon¹⁹ have shown that “among the established OA publishers with journals listed in Scopus, the average APC grew by about 5% a year over the two years 2012 – 2013.” Taking such increases into account, India’s APC bill is bound to grow far beyond the US$2.4 million in the future. These cost increases are unpredictable, making it difficult for organizations willing to pay APC to make appropriate provisions in their budgets.

_{Affordable OA publishing}

Concerned about the high subscription costs and audience-limiting access rules of many traditional journals and the high levels of APCs charged by OA journals, many editorial boards broke away from publishers of such journals ‘in order to launch a comparable journal with a friendlier publisher or less-restrictive access policy.’²⁹ The most recent example is the en masse resignation of Rooryck and the other members of the editorial board of Lingua to start Glossa.³⁰ An early example was the resignation of the editor of Evolutionary Ecology along with many members of the editorial board to start Evolutionary Ecology Research in 1998.²⁹Suber maintains a list of such ‘Journal declarations of independence.’²⁹ Gowers, a strong opponent of publishers making tall claims about the value they add to publications and the huge subscription prices they charge, has launched an arXiv overlay journal called Discreet Analysis, owned by a group of researchers, in which the overall cost per article will be well below $30.³¹ His idea is to demonstrate that “in the internet age, and in particular in an age when it is becoming routine for mathematicians to deposit their articles on the arXiv before they submit them to journals, the only important function left for journals is organizing peer review.”³¹ How will these journals survive? Initially, the Association of Dutch Universities and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund Glossa so it can be completely free for both authors and readers, and the Open Libraries of the Humanities will take over the funding after five years.³²Seed money from the University of Cambridge will see through Discreet Analysis in the first five years.³¹

"It’s important [that these alternative models] acquire a reputation and prestige that people can feel it’s okay to submit to them — rather than the more established traditional journals — without damaging their careers," Gowers says.³² "We need an alternative, cheap system sitting there — at which point the commercial publishers will become redundant."³³

Should Indian researchers spend a large sum on APCs?

Why do authors choose to publish in certain journals? Scientists want their work not only to be seen and read but also to be appreciated and cited. For them publications are the culmination of their research and a means of achieving prestige and visibility. Moreover, the journals in which authors publish play an important role in the way the global community of scientists and funding agencies evaluate a scientist. Authors choose journals that would bring them maximum visibility, prestige and citations. Although there have been many discssions in recent times about the place of citations in scholarly communication and the undue importance paid to journal impact factors,³⁴ scientists of all age groups look forward to their papers being cited repeatedly and quickly, and journals proudly advertise their impact factors on their cover pages. Scientists do not really care if a journal is OA or if it charges APC (as long as their institution or funder is ready to cover the costs), nor surprisingly are they chary of surrendering all rights to their paper to the publisher. Many journals charging APC satisfy authors’expectations to a lesser or greater extent and authors are able to find the ones that would accept their papers. In addition, many of the journals run by major commercial publishers are run professionally and their unified graphical appearance gives them an identity. As scholarly communication moves from print to online, these publishers take advantage of emerging technological tools and standards to offer the research community ever better ways of presenting their content and they also energetically market their journals. PLoS, which was started with a view to fighting the commercial publishers, has spent US$3 million on software development in 2013-14 and more than US$413,000 on marketing and advertising in addition to expenses on promotion.³⁵

The question, from the point ofview of authors, is, “is it all right to spend huge sums for getting papers published in OA journals?” No, says Balaram, former director of Indian Institute of Science. He believes that Indian researchers should not use government funds – money given for research - to subsidize non-Indian journals, and that the money spent on APCs could be better spent on research per se or on libraries.³⁶ Williams-Jones and colleagues belive that “for many sectors of academe, ‘paying to publish’ is ethically suspicious.³⁷Such an ethical concern has also been raised by Wilson and Golonka.³⁸ There are other voices from the global South opposed to OA through APC. Babini of the Latin American Social Science Council asserts that paying huge sums as APC could increase the overall costs of research and financially undermine a nation’s research and scientific publishing ecosystem.³⁹ Nilsen says paying to publish represents a new apartheid system, and that “we need to move away from a system where someone decides who should have access to what.”⁴⁰For the sake of the global public good, Nilsen recommends that we should abandon the discriminative APC-based publishing practice and adopt open access through repositories.

The APC model of OA is not serving the true purpose of OA, which aims to create a level playing field for access to research. The APC levied by PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine is roughly equal to half of a month’s salary for an assistant professor in the United States, but more than two months of salary for an assistant professor in India.

Moreover, at a time when science is facing a funding crunch, it would be prudent for Indian researchers and research institutions to refrain from paying APCs to journals. A few months ago, both Rao and Swaminathan lamented the shortage of funds for research,^41,42 and more recently the Ministry of Human Resource Development announced some budgetary cuts for Indian Institutes of Technology⁴³ and the Ministry of Science & Technlogy has told the CSIR laboratories to fund reseach by themselves and to convert ongoing projects into for-profit ventures.⁴⁴

What is the alternative model for making research OA?

What is the alternative to publishing in paid OA journals? Balaram suggests that the authors could publish their papers without paying APC and still make them open through interoperable institutional repositories.^36,45 Joshi has explained the advantages of depositing one’s papers in such repositories.⁴⁶ Authors may wonder if making a paper available through such a repository is equivalent to publishing in an OA or hybrid OA journal. The answer is yes, very nearly. Journals may insist on an embargo and they may let the author deposit only the author postprint (the refereed version). Experts such as Harnad would recommend the adoption of OA through repositories worldwide so that institutions could cancel subscriptions and use the savings to pay for the much lower-priced, affordable, sustainable OA journals.⁴⁷ Use of repositories is picking up around the world. According to Morrison,⁶ “Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) repositories collectively added more than 4.7 million documents this quarter for a total of just under 89 million documents,” and “the number of journals actively participating in PubMed Central, making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow.” arXiv grew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the last year.⁶

What is happening in India?

There are many OA journals in India, and 337 have been listed in DOAJ (as on 3 September 2016). These include journals published by leading Academies, societies and government organizations such as CSIR-NISCAIR, DESIDOC, ICMR, and ICAR, and these are free to authors and readers. MedKnow, although part of a private publishing group, publishes a large number of OA titles, most of which again are free to both authors and readers. But not all Indian OA journals are on a single platform like SciELO. Apart from a few exceptions like MedKnow journals, others do not offer all the web features and metrics that leading publishers offer, which is surprising considering the wealth of technological skills available in the country.

Another platform specifically designed to provide open access to journals published in developing countries is Bioline International, a not-for-profit partnership committed to providing open access to quality research journals and reducing the South to North knowledge gap. Bioline currently supports 36 journals from 16 countries. The download statistics of Bioline journals (http://www.bioline.org.br/stats) are very impressive. Kirsop, a founding member of

Bioline International, told us “Within a single month in 2016, some 1.5 million full text articles were downloaded – equivalent to approximately 18 million per annum – showing the value attached to publications resulting from research carried out in regions of the global south, often referred to as ‘the missing science’, but nevertheless essential to achieve a global understanding in such areas as health and the environment.” (Personal communication, 13 April 2016).

Organizations such as CSIR, DBT and DST have already adopted a policy of making research produced in their own laboratories, as well as research they support in other institutions, open access through placing the accepted papers in institutional open access repositories.^48,49CSIR-

URDIP, Pune, has set up a central platform for OA repositories and harvesting from all three organizations and these could be accessed at http://www.csircentral.net/ and http://sciencecentral.in/. Unfortunately, many laboratories under these apex bodies have not taken the OA policy seriously, nor there seems to be any will on the part of the apex bodies to implement the policy forcefully.These repositories are interoperable and have adopted the best international practices. ICAR also has an open access policy, but it does not seem to have much traction.⁵⁰ There are also many institutional repositories (listed in http://roar.eprints.org/), some of them well populated, but others are languishing, largely due to the indifference of scientists.

By contrast, China seems to have made considerable progress. It was only in 2014 that the

Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China

(NSFC) issued open access policies.⁵¹ By mid-March 2016 , the Open Repository of the

NSFC included 135,000 research papers published between 1998 and 2015 by authors from 1,305 institutions. These research papers have already been downloaded more than 669,000 times. CAS now has two OA portals, namely the Institutional Repository Grid of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with content from 102 repositories, and the China Open Access Journal Portal, with content from hundreds of journals.⁵²

Latin America has witnessed the emergence of strong cooperative scholarly publishing ventures, such as SciELO (www.scielo.org) which hosts about 1,250 journals, and Redalyc

(www.redalyc.org) which hosts, 1,095 journals. Of these more than 2,300 journals, 1,300 do not charge APC and others charge only a modest fee.⁵³ A SPARC report says, “SciELO and Redalyc do raise the visibility and accessibility of the journals they host, particularly with their local communities. These types of networked meta-publishers allow for central governance of policies, procedures and controls, but are intentionally decentralized to support the development of local capacity and infrastructure ensuring greater sustainability and alignment with local policies and priorities.”⁵⁴With these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing.

Even so, researchers in Latin America continue to publish a very large proportion of their papers in non-OA journals. For example, as shown in Table 1, in the five years 2010-14, more than 65% of papers from Brazil were published in non-OA journals. The simplest way to make the large volume of non-OA papers freely available is to set up many institutional repositories and populate them quickly. Efforts are already under way in several countries and indeed a network of repositories from nine countries is coordinated by La Referencia

(http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/), and there are legislations in place in Argentina, Mexico and

Peru to make publicly funded research freely available through repositories.⁵⁵

What needs to be done?

Compared with developments in Latin America and China, India is clearly lagging behind in making her research freely accessible. How can this be changed? We believe that making all research freely accessible through interoperable OA repositories is the ideal solution. According to Houghton and Swan,⁵⁶ till the time we reach an all Gold OA (OA through journals) world, Green OA (OA through repositories) may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy. We suggest the following actions.

Populate OA repositories that are already there, as empty and sparsely populated repositories will not reflect well on the research community.
Set up repositories in institutions where one does not exist. Academic and research librarians can play an important role in setting up and populating repositories.
Academic and research organizations (at the state and central levels, as well as apex bodies), which do not have an OA policy, should adopt a policy similar to those of DBT, DST and CSIR and implement the same.
As part of the implementation, funding agencies and heads of organizations should have a compliance monitoring mechanism that would reward those who deposit their papers, and persuade those who do not.
If the policies of all agencies are aligned, it would bring about many advantages such as ease of compliance, optimization of workflow, and sharing of data and best practices.⁵⁷
All organizations may join the CSIR-URDIP effort so that a nation wide platform could emerge for OA repositories. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also, as demonstrated by HAL, France, facilitate “coherent meta-data description, connection to national authority files, quicker take up of new technologies (e.g. visualisation and data mining) and better connection with international initiatives.”⁵⁸
Funding agencies and research organizations that are so far unconcerned about their funds being used to meet APCs should stop supporting this practice.
A cadre of scholarly communication workforce should be developed for building institutional repositories and persuading researchers to upload materials.

Conclusion

If India and China follow the Latin American model of hosting all or most of their journals on a single decentralized platform and make as many journals as possible OA, and if India, China and Latin America vigorously promote a culture of OA repositories and encourage researchers to self-archive their publications, that would have a great impact on making science and scholarship open, not only in these regions but around the world. All of this can happen only with the willing participation of the scientific community. As Harnad would say, ‘Self-archive unto others as you would have them self-archive unto you’.⁵⁹

If, instead, researchers continue to pay publishers exorbitant APCs, as Poynder points out, there will soon be a crisis over the cost of APCs, which would hit research the world over, but research in the developing world will be hit harder.⁶⁰ As long as we continue to use APC based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Peter Suber and Ms Barbara Kirsop for their valuable comments.

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Figure 1. Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in SCIE, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.

Table 1. Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year

[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]

Year	OA journals (APC)			OA journals (non-APC)			All OA journals
Year	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations	No. of journals	No. of papers	Sum of citations
2010	242	2557	17550	237	4131	16301	479	6688	33851
2011	263	3067	17367	244	4280	12645	507	7347	30012
2012	308	2800	15715	251	4157	9276	559	6957	24991
2013	326	3335	12635	268	4457	6257	594	7792	18892
2014	328	3634	6950	283	4660	3057	611	8294	10007
Total		15393	70217		21685	47536		37078	117753

Table 2. OA journals charging APC in which Indian authors have published at least 10 papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP	APC
Nucleic Acids Research	GB	138	1945	14.09	$2,770
PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases	US	126	1409	11.18	$2,250
BMC Genomics	GB	123	1330	10.81	$2,145
International Journal of Nanomedicine	NZ	94	1555	16.54	€1,843
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics	DE	65	1116	17.17	€25^#
BMC Plant Biology	GB	44	579	13.16	$2,145
PLoS Pathogens	US	42	781	18.60	$2,250
Molecular Cancer	GB	34	540	15.88	$2,145
International Journal of Molecular Sciences	CH	28	298	10.64	CHF1,600
Molecules	CH	28	300	10.71	CHF1,800
PLoS Computational Biology	US	25	342	13.68	$2,250
PLoS Medicine	US	25	721	28.84	$2,900
DNA Research	GB	24	542	22.58	$750
PLoS Genetics	US	24	354	14.75	$2,250
Biogeosciences	DE	23	294	12.78	€25^#
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health	CH	22	278	12.64	CHF1,600
Journal of Translational Medicine	GB	15	238	15.87	$2,145
Marine Drugs	CH	14	256	18.29	CHF1,800
Journal of Neuroinflammation	GB	12	179	14.92	$450
Science and Technology of Advanced Materials	GB	12	181	15.08	$1,600
BMC Medicine	GB	11	374	34.00	$2,785
Remote Sensing	CH	11	125	11.36	CHF1,600
Cryosphere	DE	10	112	11.20	€25^#
Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER	US	10	128	12.80	$200
Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10		117	1930	16.50
Total		1077	15907

ISO 3166 country code

^#Page charges

Table 3. Non-APC journals in which Indian authors have published their papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP
Bulletin of The World Health Organization	CH	41	515	12.56
Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences	CA	14	173	12.36
Environmental Health Perspectives	US	10	188	18.80
Journal of Machine Learning Research	US	10	118	11.80
Materials Today	GB	4	81	20.25
Earth System Science Data	DE	3	88	29.33
Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica	MX	3	181	60.33
Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas	MX	3	41	13.67
Folia Neuropathologica	PL	2	23	11.50
Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences	GB	2	20	10.00

ISO 3166 country code

Table 4. Mega journals used by Indian researchers

Journal	Publishing country^*	No. of papers	Sum of citations	CPP	APC
PLoS One	US	2404	17587	7.32	$1,495
Scientific Reports	GB	222	1523	6.86	£990
AIP Advances	US	196	645	3.29	$1,350
Springer Plus	CH	170	235	1.38	$1,290
BMJ Open	GB	56	148	2.64	£1,350
FEBS Open Bio	GB	21	86	4.10	$1350
PeerJ	GB	13	33	2.54	$695
Biology Open	GB	9	9	1.00	$1,495
G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics	US	9	83	9.22	$1,950
		3100	20349	6.56

ISO 3166 country code

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published

Intellectual Property Rights — Open Access for Researchers

nehaa — 2015-03-24T01:22:20Z

In the year 2013, Nehaa Chaudhari had worked on a module on Intellectual Property Rights for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s Open Access Curriculum (Curriculum for Researchers) as part of a project for the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia. UNESCO published the module this year. Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga were among the Module preparation team. Nehaa Chaudhari was the writer for Units 1, 2 and 3: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright and Alternative to a Strict Copyright Regime.

This publication is available in Open Access under the Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/). By using the content of this publication, the users accept to be bound by the terms of use of the UNESCO Open Access Repository (http://www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-use-ccbysa-en).

Module Introduction

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are set of rights associated with creations of the human mind. An output of the human mind may be attributed with intellectual property rights. These are like any other property, and the law allows the owner to use the same to economically profit from the intellectual work. Broadly IPR covers laws related to copyrights, patents and trademarks. While laws for these are different in different countries, they follow the international legal instruments. The establishment of the Wold Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has established the significance of IPR for the economic growth of nations in the knowledge economy.

This module has three units, and while the Unit 1 covers the basics of IPR, Unit 2 expands in detail the components of copyright and explains the origins and conventions associated with it. Unit 3 discusses the emergence of liberal licensing of copyrighted work to share human creation in the commons. In the last unit, we discuss the Creative Commons approach to licensing of creative works within the structures of the copyright regime that permits the authors to exercise their rights to share in the way they intend to. Creative Commons provides six different types of licenses, of which the Creative Commons Attribution license is the most widely used in research journals part of the Open Access framework.

At the end of this module, you are expected to be able to:

Understand intellectual property rights and related issues
Explain copyright, authors’ rights, licensing and retention of rights; and
Use the Creative Commons licensing system

Acknowledgements

Nehaa would like to thank Varun Baliga and Anirudh Sridhar for their research and writing support in Unit 1, and Samantha Cassar for Unit 2.

Click to download the PDF containing the Modules. Also read UNESCO’s Open Access (OA) Curriculum is now online

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/unesco-nehaa-chaudhari-march-19-2015-communication-and-information-resources-news-and-in-focus-articles-unesco-open-access-curriculum-is-now-online

Privacy, Free/Open Source, and the Cloud

elonnai — 2012-03-22T05:50:10Z

A look into the questions that arise in concern to privacy and cloud computing, and how open source plays into the picture.

Introduction

Cloud computing, in basic terms, is internet-based computing where shared resources and services are taken from the primary infrastructure of the internet and provided on demand. Cloud computing creates a shared network between major corporations like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo. In this way, cloud systems are related to grid computing systems/service- oriented architectures, and create the potential for the entire I.T. infrastructure to be programmable. Because of this, cloud computing establishes a new consumption and delivery standard for IT services based on the internet. It is a new consumption and delivery model, because it is made up of services delivered through common centers and built on servers which act as a point of access for the computing needs of consumers. The access points facilitate the tailoring and delivering of targeted applications and services to consumers. Details are taken from the users, who no longer need to have an understanding of, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports their desired application.

There are both corporate and consumer implications for such a system. For example, according cloud computing lowers the barriers to entry for corporations and new services. It also enables innovative enterprise in locations where there is an insufficient supply of human or other resources through the provision of inexpensive hardware, software, and applications. The consumer, in turn, is provided with information that he or she is projected to be interested in based on information he or she has already “consumed.” Thus, for example: Google has the ability to monitor a person’s consuming habits through searches and to reduce those habits to a pattern which selects applications to display – and consumption of those reinforces the pattern.

Privacy Concerns:

Though cloud computing can be a useful tool for consumers, corporations, and countries, cloud computing poses significant privacy concerns for all actors involved. For the consumer, a major concern is that future business models may rely on the use of personal data from consumers of cloud services for advertising or behavioral targeting. This concern brings to light the fundamental problem of cloud computing which is that consumers consent to the secondary use of their personal data only when they are signing up for services, and that “consent” is almost automatically generated. How can the cloud assure users that their private data will be properly protected? It is true that high levels of encryption can be (and are) used, and that many companies also take other precautionary measures, but protective measures vary, and the secondary sources that gain access to information may not protect it as well as the initial source. Moreover, even strong protection measures are vulnerable to hackers. As well, what happens if a jurisdiction, like the Indian government, gains access to information about a foreign national? India still does not have a comprehensive data protection law, nor does it have many forms of redress for violations of privacy. How is that individuals information protected?

These questions give rise to other privacy concerns with respect to the data that is circulated and stored on the cloud, which are the questions of territory, sovereignty, and regulation. Many of these were brought up at the Internet Governance Forum, which took place on the 16th of September including: Which jurisdiction has authority in cases of dispute or digital crime? If you lose data or your data is damaged, stolen, or manipulated, where do you go? Is the violation enforced under local laws, and, if so, under the law of the violator or the law of the violated? If international law, who can access the tribunals, and which tribunals have this jurisdiction? What if a person's data is replicated in two data centres in two different countries? Are the data subject to scrutiny by the officials of all three? Is there a remedy against abuse by any of them? Does it matter whether the country in which the data centre resides does not require a warrant for government access? And how will a consumer know any of that up front? As a corollary, if content is being sent to one country but resides on a data centre in another country, whose data protection standards apply? For example, certain governments in Europe require data retention for limited amount of time for purposes for law enforcement, but other countries may allow retention of data for shorter or longer periods of time.

How are privacy, free/open source, and the cloud related ?

Eben Moglen, a professor from Columbia law school, and founder and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center who spoke on cloud computing, privacy, and free/open software at the Indian Institute for science on Thursday September 25, had another solution to the privacy concerns that arise out of the cloud. His lecture explains how the internet has moved from a tool that once promoted equality between people – no servants and no masters – to a tool that reinforces social hierarchies. The reinforcement of these hierarchies is directly related to the language used and communication facilitated between the computer and the individual. Professor Moglen describes how initially, when computers were first introduced to the public, humans spoke directly to computers, and computers responded directly to humans. This open, two-way communication changed when Microsoft, Apple, and IBM removed the language between humans and computers and created proprietary software based on a server-client computing relationship. By removing the language between humans and computers, these corporations dis-empowered individuals. Professor Moglen used this as a springboard to address the privacy concerns that come up in cloud computing. Privacy at its base is the ability of an individual to control access to various aspects of self, such as decisional, informational, and locational. In having the ability to control these factors, privacy consists of a relation between a person and another person or an entity. Professor Moglen postulated that free/open access to code would make the internet an environment where choices over that relationship were still in the hands of an individual, and, among other protections, the individuals could build up their desired levels of privacy.

Is free/open software the solution?

Eben Moglen's solution to the many privacy concerns that arise out of cloud computing is the application and use of free software/open source by individuals. Unlike some applications on the cloud, open source is free, and once an individual has access to the code, that person can control how a program functions, including how a program uses personal information, and thus the person would be able to protect their privacy. Of course, this presumes that the consumer of the internet is sophisticated enough to access and manipulate code. But even putting that presumption aside, is the ability to write code enough to protect data (will help you protect data better – add more security)? Perhaps if a person could create his own server and bypass the cloud, but this does not seem like an ideal (or practical) solution. Though free/open source is an important element that should be incorporated into cloud computing, free/open source depends on open standards. According to Pranesh Prakash, in his presentation at the Internet Governance Forum, the role of standards in ensuring interoperability is critical to allowing consumers to choose between different devices to access the cloud, to choose between different software clients, and to shift between one service and another. This would include moving information, both the data and the metadata, from one cloud to another. Clouds would need to be able to talk to one another to enable data sharing, and open source is key to this, though it is important to note that if one uses free/open source, they must set up their own infrastructure.

Conclusion

Even though Moglen believes that free/open source software brings freedom and provides the solution to protect an individual’s privacy in the context of cloud computing, he was not speaking to the specific context of India. To do that, it is important to expand the definitions that one uses of free/open source and privacy, and then to contextualize them. Looking closely at the words “free/open source,” they are not limited to access to a software's code, even though that is free/open source’s base. For the ideology of free/open source to work, access to code is just a key to the puzzle. A person, community, culture and state must understand the purpose of free/open source, know how to use it, and know how it can be applied in order for it to be transformative, liberating, and protective. There needs to be a shared understanding that free/open source is not just about being able to change code, but about a shared commitment to sharing code and making it transparent and accessible. In the United States and other countries, free/open source did not just enter into American society and immediately fix issues of privacy by bringing freedom, as it seems Professor Moglen is suggesting free/open source will do in India. Though Professor Moglen promises freedom and privacy protection through free/open source, perhaps this is not an honest appraisal of the technology. Free/open source, if not equally accessed or misapplied, protects neither freedom nor privacy. As noted above, even if a person has access to code, he can protect data only to a certain extent. Thus, he might think that he has created a privacy wall around information that actually is readily accessible. In other words, free/open source cannot be the only answer to freedom, but instead a piece to a collective answer.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy/privacy-cloud-computing

2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics

rebecca — 2012-07-18T10:47:44Z

The 2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics convened a panel on Open Access. There was consensus amongst the panelist that the “big question” facing the open access movement no longer remains "if" or "why" open access, but rather "how" open access. The panel proved instructive for shifting the discussion away from ideology towards concrete questions facing the open access agenda and its implementation.

This year’s International Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics held in Bangalore brought together a panel of speakers who discussed the accomplishments of and future challenges facing the open access movement. There was an air of consensus amongst the panelists that the “big question” facing the OA movement today no longer remains if or why open access, but rather how open access[1]. The speakers did a good job of moving the discussion beyond ideology or proof of principle and used the panel to discuss some of the challenges facing the OA agenda and its implementation.

More than ten years after the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the benefits of open access have been demonstrated through countless studies. Studies have demonstrated an increased impact factor for authors who self archive, for those who self-archive early, those who publish in OA journals, as well as for journals that have gone OA. Other studies have shown the benefits of open models for facilitating scientific collaboration and stimulating the knowledge economy; creating new opportunities for both big business and start-ups alike. Further, open models of publishing—both green and gold—are well recognized today as attractive alternatives for research institutions and universities seeking local and sustainable solutions for internal intellectual property management. In light of this mounting body of evidence, policy makers and administration can no longer overlook the benefits of OA for the visibility and impact of their institution, faculty and research publications.

Fortunately, the wealth of studies demonstrating the benefits of OA for both the STM and HSS disciplines have grabbed the attention of national and international policy makers. On the international stage, models of scholarly research and communication that privilege the open sharing of knowledge are proving more favorable to closed models which remained (relatively) unresponsive to shifting scholarly needs and practices. The presentations given by Alma Swan from Key Perspectives Ltd and of Dr. Carlos Morais Pires of the European Commission reminded us that OA is no longer an fringe matter confined to the esoteric concerns of tech-savvy physicists. Both the unsustainable increase in journal licensing fees and the opportunities presented through digital publishing methods has allowed OA to emerge as a mainstream public policy issue. Leading inter-governmental institutions such as the World Bank, UNESCO and the European Commission have all committed themselves to the OA agenda through a range of initiatives.

The World Bank, for example, now releases all of their publications under the CC-BY license and deposits them within their Open Knowledge Repository. UNESCO continues to support the movement through capacity building initiatives such as policy guidelines and through the Global Open Access Portal. The European Unions’ recent “Digital Agenda” report has firmly recognized the importance of the OA movement to the European economy. Additionally, the Commission’s launch of the “OpenAIRE” repository has set an important valuable precedent and it is hoped that this move will encourage more organizations from the EU to maintain their own institutional repositories. With the support of big players like UNESCO and the European Commission, it remains probable that OA will continue to find its way into the policy agendas of more universities and funding agencies. This high level policy support has certainly reinforced the legitimacy of the OA movement and has proven valuable for the “open” shift in scholarly communication.

As support for OA continues to gain momentum at the international level, an environmental scan reveals a conducive—if not promising—environment for the future growth of open access in India. Indeed, the success the OA movement has seen to date is a cause for optimism in itself. However, these accomplishments must not obviate the real need for continued advocacy in India at all levels. At the national level, the Knowledge Commission of India has shown support for the OA agenda. The agenda has also been taken up by the Council on Scientific and Industrial Research in the form of a council recommendation and a growing network of institutional repositories. At the university level, the National Institute of Oceanography Goa and the National Institute of Technology Rourkela remain the only two institutions which have demonstrated a thorough and long-term commitment to OA in a policy-based capacity. Consequently, both institutions continue to witness growth of their repositories thanks to the support of administrative and library staff. However, it must be recognized that other institutional repositories in India continue to grow at impressive rates, even in the absence of a strong policy base.

Recognizing that most OA enthusiasts agree both upon the need for and benefits of OA, Dr. Norbert Lossau of the Geottingen State Library, Germany, reminded us of the need to focus less on reconfirming the known and taking advantage of opportunities to address concrete questions around implementation. Lossau’s presentation provided a concise and action-oriented framework for moving the OA agenda forward. In particular, he emphasized the need for resource reallocation within library units in order to provide the required institutional support for OA and also underlined importance of capacity and network building among actors who might be working in isolation.

Given the inertia of many faculty and researchers in Indian universities and research institutions, more needs to be done at the policy level before OA can be said to enjoy mainstream success. Given the scope of the task ahead, Dr K Kanikaram Satyanarayana, Deputy Director General of ICMR reminds us that the changing landscape of scholarly communication may not lend indefinite and central importance to the scholarly journal and consequently, the OA movement. Recent internet-based innovations in scholarly publishing—such as the “PLOS Currents” project—reveals how the instantaneity of the digital research environment is inciting greater demand for raw data. Researchers no longer appear willing to wait for the publication of peer-reviewed articles in order to test and build upon the work of their peers. With related issues like open data moving center stage in the “openness” debate, it remains unclear if access to scholarly literature as a finished product and medium of scholarly communication—will remain a priority for policy makers in the long term.

Given the challenges ahead, champions of OA—in any context—need not, nor should not, do it alone. While recognizing the challenges related to maintaining global networks, the panel discussion served as an important reminder that the long-term success of any OA initiative rests in its’ ability to plug into regional, sub-regional and global networks. Global network building does not, however, imply that India need only integrate themselves into established networks (which are more often than not grounded in the Western experience). While greater representation and participation of advocates from the South would certainly be of benefit, it is also important that the distinct needs and conditions of scholarly communication in the Global South are not left unaddressed. Facilitating a truly global exchange of knowledge and building long-lasting south-south collaborations remains an important task ahead. This is particularly important if the Global South is to be recognized as more than mere “beneficiaries” of the OA and also receive visibility as knowledge producers.

[1] Phrase popularized by Neelie Kroes of the EC, in support of OA

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/2012-conference-on-trends-in-knowledge-information-dynamics

Research papers will be available in public domain

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T05:38:36Z

IIT-Madras intends to make circle of knowledge complete, writes Vasudha Venugopal in this article published in the Hindu on 15 February 2012. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is quoted in the article.

2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.

The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.

What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.

Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.

Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.

While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.

Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says.

The original article was published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India

praskrishna — 2013-01-02T05:35:22Z

Professor Leslie Chan, a champion of Open Access (OA) and Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough visited Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore in December 2012 for a series of lectures. Well known advocate for OA in India and the developing world, Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, accompanied him on these tours.

Leslie gave five talks in over three days at the Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, on the morning of December 17, at the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR on the afternoon of December 17 at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala on Decemeber 18 followed by a discussion with Satish Babu, President of the Computer Society of India and Director of ICFOSS in the afternoon, a talk at Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library on December 19, and a talk at SDM Institute for Management Development on December 20, 2012, which was more of a discussion.

Speaking on “Opportunities for Knowledge Management in the Open Access Environment” at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management–Kerala, Leslie Chan said, “the recognition of what constitutes scholarship is still very narrow and the quality of the content is secondary. It is the brand of the journal that is still the driving force behind every western journal.” He further said that there was a tension brewing among open access, quality control and the means of measuring impact. Market forces had infiltrated the realm of knowledge as well, for it was the companies that were increasingly taking over journals that were originally published by scholarly societies.[1]His presentation touched upon what is OA and its key benefits, growth of OA in the last ten years, and opportunities for information and library professionals. See the presentation slides below.

At the Mysore University Library, Leslie gave a lecture on Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communications and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment. He dealt with the key issues of changing contexts of research discovery and dissemination in the digital environment, why greater openness is good for science, the tensions between openness, quality measures, impact and policies, collaboration and competition, interdisciplinary research, deluge of research data. Prof. Chan touched upon some key problems like the broken scholarly communication system, emerging tools not being used effectively to serve scholarship, and the need to re-design scholarly communications and impact measures. See the presentation slides below.

Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communication and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment from University of Toronto Scarborough

Therafter, Prof. Chan visited Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Institute for Management Development and addressed scientists, librarians and academicians. There were discussions on how open access journals and repositories can help improve the visibility of an institution's research strengths, help attract research collaborators for authors and increase the return on investment. Prof. Chan was particularly critical of the current trends, in evaluating both researchers and their institutions using impact factor of journals in which they publish their research papers as the yardstick. Read the press coverage by Star of Mysore (PDF, 462 Kb).


Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam accompanied Prof. Leslie in his tours to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore

Leslie's tour to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore which saw him deliver a series of lectures along with open forum discussions has triggered a fresh awakening to seriously debate on open access initiatives. The event was well covered by the media with the Hindu doing an exclusive interview with him.[2]

More pictures of Prof. Chan's visit can be seen here.

[1]. See “Call for efforts to promote open access platforms, The Hindu, December 19, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/10LEiBU, last accessed on December 31, 2012.
[2]. See "In defence of Open Access systems", The Hindu, December 31, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/VZfmz6, last accessed on January 2, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/leslie-chan-gives-five-talks-in-india

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

The 2013 EPT Award for Individuals in Developing Countries Working for Open Access

praskrishna — 2013-10-29T07:30:10Z

Below is the press release announcing the 3rd Annual Award for individuals in the developing world who have made a significant contribution to Open Access. The application form for nominations follows the announcement. The EPT hopes to receive a similarly large number of representations as were received for the award in its first two years.

Please send your proposal by 30/11/2013 to: EPT Chair, Derek Law, at d.law@strath.ac.uk

Open Access Week arrives again this October, and is a time to celebrate all that has been achieved in the previous twelve months. The Electronic Publishing Trust is a long standing advocate of OA and the difference it can make. As our contribution to this year’s OA Week, we are offering our third annual international award to recognise the impact that individuals can make. The huge interest in and success of the first two awards makes it clear that such international recognition acknowledges the very real efforts being made by many individuals throughout the world, and accelerates the development of models for achieving the open and free transfer of essential information for the progress of research.

Announcement

The Electronic Publishing Trust[*] is pleased to announce that it is offering its third annual award for individuals in developing and transition countries[**] who have made significant advances to the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings. Information on previous winners can be found on our website at http://epublishingtrust.net/

Nominations are sought for the award. Individuals may be nominated by themselves or others or by organisations, sending a statement using the attached form to the chair of the EPT Board, (d.law@strath.ac.uk) outlining the achievements of the individual. Please find the nominations form below.

Nominations should be received by 30th November 2013. Selection of a winner will be made by a panel of EPT Board Members which will be chaired by Dr Patrick Corran, and will include Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam, Barbara Kirsop, co-founder of the charity, and Judy Ugonna.

The result will be announced in January 2014 and it is intended that a presentation will be made at a location convenient to the winner. The award recipient will be publicly recognised through the presentation of a certificate and an engraved award. It is also hoped to have a “side” event at future OA meetings to celebrate the work of the winner.

EPT Award submission form for nominations

The EPT Award is for individuals who have made an impact on the progress of open access to research findings.
Nominations may be made by individuals or organisations.
Please supply the following information:

Name of nominee:
Affiliation of nominee:
Position or role of nominee:
Contact address and email of nominee:
Contact address and email of proposer:

Please provide a brief statement to describe the ACTIVITIES of the nominee in support of Open Access (no more than 250 words).

Please describe the RESULTS AND SIGNIFICANCE of these activities (not more than 500 words).

[*]. The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) was established in 1996 to facilitate open access to the world’s scholarly literature and to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication.

[**]. As defined by the UN at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm#transition

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ept-award-for-individuals-in-developing-countries-working-for-open-access

An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth

praskrishna — 2012-11-24T06:09:54Z

India has been losing out its best talents to the West, however, this trend could be reversed if we create adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, and our scientific productivity and quality of research will improve significantly, says Dr. Francis Jayakanth in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

First of all congratulations for winning the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access.
Thank you very much.
When did you first take an interest in Open Access and what are your research interests?
I have always been impressed with the electronic pre-print servers like the arXiv, Cogprints, etc. I wanted to do something similar for IISc research publications.

One of the important activities of the National Centre for Science (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has been the training programme. Till recently, NCSI was conducting an 18-month training course called Information and Knowledge Management. This was targeted primarily at students graduating from Indian library schools, with a view to providing them with classroom and practical training in the application of ICT. Essentially, the aim was to train the students in how to provide state-of-the-art, computer-based information services. I have been closely associated with this training programme by offering courses and overseeing projects.

As part of the training programme the students are expected do a project. Around the year 2001, one of our students, Mr. Madhuresh Singhal carried out a project work in implementing GNU Eprints.org software developed by the University of Southampton. Incidentally, ePrints is the first professional software platform for building high quality OAI-compliant repositories. The student project successfully demonstrated the self-archiving concept through institutional repositories. The project work was later implemented to set up the country’s first institutional repository, eprints@IISc . Ever since, I have been an OA practitioner and an OA advocate.

I’m not a hard-core researcher. My work interests lies in using free and open source software for providing web-based information services.
Why Open Access is important to science and particularly India?
When researchers publish their works in journals and conference proceedings, they would want their works to be read, cited, and built upon by as wide an audience as possible. Much of the scientific publications are being published by commercial publishers. Subscription costs of such publications are very high, constantly increasing, and beyond the means of most of the libraries. The high subscription costs create an access barrier to the scientific literature because of which the publications do not get the kind of visibility that the researchers would like to. The lack of adequate visibility will reduce the potential impact of the publications. This in turn could affect the advancement of knowledge. It is therefore imperative that the access barrier to scientific literature created because of high subscription costs should be overcome and this could be achieved through OA publishing.

The problems with respect to research literature that India and other developing countries have always faced are two-fold:
- Not being able to access high quality scientific literature because of the high subscriptions costs, and
- Research reported in the national journals does not reach the global audience because most of the journals published from the country are not indexed by Web of Science (WoS) and/or Scopus databases, which are leading citation indexing databases.
If all the journals that are being published in the country could migrate to open access platform then the visibility of research works reported in the journals published from the country will automatically improve with time. This has been the experience of several of the OA journals published by MedKnow and others.
In terms of the number of papers published in refereed journals, the number of citations to these papers, citations per paper, and the number of international awards and recognitions won, India’s record is poor. What needs to be done to improve this?
For a long time now, our country has been losing out the best of the talents to mostly western and other countries. If this trend could be countered by the creation of adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, our country's scientific productivity and also quality of research done in the country will improve significantly. This may also trigger reverse brain-drain.
Indian scientists lack access and visibility. They find it tough to access what other scientists have done, due to the high costs of access and libraries in India can’t afford to subscribe to key journals needed by users. Also other researchers are not able to access what Indian researchers are doing leading to low visibility. How can we overcome these deficits? Will adoption of Open Access within and outside India overcome the aforesaid handicaps?
Access to scientific literature in the country has improved significantly during the last decade or so. This is largely because of the several library consortia that have emerged in the country during that period. However, the existing consortia and the ones that are likely to emerge in the coming years, is not the solution for the access barrier to scientific literature that exists today. There has to be a world-wide adaptation of OA to overcome the access barrier.
Do you support the movement towards making scientific publications as freely accessible as possible and create an institutional repository? What steps are being taken by the Indian Institute of Science to maintain an open access archive?
Yes. Open Access Journals and Open Access Archives or Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the two ways to facilitate OA to scholarly literature. As per the DOAJ statistics, today, there are close to 7500 peer reviewed OA journals and as per the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) there are more than 2770 institutional repositories across the world.

In a recent study, Bo-Christer Bjork estimated that the overall percentage of scientific literature currently available OA is about 20 per cent. This includes both papers published in OA journals and those deposited in institutional repositories and directly on the Web. So, still a long way to go in achieving 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature! If all the research institutions set up their IRs and ensure that copies of post-prints are placed in the IRs then 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature could be achieved, at least, from now onwards.

ePrints@IISc, the OA institutional repository of IISc was established by NCSI in 2002. The repository holds more than 32,400 publications of IISc making the century-old institute’s research far more globally visible than before. NCSI has also provided technical help and support to several other institutes and universities in setting up their repositories and OA journals.
What are the key challenges of the scholarly publications in India?
Poor visibility and readership of many of the journals published from the country affects the citations of the articles published in such journals. This in turn affects the impact factors (IF) of the journals. No author would like to publish in very low IF journals.
What message would you give to funding agencies, the government and policy makers particularly for implementing a nation-wide mandate for Open Access?
Most of the research projects in the country are being funded by the government agencies. It is therefore imperative that we should have a nation-wide OA mandate for research publications that emerge from research projects funded from tax payers’ money. Such a mandate will not only help in enhancing the visibility of research done in the country; it may also help in avoiding duplication of research projects carried out in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/interview-with-francis-jayakanth

Indo - French Perspectives on Digital Studies

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T05:17:33Z

Anubha Sinha was a speaker at the Indo-French workshop on Open Access at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on March 15, 2017. The event was organized by the Digital Studies Group.

Anubha Sinha broadly spoke on the state of open access in India, the features of the DBT-DST policy, ICAR policy, how to shape the future of open access movement in India and what are the obstacles in the same.

See the workshop schedule here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies