[Fsf-friends] [OFFTOPIC] India's march towards open access

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

 	Fascinating article, of relevance to those
 	in the Free Software world. FN

INDIA's MARCH TOWARDS OPEN ACCESS

Subbiah Arunachalam
Source: SciDev.Net

+----------------------------------------------
Subbiah Arunachalam argues that the best way
to make scientific research more available worldwide is to encourage scientists 
to
self-archive their research.
+----------------------------------------------+

In December 2003, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) held a one-day
conference on access to scientific data and information as part of its
annual meeting in Pune. The conference was held to address two key problems
faced by Indian scientists -- poor access to international journals and the
low visibility of papers published by Indian scientists -- and the possible
solutions offered by electronic publishing and open archives.

Inaugurating the conference, Raghunath A.  Mashelkar, director-general of
India's Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, spoke of how
international organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and
the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) were helping developing
countries improve electronic access to expensive journals through the HINARI
and AGORA programmes, respectively.

 	Unfortunately, however, India has not benefited from either of these
 	programmes. Although journal publishers are willing to provide
 	toll-free electronic access to researchers in countries where
 	relatively few scientists read their journals, they are not prepared
 	to do so in larger developing countries such as India, where they
 	already have a considerable number of subscribers. Yet India's
 	average gross domestic product (GDP) is, per capita, less than half
 	the threshold agreed upon by the WHO and FAO when they set up the
 	HINARI and AGORA programmes.

A RADICAL RESPONSE

So scientists in such countries need to find a more radical response by
harnessing the new opportunities provided by information and communication
technologies (ICTs). We need to break away from the existing model of
publishing and communicating scientific knowledge. One way of doing this is
to embrace the 'open-access' approach being promoted by the Budapest Open
Access Initiative with its two complementary strategies of setting up
interoperable open archives and promoting open-access journals.

Several Indian publishers have already adopted the open-access philosophy
for the electronic versions of their journals. Unlike some open-access
journals in other countries, in which authors pay to publish their papers,
Indian open-access journals use government grants and subscriptions to their
print version to cover publishing costs.

All 10 journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences, for example, as well as
the four journals of INSA, are open-access journals. In fact, INSA has
already produced free-access electronic versions of back volumes for all its
journals, and the Indian Academy of Sciences is also attempting a similar
'retro-digitisation'.

The Journal of the Indian Institute of Science is also available in this
form back to its very first issue, published in 1914. The Indian Medlars
Centre of the National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, is bringing out
electronic versions of 22 biomedical journals, all of them accessible
without subscription. The Medlars Centre also has an online bibliographic
database, www.indmed.nic.in, providing titles and abstracts of articles from
77 Indian biomedical journals.

 	Medknow Publications, a small company based in Mumbai, has helped 10
 	medical journals -- including the Journal of Post Graduate Medicine
 	and Neurology India -- make the transition from print to electronic
 	open access and all of them are doing much better now than before.

In addition, some Indian open-access journals are using international
agencies such as Bioline, a not-for-profit electronic publishing service for
developing countries, and JournalServer.org, an online library of academic
journals, to gain greater visibility.

However, open-access publishing needs to be complemented by setting up
interoperable institutional archives, which allow researchers to make
versions of their articles publicly available online both before and after
publication.

An additional attraction of such archives is that they would raise the
profile of Indian research. At present, research originating in an Indian
laboratory and published in expensive journals all too often goes unnoticed,
even by other researchers in India. Creating institutional archives of such
work would help to integrate it into the global knowledge base, to reduce
the isolation of our scientists and to improve opportunities for funding and
international collaboration.

The clear advantages offered by institutional archiving over the present
publishing system, in which many research papers are held in the back issues
of journals controlled by commercial (and some society) publishers in other
countries, suggests that the government should have an interest in ensuring
its success.  India's University Grants Commission, for example, should
insist that major universities with a large output of science and technology
papers set up institutional archives.

 	Other funding agencies -- such as the Department of Science &
 	Technology, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research,
 	Department of Biotechnology, Department of Atomic Energy, Department
 	of Space, Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Indian Council
 	of Medical Research -- should also insist that research papers
 	resulting from work supported by their funds be made available
 	through open-access archives and toll-free journals.

India is not the only country being drawn towards open access.

In China - for example, among officials of the National Natural Science
Foundation and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information in
China, as well as researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences
-- there is already significant interest in its benefits to the country's
scientists.

Reflecting this interest, in mid-June 2004 China will hold a major national
conference on open access in cooperation with the US National Academy of
Sciences. And in the last week of June, the Eighth International Conference
on Electronic Publishing will take place in Brasilia.

The first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, held last
December, has given a considerable boost to these efforts: the WSIS
Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action include strong statements in
favour of open access to scientific literature. UN secretary-general Kofi
Annan has also offered his support.

NURTURING THE NETWORK

International action is one thing, but genuine free access is another.

It will need a champion (or champions) in every institution to promote the
creation of institutional archives, and persuade scientists to place their
papers in them.

Free access also requires adequate hardware and connectivity. Many
universities and research institutions in the developing world lack both
computers and high bandwidth Internet connectivity, so part of the strategy
of open-access proponents must include campaigning for improved ICT
facilities. Luckily, costs of both hardware and Internet bandwidth are
coming down all over the world.

Another important hurdle to overcome is the fact that many scientists labour
under the impression that journal editors may not accept archived papers,
claiming that this represents an unacceptable form of 'pre-publication'.

These scientists worry that it will be difficult to assess the impact of
their research if it isn't published in conventional journals. After all,
they argue, promotions and awards are often determined by the impact factor
of the journals in which one's work is published. Many are also unaware of
the advantages of gaining greater visibility and are reluctant to make the
effort to post their articles on archives.

Just over a year ago, for example, the National Centre for Science
Information (NCSI) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the country's
best-known higher education institution in science and technology, set up an
institutional archive. The institute publishes about 1,800 papers a year, of
which about 900 are indexed in the Web of Science, which gives access to the
world's most prestigious, high impact research journals.

Yet so far, the archive has attracted less than 70 papers. This experience
emphasises an important point: it is not enough just to create an
open-access archive. Filling it is far more important (and difficult). After
all, an empty archive is worse than having no archive at all.

 	But attitudes of the journals are changing, making institutional
 	archiving a more attractive proposition. It is important for
 	champions of open access to let scientists know that many journals,
 	including high-impact titles such as Nature and the British Medical
 	Journal, already permit authors to archive both preprints and
 	postprints. The emphasis should therefore be on setting up open
 	archives rather than on persuading journal publishers to make their
 	journals open access.

If scientists and scientific establishments in China, India and Brazil can
be persuaded to adopt open access quickly, then it is likely that the rest
of the developing world will follow.

Related links:
Indian National Science Academy Indian Academy of Sciences
Indian Medlars Centre HINARI
AGORA Budapest Open Access Initiative Bioline International JournalServer.org M 
S Swaminathan Research Foundation Quick guides: Science Publishing

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This article is courtesy Scidev.net. Check out the new South Asia section of
this website, focussing on science and development issues. -FN

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