Making Publicly-funded Research Accessible to the Public (original) (raw)
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Open Access Availability of Indias Scientific Research Funded by National and International Agencies
DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology
Funding has become the most significant element of supportive action for research that has served the research community in numerous ways to improve the advancement and development of society. Scientific research in India is funded by many public and corporate sector institutions and autonomous organisations, NGOs, and regional and international agencies. However, access to publicly funded scientific research literature has been an essential issue of debate among the advocates of the Open Access (OA) movement during the last two decades. This study maps OA availability to India’s research publications funded by national and international agencies. The study applied a scientometric approach using the Scopus database to identify funding research publications available in the OA domain. The findings revealed that 570320 research articles were published by the Indian researchers during 2016-to 2020, of which 150638 (26.41 %) were produced with the financial support of different nation...
The Status and Patterns of open Access in Research Output of Most Productive Indian Institutions
Journal of Scientometric Research, 2020
Open Access is emerging as an important movement worldwide since last few years, triggered mainly by the high subscription cost of pay walled journals that create barriers in universal dissemination of knowledge reported in those journals. The paywall barriers to access of knowledge has become so problematic that even institutions in the developed countries are not only cancelling subscriptions but also mandating it for their researchers to either publish in open access journals or at least deposit their research papers in Institutional Repositories. The high subscription cost of journals is a more serious issue for developing countries, as it takes away institutional resources that can be used for other productive purposes. India has taken several steps in promoting open access, including release of an open access policy by Ministry of Science and Technology, however, it is not very clear that how effective these initiatives have been. This paper intends to address this issue. It examines published output, indexed in Web of Science, from 100 most productive institutions in India and analyze how much research output coming from them are available in Open Access (OA). The paper further analyzes availability of research papers from these institutions in the popular pirate site Sci-Hub. It is interesting to observe that legal OA percentages are significantly lesser than the Sci-Hub availability for all the institutions, an indication that the existing systems for promoting open access in India are not working efficiently. At the end, the paper also presents statistics about number of papers deposited in three central institutional repositories in India. These statistics provides an indication of the extent to which these repositories have been able to promote open access in India. The paper concludes by pointing to some factors that impede Open Access in India.
A Global Vision for Open Access: Insights and Perspectives from the Scienti c Community in India
ACS Axial, ACS Publications, 2023
Read the Interview with Dr. Hasan How has the librarian’s role changed in the evolving open access publishing world? The open access movement emerged in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional publishing models. It is on the rise due to many factors, the biggest being the growth of the internet and ease of access. At the heart of open access is the ethos to facilitate the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of the wider public good, a mission that closely aligns with the ideals of librarians and the institutions they serve. Libraries find themselves increasingly providing advice and financial support to researchers wishing to publish open access. They are sharing and highlighting open access resources on their websites and catalogues, boosting the transition of open access through publisher partnerships, and supporting crowdfunding approaches toward open access funding for publications (especially books). As a result, librarians are becoming more involved in scholarly publishing initiatives and advancing the adoption and creation of open and affordable course content. As far as India is concerned, here academic visibility, impact of research output, public perception, etc. are major drivers for ranking and accreditation, apart from individual promotion in academics and research. Here, the Librarians are playing a great role in achieving the same. If the entity like One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) is able to strike a deal with the publishers for APC or Open Access support for their researchers, that could be great, and open access really become more open. What are the current challenges facing open access? The open access movement has gained momentum in recent years. However, it faces several challenges as well. One of the biggest challenges is the sustainability of the OA model. While OA publishing offers free access to readers, it does not eliminate the costs associated with the publication process. To sustain the high quality of journals and uphold rigorous editorial standards, most gold OA journals rely on APCs. These charges are posing a barrier for most authors, particularly those without access to research funding. Another challenge is regulatory compliance. For many academics, open access is associated with bureaucracy and reduced agency. Confusion is worsened by the conflation between fully open access journals and hybrid journals – proprietary journals which include an option for open access for individual articles. Finally, inequality in access to research funding across disciplines, countries, and institutions results in most authors struggling to cover APCs. To address this issue, publishers are negotiating transformative agreements with institutions and national consortia to centralize the payment of OA publishing fees and remove the financial burden from individual authors. From your perspective, how is open access going to impact Indian science in the near future? India’s science policy, Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020, aims to make scholarly knowledge openly accessible to all. The ONOS also has the mandate to make the contents accessible to all, with government funding. They also have provision to pay the APCs. This new proposal is expected to replace the current norm where individual academic institutes or consortia of institutes subscribe to journals separately, thereby replicating costs. If this policy comes into force, anyone in India will be able to access scholarly literature without having to pay for it. The experts have proposed further to remove the burden of APCs on the researchers, either via a system of invoicing to the government or through a ‘subscription rights’ mechanism via a centralized portal. The policy will recommend a central payment system for APCs for all reputed APC-based journals. Predatory publishers will be strictly excluded from this system. This new open access policy of India will not just open up scholarly knowledge but also access to research data and research infrastructure. It is expected that this policy will have far-reaching implications in the knowledge creation and dissemination cycle. Also, factors like academic visibility, impact of research output, public perception, etc. are major drivers for ranking and accreditation, apart from individual promotion in academics and research. This is helping India make OA more common, as more visibility means, more citations, more H index, more citations per faculty, etc., a win-win situation for all. So, the overall scenario in India is encouraging and open.
Open Access for Indian Scholarship
Desidoc Journal of Library Information Technology, 2008
India's scholarship has ancient roots and a glorious heritage. Over the last few decades in particular, due to the way the scholarly communication system overall has developed in that time, India's academic output has suffered from low visibility and poor dissemination. At the moment, global visibility is good for Indian articles that are published in the best 'western' journals and in Indian journals indexed by the major abstracting/indexing services, such as ISI's Web of Science. Moreover, for Indian articles deposited in open access collections in India or those that are co-authored with scientists in other parts of the world who have deposited them in Open Access repositories outside the continent, visibility is maximal. This still leaves a lot of Indian output-most of it in fact-virtually invisible to the rest of the world. India's investment-intellectual, effort and cash-can never hope to gain a good return this way. The article focuses on how open access can help resolve the problems of maximising the visibility, and thus the uptake and use, of Indian research outputs. The mechanisms to provide open access to scholarly communications, impediments to Open Access in India, and how self archiving can provide a boost to open access movement has been highlighted in this document. The author argues that it is important to emphasise that only mandatory policies work well. Policies that just encourage or even request authors to make their work Open Access do not result in a sizeable level of compliance.
Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives
India - Science and Technology, volume 3, 2014
Various initiatives are taken globally to make knowledge repositories more accessible to researchers by exploiting the internet platform and developing a model that allows free access. India is also actively participating in this new initiative. Open access to scientific knowledge is an integral part of India’s S&T policy intervention. Some of the major international and Indian national initiatives are highlighted. Further efforts that would be required to make Indian participation more fruitful are also brought out. Das, Anup Kumar (2014). Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives. In: CSIR-NISTADS (ed): India - Science and Technology, volume 3. Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, ISBN 9789384463045, pp.292-299.
Open Access in India: Hopes and Frustrations
2007
Current status of scientific research and progress made in open access-OA journals, OA repositories and open course ware-in India are reviewed. India is essentially feudal and hierarchical; there is a wide variation in the level of engagement with science and research and there is a wide gap between talk and action. Things never happen till they really happen. The key therefore is constant advocacy and never slackening the effort, and to deploying both bottom-up and top-down approaches. The author' own engagement with the Science Academies and key policymakers is described. Indian Institute of Science is likely to deposit a very large proportion of the papers published by its faculty and students in the past hundred years in its EPrints archive. There is hope that CSIR will soon adopt open access.
Journal of scientometric research, 2020
This paper highlights the brief background of the concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The RRI concept has some key issues, one of which is open access that brings forth the concept of Open Science. The global trend of Open Science research is presented here on the basis of data obtained from Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed. The global Open Access movements got strengthened after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) public statement on February 14, 2002, supporting the principles relating to open access to the research literature. The state of India in production and dissemination of open access resources, in comparison with other BRICS nations is pointed out here. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) have recorded a significant number of open access journals and open access repositories from India, one of the best from the developing nations. However, in other Open Science areas such as ensuring open research data and publishing research publications with an explicit Open Licensing term, India needs to take the lead in the developing world. The recent advancements in open science frameworks in the world vis-à-vis the open science strategies and practices in India as compared to other emerging economies are highlighted.
Journal of Korean Medical Science
We read with great interest the opinion article discussing the publicly funded platinum open access (OA) model of publishing, and its contemporary relevance. 1 We are clinician scientists from India, an emerging economy, however, still a lower middle income country. 2 In this letter, we share our viewpoints regarding this, from a regional standpoint. The recent drive towards OA publishing, contributed in no small part by the emergence of plan S, is motivated by noble intentions. These include the desire to make all scientific knowledge freely accessible to everyone, with the ultimate aim that such knowledge can be best utilized for the betterment of mankind. The perceived reason for the emergence of the OA model was the need to improve access to subscription-based journals, for which libraries paid significant quantities of money. These costs, which had to be borne by the institutions hosting such libraries, were perceived to be a hindrance towards access to science, a significant proportion of which is publicly funded, conducted by scientists, a significant proportion of whose salaries are funded by public money. Thereby, it was considered reasonable to demand that all publicly funded research be published in OA journals. 3-6 A critical analysis of the proposed plan, however, reveals significant concerns. 3 First, there remain costs associated with scientific publishing, including, but not limited to, operating manuscript submission systems, editorial offices, copyediting, and printing copies for journals. 7 Second, not all research that is published is funded research. Many a time, authors might conduct research, particularly observational research, investing their own time, while neither seeking, nor requiring, funding for the same. Third, studies are often