Open Access Day celebrated in India
Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia
Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are
over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even
the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more
than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students
are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam
called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates
for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that
publicly funded research should be freely accessible online,
immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s
first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC
(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for
FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the
Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access
journals.
Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the
limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for
drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open
Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of
India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which
is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas
also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems
of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community
such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely
linked career growth in an academic or university context.
Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department
of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced
the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over
existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers
are only provided with reference number when experiments are
discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete
experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This
is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in
attempting to re-invent the wheel.
Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she
was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia
campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access
and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at
the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that
two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir
Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access
day.
Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of a novelty.
