Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report: Call for Comments

It notes that Indian science has "low but increasing research productivity helped by increasing investments on R&D, and low but moderately improving visibility", and that the best way to boost visibility and impact of Indian science are by pursuing a nation-wide open access policy.

Thus, it recommends that all publicly funded research in India should be made open access and provides suggestions on how this could best be achieved.  It points out the need to go beyond open access mandates, to practical aspects like training of repository maintainers and of researchers for self-archiving. In addition, it points out the need for more effective advocacy and for a judicious mixture of both top-down and bottom-up approaches for bringing about the realization of the benefits of open access.

Please do write in to Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam ([email protected]), Madhan Muthu ([email protected]) and Pranesh Prakash ([email protected]) with your suggestions, criticisms, or general comments that you may have by Friday, August 12, 2011.

This draft report was prepared in April 2011 and the authors will update it soon.