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http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain
<b>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.</b>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/article2893901.ece">The original article was published in the Hindu</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2012-02-17T05:38:36ZNews ItemIndian Govt looks to provide free access to publicly-funded research works
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/medianama-july-23-2014-riddhi-mukherjee-indian-govt-looks-to-provide-free-access-to-public-funded-research-works
<b>Sunil Abraham gave his inputs to the blog entry published in Medianama on July 23, 2014.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the Ministry of Science and Technology recently <a href="http://dbtindia.nic.in/docs/DST-DBT_Draft.pdf">released</a> (pdf) the draft of what is termed as Open Access Policy and has invited comments from the public until July 25, reports <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/India-to-create-free-access-to-scientific-work-online/articleshow/38818160.cms">The Times of India</a>. Comments can be submitted to madhan@dbt.nic.in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The objective of this policy is to provide unrestricted access to research work funded by the departments. The draft states that since all funds disbursed by DBT and DST are public funds, it is important that the information and knowledge generated through the use of these funds are made publicly available as soon as possible.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As per the draft, DBT/DST will be creating a central repository wherein grantees can either publish their papers in an open-access journal or post the final accepted manuscript to an online repository. This includes papers funded by the two departments in 2012-13 as well as review articles invited by DBT/DST or author initiated that received funding from these departments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The draft suggests that the full text of the research paper and metadata of all research projects fully or partially funded by DBT/DST or the projects that utilised infrastructure built with the support of DBT/DST will have to be made publicly available, failing which they wouldn’t be considered for future grants or fellowship opportunities among others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The department believes that providing free access to these publications through gratis open access repository will enable increasing the distribution of these publications and will ensure that these research can be read and built upon.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Copyright of research papers</b>: The draft also sheds light on copyright issues. It states that research work produced by a scientist as an employee of a government body or private institution the copyright would remain with the respective government body or private institution. However, following the final acceptance of the paper by any journal, it has to be deposited in an open access repository within a period of one week.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The author of the research paper will retain the right to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the article in any medium for non-commercial purposes. They can also prepare derivative works from the article, and authorise others to make any non-commercial use of the article with credit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Implications</b>: This is a godsend for students, teachers and institutions that don’t have the means to purchase expensive academic journals. Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) told TOI that the idea is that taxpayers shouldn’t pay twice to access research funded by taxpayers’ money.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Earlier developments in Open Data</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In August 2013 the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2013/08/223-indian-govt-launches-open-repository-for-school-education/">launched an initiative</a> called <a href="http://nroer.in/home/">National Repository of Open Educational Resources</a> (NROER). The objective was to provide free educational resources to school students under the Creative Common license.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Union Cabinet had <a href="http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=80197">cleared</a> the DST formulated <a href="http://www.dst.gov.in/NDSAP.pdf">National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy</a> (NPDSA) back in February 2012. <a href="http://dst.gov.in/nsdi.html">NPDSA</a> was supposed to increase accessibility and ease sharing of non-sensitive data amongst the registered users and their availability for scientific, economic and social developmental purposes. However, very little has been reported on how NPDSA was utilised since then.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Click to read the article <a class="external-link" href="http://www.medianama.com/2014/07/223-government-open-access-policy/">published in Medianama here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/medianama-july-23-2014-riddhi-mukherjee-indian-govt-looks-to-provide-free-access-to-public-funded-research-works'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/medianama-july-23-2014-riddhi-mukherjee-indian-govt-looks-to-provide-free-access-to-public-funded-research-works</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2014-07-28T05:34:37ZNews ItemThe 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with Jamie King and Peter Mann
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files
<b>Film-makers Jamie King (producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series) and Peter Mann, in conversation with Siddharth Chadha, on 'Dark Fibre', their latest production, being filmed in Bangalore</b>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is a documentary/fiction hybrid by J. J. King, producer/director of the 'Steal This Film' series, which has already reached over six million people online and is working towards achieving international television distribution, and Peter Mann, a British film-maker whose most recent work is titled 'Sargy Mann'.</p>
<p>'Dark Fibre' is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal 'people's network'. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it -- but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people's imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the 'security' of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India -- possibly emissaries of a still-greater power -- are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day 'Moby Dick', with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.</p>
<h3>In conversation with Jamie and Peter in Bangalore</h3>
<p><strong>Q: How did you get the idea to make Dark Fibre, a fiction film?</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter: </strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>We first met through BritDoc--British Documentary--and they run Channel 4 which is a Film Foundation. They have been good to us. They funded both Steal This Film and 'Sargy Mann'--a film on my father who is a blind man. They organised a meeting of all the directors they had funded and we met there. We were both thinking about what to do next and felt frustrated because we were making documentaries but really wanted to make fiction. We both shared the same ideas, with regard to shooting something completely as it is but presenting it in a fictional context.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>And furthermore, we agreed that documentaries are not really real life. Because at the end of the day, I will keep only what I like, make you look at the way I want you to, I would cut you out of the picture if I don't agree with you. This happens even with the most worthy of the films. And you can be more truthful in fiction because its always a subjective truth. Fiction allows things to remain more real. I don't need an argument in the film. If I can just say, here is one guy's story and this is his story, then you can see the city with no bullshit. The story would allow you to look at things as they are; it's partly that idea behind Dark Fibre.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>This is in some way related to the concept of the artistic truth. You use all the tools at your disposal to tell a story, not just literal facts. This is about presenting things within an atmosphere, presenting things in a context. This then adds up to someone understanding something about the world, and I think fiction serves that better than documentary.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What brings you to India to make Dark Fibre?</strong> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>I think the cablewallah networks are unique. I have never seen anything like this anywhere else myself. India is also in a very, very interesting time and place. The idea of information as a commodity is alive here as it isn't in many other places. The value of information is very high here. There is a western imaginary of Bangalore which is immediately fascinating. It's the place where our information is processed. This is where our credit card and our phone data goes. And it enters a weird black market that we don't understand. This is the cliché. We already have cliché films about Bombay and call centers. We do not want to put a call center into the film because that is already the imagined cliché vision of Bangalore. It is obviously far more sophisticated than that. And in some ways it is far patchier than that. Who are these information workers? What are they doing and at which level are they doing it? Are they the street workers putting cables into walls or is it the guy at Infosys who is hiring people and teaching them to fake English accents? Which is the real information worker? That variegation of information life in Bangalore is interesting, not just to us, but, I think, to everybody. Information dexterity is perceived as the signature of Northern dominance. The ability to manipulate information, to move intellectual property, to transform an idea into a product, to transform someone else's idea into your property. That kind of dexterity is seen as the keynote of western dominance. And watching a developing country transform into an information dextrous economy, seeing information dextrous people is amazing. And then there is the patchiness of it--who gets left behind? Who gets included? Whats missed out and what is added in that vision? How is it manipulated in favor of big businesses? And all of this is fascinating not only from an orientalist's point of view but from a general economic-socio-political point of view.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the underlying concept that brought about Dark Fibre?</strong><br /><strong><br />Jamie:</strong><br /> <br />While making 'Steal This Film' we spent a year on a 36 minute film trying to make an argument that would be staunch, impactful, and radical. What we learned is that it's very difficult to set out to argue your way to the truth. It's relatively easier to let the world itself speak and in the meanwhile observe it in detail. The kind of issues we are engaging with in Dark Fibre are around people's relationships with information and their relationship with freedom. These are very, very hard to nail down and speak about in a radical way. These are things left to the Intellectual Property lawyers, it's already happening, it's already cliché. All the arguments are already written. And even after a year of Steal This Film, it's shown in liberal universities – Wait! Liberal universities? I was supposed to be an anarchist! We want to go further. We want to tell people things through an image.</p>
<strong></strong>
<p><strong>Peter:</strong></p>
<p>Our idea of relationships is exploring the parallel physical communications networks and the virtual networks. In a city like Bangalore you see it. The traffic here is chaotic but it works. How? There is no answer to that. But it provokes questions. Through Dark Fibre, we are trying to say that there is a potential network in the city (cablewallahs) which is currently being unused and asking what it would take to unlock that potential and where would it take us if that really happens.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Why the cablewallahs? What is so fascinating about them?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie: </strong><br /> <br />Yes, we are interested in the cablewallah network and I think it's quite perverse that it makes people from around here laugh. You see cablewallahs as a fact of life, probably a mundane fact of life. Westerners, Europeans, who are used to orderly deployments of information technology are completely blown away when you tell them that this is how it works in India. Ad hoc, grassroots, messy, out of control.</p>
<strong><br />Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>To the West, it is just unthinkable that the government would allow something like these networks, which supply 24 hours television. To not have these under government control is unthinkable.</p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>So, obviously, we are at a point of transition where it's unthinkable to the Global North and it would become unthinkable here too. We are in the middle of that shift and thats one of the things we are trying to document; the network form, which is horizontal, ad hoc and on the street, becomes not only regulated but seditious.</p>
<strong>Q: Why would you call it seditious?</strong><strong><br /><br />Jamie: <br /><br /></strong>
<p>Because it begins to be seen as almost dangerous. As the regulators move in, they take Direct to Home control of all the deployments of their intellectual properties. The older networks start to look not only like intellectual property right infringements, but their disorder is also seen to be terrorist.</p>
<strong>Q: What is the film trying to propose through linking these cablewallah networks?</strong>
<p> </p>
<strong>Jamie:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>Our proposal in this film is - "What if instead of just dying peacefully, someone had the idea of transforming these networks that used to deliver international and local content, by connecting them together, and turning them in to massive local media networks which are used for media sharing, file sharing, your own local channel?" There is a potential because the network is already there.</p>
<strong>Peter:<br /><br /></strong>
<p>In a way, if you think about the microcosm idea of the Internet as a whole, that essentially is what our plot is. On a certain level you would say that it's just a network but then the internet is the most important driving force of the world today.</p>
<p><strong>Jamie:</strong></p>
<strong></strong>
<p>The point is that once this idea is out, we can create the infrastructure to connect the entire city, infrastructure we can all use. Everyone starts to have a stake in it, be it the newspapers, TV channels, pirate markets (they will say, "No one is buying our shit anymore because they can share it over the network"), the computer manufacturers, the importer of Chinese routers, a gangster who thinks he can advertise on the network, the intellectual property lawyer... different people start getting the idea that they might have something to do with this network. Basically this is a chaos scenario, from which arises the plot. It is a fictional scenario but is set in the reality of information sharing here today.</p>
<p><strong>Q: What is the technique you use to make the plot hybrid fictional?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />The main character is played by an actor and he will be an embedded actor, working with the real cablewallah. Parts of it will be documentary, seeing how the cablewallah works and the viewer, through watching this actor, will understand how the network works. We have already spoken to some cablewallahs. And they have been very happy about all this. We see this as sort of embedded journalism, where the embedded actor takes the place of an interviewer. The film is not going to be historical. The characters will have a background and the film is going to have a background, but what we are trying to do is show the 'now'. We want to make it speak about the past and speak about the future. About our future.</p>
<p><strong>Q: 'Steal This Film' was a critique of the international intellectual property regimes. Would this film also be similarly advocative?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Jamie:</strong><br /><br />We are going to the next level from 'Steal This Film', and this is more of my argument than Peter's -- that the conversation about Intellectual Propery is over or the film is the last word at all. But I personally need to go somewhere else to say more. I am interested in information in general. And how information affects what we can think, what we can dream, what we can be, how it forms all of us -- that is what we are working on in 'Dark Fibre' and the question of intellectual property is a subset of that question. We spend a lot of time talking about ideas and that's one of the things that connects us. We want to articulate a lot of the philosophical, abstract ideas in this film. And we will see if we can manage to do it in a new context. 'Steal This Film' interested a few people and this will be the next point of departure for discussion.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Peter, do you share Jamie's passion for Intellectual Property?</strong><br /> <br /><strong>Peter:</strong><br /><br />Not in the same way. I am very interested in the subject. Anybody who creates work is interested in it. In my last film, there is a constant commentary of a test match going on and as a result of it, it is almost impossible to sell it to television; people who own the rights to the cricket say that we have to pay them thousands of pounds! I am interested in documenting the world as it is and not what is cleaned up for TV. I am interested in the specifics. If you get on a bus in London, the ringtone everyone has on a mobile phone is not a ringtone but a particular song. But you can't put that on film because Mick Jagger, or whoever the artiste is, will want ten thousand pounds for it. The frustration that I face is that it is impossible to put the world that I see in front of me on film. I used to work with TV commercials and you would never see anything in commercials that is not the product being sold. I was once working on a Coca Cola commercial in New York and there was a person who was appointed by Coca Cola to go around the whole set to ensure that no one is drinking anything that is not made by Coca Cola, whether that is water or juice. Anything. And I think all that is about creating a creased world that we don't live in. I am interested in the world, through documentaries or fiction, that we live in. And it is bits of music, it is referenced films, we reference music, we reference sport. Just because people have rights over these, you never see them on film. That is my main area of interest, more than what is happening on the legal front.</p>
<p><img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/stf.jpg/image_preview" alt="stf" height="400" width="284" /> <img class="image-inline image-inline" src="uploads/copy_of_steal_this_film_2.jpg/image_preview" alt="steal this film" height="400" width="280" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files</a>
</p>
No publishersiddharthhistories of internet in Indiainternet and societyDigital AccessIntellectual Property RightsYouTubeart and interventionPiracyOpen Accessinnovationdigital artists2011-08-04T04:41:31ZBlog EntryLetter on South Africa's IPRs from Publicly Financed R&D Regulations
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations
<b>Being interested in legislations in developing nations styled after the United States' Bayh-Dole Act, CIS responded to the call issued by the South African Department of Science and Technology for comments to the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Regulations.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-on-south-africas-iprs-from-publicly-financed-r-d-regulations</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpen StandardsBayh-DoleIntellectual Property RightsOpen AccessOpen Innovation2011-08-04T04:42:15ZBlog EntryShould India adopt Plan S to realise Open Access to Public-funded Scientific Research?
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/should-india-adopt-plan-s-to-realise-open-access-to-public-funded-scientific-research
<b>Timely and affordable access to scientific research remains a problem in this digital day and age. Around three decades ago, the radical response that emerged was making public-funded scientific research “open access”, i.e. publishing it on the Web without any legal, technical or financial barriers to access and use such research. Several Indian public research institutions also adopted open access mandates and built self-archiving digital tools, however, the efforts haven’t yielded much. Most countries including India, continue to struggle with implementing open access. The latest international initiative (created in Europe) to remedy this problem is Plan S. Plan S is has been positioned as a strategy to implement immediate open access to scientific publications from 2021 – which India is considering adopting.
This article unpacks the disorderly growth of open access in India, and discusses the gap between the Plan's vision and current Indian scenario in some respects. </b>
<p></p>
<p><em>Note: This blog entry was first published on May 29, 2019, and later updated on June 5, 2019 to accommodate the revisions to Plan S (released on May 31, 2019 after their public feedback exercise).<br /></em></p>
<h2>Introduction<em><br /></em></h2>
<p>In 2017, scientific
researchers in India produced 1.4 lakh pieces of peer-reviewed literature, of
which approximately 27,000 were open access publications (SCImago 2018). This
means that only 27,000 pieces were available to the public to freely read and
share, despite the fact that Indian tax-payers had funded half of the annual
expenditure on R&D that year. The remaining items were largely stuck behind
expensive paywalls and subscription systems, doing a huge disservice to the
scientific ecosystem as well as the public interest.</p>
<p>Open Access is
a movement to make both scientific research and data accessible to everyone in
society, and a key tenet of Open Science. It emerged in response to rising
costs and barriers to timely access and sharing of research, as well as a
crisis of epistemic injustice in science. With the advent of the Internet and World
Wide Web, it was expected that costs of publishing and disseminating scholarly
research would decrease leading to a more equitable research environment. The
principal idea was “<em>to make copies of all
the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the
internet</em>.”(Harnad S 1995). Two principal ways of implementing OA that initially
emerged were: publishing on online institutional repositories (of the research
institute/ funder) and/or paying the journal to make the paper OA online (i.e.
author pays upfront instead of public paying subscription charges to read that
research).</p>
<p>Since
Harnad’s first call, numerous international conventions, mandates, calls have
been issued in support of OA. The latest international response to the problem is
<a class="external-link" href="https://www.coalition-s.org/">Plan S</a>. With its origins in Europe, Plan S was initially positioned as a clarion
call to provoke a global flip to OA, and then transformed to achieving the goal of "scientific publications that result from research funded by public
grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms" from 2021. Plan S invites research funding
organisations to become members of cOAlition S, who in turn are expected to
abide by the ten principles articulated under the Plan. Crucially, it holds
funders responsible for enforcing OA policies and sanction
non-compliance.</p>
<p>The Principal
Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India announced in February 2019 that
India will join Plan S. That could make India the second country in the global
south to adopt Plan S (Zambia (via National Science and Technology Council of
Zambia) was the first one). Although it must be noted that the announcement was made with respect to an earlier version of the current plan. It remains to be confirmed if India will still abide by its commitment. Even so, at first glance the key tenets underlying the plan remain the same to a large extent. Regardless it is a huge step for India, and perhaps bears the promise
of pulling together the various strands of a diffused OA movement in India. Presently,
cOAlition S is dominated by European entities. Majority of the entities provide
marginal funding support to Indian scientific research, with the exception of
two members - the UK based biomedical charity Wellcome Trust and the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. Wellcome Trust has been a longstanding global
advocate of OA, and also played a crucial role in shaping a key institutional OA
mandate in India. Apart from the European Commission and European Research
Council, China’s largest funding agency has also made strong statements to
support Plan S.</p>
<p>Plan S’ principles
prescribe that research should be only published in those journals and on
platforms which enable authors to publish articles under a Creative Commons
Attribution license (CC- BY; alternatively, CC Attribution Share-alike or CC Public
Domain licenses); authors should retain copyright in their articles; have a “solid
system” in place for peer-review as per the standards in the relevant research
discipline; provide subsidies/ waivers in Article Processing Charges (APCs); and
do not operate under the hybrid model. More importantly, the Plan prioritises
publishing in journals over institutional repositories (IRs) – and requires
funding organisations to pay APCs. Further, all kinds of self-archiving
platforms (including IRs) should also meet certain registration requirements.</p>
<h2>Key aspects of Indian scientific research</h2>
<h3>Funding of research<br /></h3>
<p>Currently, scientific
research is significantly funded by both government and private sector in India.
During 2017-18, the national investment on R&D activities in scientific
research was estimated to be approximately one lakh crores, with majority (45%)
being met by central government, and approximately 38% from private sector
industries (and 7% from state and 5% from public sector organisations). The
highest R&D expenditure is incurred by Defence Research and Development
Organisation at INR 13,000 crores, followed by Department of Space at 5000
crores, Department of Atomic Energy at under 4000 crores. Indian Council for
Agricultural Research (ICAR), Council of Scientific and Agricultural Research
(CSIR), Department of Science and Technology (DST) find themselves in the same
bracket of 2000-4000 crores roughly, whereas Department of Biotechnology (DBT)
and Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) trail with under 1000 crores (Department
of Science 2018). Of these institutions, only ICAR, CSIR, DST and DBT have OA
mandates.</p>
<h3>Indian institutional OA initiatives<br /></h3>
<p>The earliest OA
efforts in India led to the creation of IRs to support self-archiving in
scientific research institutions (Arunachalam 2004). Recommendations presented
at the 93<sup>rd</sup> Indian Science Congress in 2006 said that an optimal national
OA policy should mandate research papers produced either by partial or full government
funding to be deposited into IRs immediately upon publication; encouraged such
grant holders to retain copyright; and suggested that the government should
commit to cover costs for publication in OA journals (i.e. cover APCs). These
recommendations found support in a 2007 report by the erstwhile National
Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India.
The Commission envisaged a national academic OA portal for sharing research
articles, and highlighted the need for the government to allocate funds for
digitisation of books and periodicals in the public domain (material outside
the scope of copyright protection). Additionally, it recognised the digital
divide as an impediment to access to scientific knowledge. More importantly, it
required the government and research institutions to bear the cost of
publishing in OA journals, instead of passing the financial burden to authors/
scientists.</p>
<p>Soon key public-funded
institutions such as the <a href="http://www.csircentral.net/mandate.pdf">Council of Scientific and Agricultural
Research</a> (CSIR), <a href="http://www.dbtindia.nic.in/wp-content/uploads/APPROVED-OPEN-ACCESS-POLICY-DBTDST12.12.2014.pdf">Department of Science and Technology
and Department of Biotechnology</a>
(DST-DBT), <a href="https://krishi.icar.gov.in/PDF/ICAR_Open_Access_Policy.pdf">Indian Council of Agricultural
Research</a>, Institute of
Mathematical Sciences adopted OA mandates. However, the thrust of all policies happened
to be on IR deposits and not financial support for APCs. The concept of IRs
took root to a considerable extent, although many IRs later ran into issues for
various reasons and stopped functioning (Das 2014). A few initiatives such as
the <a href="http://www.urdip.res.in/#/aboutus">CSIR-URDIP</a>
(which developed a centralised IR to make OA journals discoverable across
institutions funded by CSIR and DST-DBT) remain under-populated despite being
stably maintained. This is either due to absence of or uneven implementation of
OA mandates – for example, only some institutional beneficiaries (approximately
20) have implemented the DST-DBT mandate, and a meagre 3000 papers have been
made open thus far in various IRs. Problems cited for under-populating of
repositories include disinterest by administrators in implementing the mandates
(DST Centre for Policy Research 2018).</p>
<h2>Plan S' vision and current Indian scenario<br /></h2>
<h3>Mandatory copyright retention by authors</h3>
<p>If India
signs up for Plan S, IRs under Indian OA mandates will be required to publish
articles under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY; alternatively CC BY
SA or CC0, and CC BY ND in exceptional cases), wherein the copyright shall be retained by the author without any
restrictions. Unfortunately, “copyright retention by authors” hardly finds support
in Indian OA mandates as a fundamental principle. None of the institutions with
OA mandates (mentioned previously) provide a clear stance on copyright
retention, thereby implicitly leaving it to individual authors to negotiate
their own arrangements with publishers. For example, the DST-DBT OA policy
states that “<em>It is not the intent of this
policy to violate copyright or other agreements entered into by the researcher,
institution or funding agency...</em>” Individual arrangements largely take the
shape of mandatory copyright transfers in favour of the publishers (with an
embargo condition on author’s freedom to re-publish). Mandatory copyright
transfers harm the agency of authors to publish/ share their works in other
places of their choice. This is the primary reason for legacy works to remain
locked up with the publishers until the copyright term expires; and in many
cases even after the work has become a part of the public domain, publishers are
loathe to release such works.</p>
<p>This happens
despite two things: firstly, in most cases in India, authors’/ researchers’
institutional employment contracts require that all IP vests with the
institutions; secondly, as per the applicable law - Indian Copyright Act, 1957,
copyright in such works in ordinary circumstances vests with the employer. Thus, if public institutions so desired, they should be able to
retain the copyright in the work produced under their aegis (and transfer it to
the authors).</p>
<h3>Removal of embargoes<br /></h3>
<p>Both OA and closed
access journals routinely impose embargoes averaging a year for peer-reviewed
outputs to be made open. Presently, most Indian OA mandates accommodate an
embargo of six months to one year, and accept both post-prints and pre-prints
(the two terms roughly refer to the version of author’s manuscripts before and
after peer-review) for publication in IRs. Such conditions again run contrary
to the Plan’s requirement of making the final peer-reviewed published version
of articles (post-print version) to be made open immediately upon publication–
i.e. without an embargo period.</p>
<h3>Addressing the menace of predatory publishing<br /></h3>
<p>Separately, another
thorn in the side of OA’s reputation has been the rise of predatory journals. Predatory
journals are outfits that dress themselves as a genuine OA journal, often
charging unsuspecting authors high APCs, but conduct abysmal peer-reviews and
provide poor editorial services and exhibit such conduct amounting to fraud. Such
outfits have irreparably damaged many researchers’ reputations and careers, especially for vulnerable authors in the global south, with
their unchecked manuscripts getting published without requisite quality
checks (Sinha 2016). While this is an issue that requires special immediate measures; Plan S can potentially check the growth of such journals since it requires all publication venues to be completely transparent about their editorial policies and editorial board members, and also prohibits them from using APCs as bait to guarantee publication. </p>
<h3>Publishing in 'prestigious venues' cannot be a criterion for evaluating scientific merit<br /></h3>
<p>The growth of
OA has further been hindered due to a misguided tendency amongst authors to
publish only in select prestigious journals, many of which are closed access.
Such select journals have cultivated a brand of reputability and prestige over
decades, they demonstrate as much by their high JIF (Journal Impact Factor)
credentials. Traditionally, JIF has been the measure of a journal’s prestige –
a proxy for the impact and influence of a journal’s publications. Despite
having been discredited as wholly inaccurate (Kiermer 2016), many funding
agencies continue to consider a publication’s worth in terms of the JIF of the
journal it was published in, in hiring, promotional and other career
advancement decisions. So long as we continue to judge the worth of research by
the venue of its publication (assuming a uniform high quality of peer review
and other checks) and not by its actual contribution to science, OA publishing
is bound to be a less favourable option, because most OA journals are new and
have not raked up a high impact factor score. Yet Indian funding
agencies continue to use and promote JIF metrics, for a lack of awareness or
wanton dis-interestedness in improving the system. Another reason for an
immediate need to break the religiosity surrounding JIF is that many journals (both
OA and closed access) in the global south enjoy good reputations but do not
carry a high JIF as they are newer and their citation metric pales in comparison
to their more dominant western counterparts. This disparity is starker for
fields wholly situated in the global south. In this respect, the Plan clearly requires funders to only evaluate a publication on the basis of its intrinsic merit, and not factor in publication channels, impact factors or the publisher.</p>
<h3>Recent steps by Indian government and agencies<br /></h3>
<p>Indian agencies’
approach to addressing these issues has been chequered, and does more harm than
good. In 2017, the Universities Grants Commission (UGC) released a pre-determined
list of journals that researchers should publish in, and linked researchers’ career
advancement to publishing in the select listed journals (Pushkar 2016). This
approved list contains approximately 39,000 journals that are indexed in Web of
Science, SCOPUS and Indian Citation Index (Universities Grant Commission 2018). UGC’s
step was seen as an attack on academic freedom with serious doubts about its competence
to create a credible exclusionary list of journals in multiple disciplines –
and it has indeed been shown that the procedure of making the list is flawed
(Patwardhan et al. 2018). Separately, the Ministry of Human Resources and Development notified to
National Institutes of Technology (NITs) that papers published in journals
levying APCs will not earn career advancement credits (Mukunth 2017). MHRD’s notification dismisses <em>all </em>paid journals irrespective of their
quality. This has the effect of placing genuine high-quality OA journals on the
same pedestal as predatory journals, and ultimately dents the growth of OA business
models looking for modest support via APCs that are helpful in covering
operational costs (software platform and an editorial team), and do not come
close to unreasonable APCs levied by the biggest commercial players in the
field. The reality is that most OA journals charge authors to publish (Bastian
2018).</p>
<p>These
steps led to much consternation amongst the Indian research community. Another government central committee has proposed to award cash bonuses
for publications (with a higher bonus for publishing in international journals
over national journals). This has been criticised by Indian scientists on two
grounds: firstly, that the scheme may lead to a spike in predatory or
sub-standard journals; secondly, it devalues national journals, and reinforces
the prestige factor to favour international journals (Vaidyanathan 2019). A
2011 study has shown that cash incentives appear to encourage submission of
research that has low regard for quality (Franzoni et. al 2011). In fact in 2010,
UGC introduced APIs (Academic Performance Indicators), which was essentially a
system of reward points against number of publications for researchers and
faculty members ostensibly to improve scientific publishing. However, this ended
up triggering a race to publish poor quality research in fake journals (<a href="https://thewire.in/education/the-ugc-deserves-applause-for-rrying-to-do-something-about-research-fraud">Pushkar</a>
2016), and the UGC recently changed the scheme to in order to do damage-control.</p>
<h3>Government will have to foot APC bill</h3>
<p>Crucially, the
Plan requires funding organisations to commit to funding APCs, in addition to
research grants. The PSA in his announcement on Twitter (relating to Plan S)
has said that, “We will negotiate for APCs normalised to India.” The Plan also
emphasises on waivers and discounts for low and middle income countries. Studies
show that Indian authors spend anywhere between INR 500 to 3 lakhs per article
on APCs, and during 2010-14 the estimated payment to open access journals (the
immediate OA kind) was INR 16 crores per year, on an average costing INR 76,000
per paper (Madhan et al. 2016). It has been estimated that Plan S will cost India
INR 616.46 crores per year (Mukunth 2019). The estimate is more than half of the
annual investment in public institutions such as DBT and ICMR.</p>
<h3>Imperfect competition in the scholarly publishing market</h3>
<p>Does the
academic publishing market have any justifications for exorbitant APCs? A European University Association study highlighted the
oligopolistic structure in this market sector, which functions with an absolute
lack in pricing transparency (through strict confidentiality agreements with
institutions), large profiteering through public funds and asymmetry in
negotiating power (European Universities Association 2018). In 2015, five
companies controlled more than half of the market for academic publishing: RELX
(formerly Reed Elsevier, UK), Taylor and Francis (UK), Wiley-Blackwell (UK),
Springer Nature (Germany), SAGE (US). Majority of the most important closed-access
journals continue to be owned by these publishers (Larivière et. al 2015). It
does not help that many of the top OA journals are also owned by the same
publishers (who are responsible for charging the highest APCs). It will be
interesting to see which journals will change their model to comply with Plan S
requirements.</p>
<h2>Conclusion<br /></h2>
<p>Nonetheless,
after many years of piecemeal OA reforms within Indian institutions, the PSA’s
announcement indicates a renewed interest in OA. Elimination of copyright
transfer agreements and embargoes will give authors surely more control over
their works – steps that should have been implemented and strictly enforced by
Indian institutions long ago.</p>
<p>However, it
makes little sense for developing countries to spend an enormous amount on APCs
demanded by a foreign publishing oligopoly. Latin America continues to be
opposed to Plan S as a matter of its principled position against APCs. If India
signs up for Plan S, it is could be the case that we will find ourselves
in a situation where our public institutions will be paying for subscriptions
as well as APCs for a long time to come. One of the plan's principles does say that "<em>... When Open Access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with
the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must
be transparent to inform the market and funders potential
standardisation and capping of payments of fees.</em>" Since the coalition is currently overwhelmingly
Eurocentric, it remains to be seen how a fair and reasonable analysis will be
worked out across geographies. In this sense, Plan S is not exactly a
breakthrough plan for the global south as it does not sufficiently undercut the
market power of the oligopoly.</p>
<p>There is
plenty that can be done in the interim to realise the vision of OA, as we
continue to ponder and debate the feasibility of Plan S in the global scheme of
scientific publishing as well as India. For starters, it would be ideal to
conduct a nationwide consultation with the research community in India. Strengthening
the infrastructure underlying institutional repositories – in terms of
developing more powerful search tools for IRs, linking IRs, making deposited
articles more discoverable over the Web are steps that do not require
relatively large funds (vis-à-vis APCs), yet stand to contribute to improving
visibility of our research. The government must also look out for authors’ interests
by actively negotiating stricter terms with publishers, so that authors aren’t
coerced into signing away their copyright (or by fait accompli). Transparency
of commercial agreements should become a non-negotiable principle in institutions’/ libraries’ dealings
with publishers, which is also reiterated as a key principle of the Plan. Such steps may not result in an immediate shift to OA, if implemented strictly and uniformly can perhaps be more radical
and fruitful than anything that the Indian research community has seen in decades. </p>
<p></p>
<h2><strong>References</strong></h2>
<p>Arunachalam,
Subbiah (2004): “India’s March Towards Open Access,” <em>SciDevNet,</em> <a href="https://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/opinion/indias-march-towards-open-access.html">https://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/opinion/indias-march-towards-open-access.html</a></p>
<p>Bastian Hilda
(2018): “A Reality Check on Author Access to Open Access Publishing” <a href="https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/">https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/</a></p>
<p>Das, Anup
Kumar (2014): “Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and
National Initiatives,” <em>CSIR –NISTADS
(ed): India - Science and Technology</em>, Vol 3, pp. 292-299</p>
<p>Department of
Science and Technology (2018): “Annual Report 2017-2018” <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IPKUdbSx0Da2Zi_ufzC4u-T3jCFzPred/view">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IPKUdbSx0Da2Zi_ufzC4u-T3jCFzPred/view</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"></span></p>
<p>DST Centre
for Policy Research (2018): “Panel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge,
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH_kjoFRjAQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH_kjoFRjAQ</a></p>
<p>European
Universities Association (2018): “The lack of transparency and competition in
the academic publishing market in Europe and beyond” <a href="https://eua.eu/component/attachments/attachments.html?task=attachment&id=1691">https://eua.eu/component/attachments/attachments.html?task=attachment&id=1691</a></p>
<p>Harnad, Stevan
(1995): “Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A
Subversive Proposal”, <em>Scholarly Journal
at the Crossroads</em>, Washington DC: Association of Research Libraries</p>
<p>Kiermer,
Veronique (2016): “Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation
Rates,” <em>PLOS Blogs,</em> <a href="https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2016/07/impact-factors-do-not-reflect-citation-rates/">https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2016/07/impact-factors-do-not-reflect-citation-rates/</a></p>
<p>Franzoni,
Chiara & Scellato, Giuseppe &Stephan, Paula (2011): “Changing
Incentives to Publish,” Science, <a href="http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/reid/sta2201s/2012/Science-2011-Franzoni-702-3.pdf">http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/reid/sta2201s/2012/Science-2011-Franzoni-702-3.pdf</a></p>
<p>Larivière,
Vincent & Haustein, Stefanie & Mongeon, Philippe (2015): “The Oligopoly
of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,”<em>
PLoS One</em>. 10 (6), p. 1-15.DOI: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502">https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502</a></p>
<p>Madhan, Muthu
& Kimidi, Siva Shankar & Gunasekaran, Subbiah & Arunachalam,
Subbiah (2016): “Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published?,”
Current Science <a href="http://dst.sciencecentral.in/17/1/Current_Science_Sept2016.pdf">http://dst.sciencecentral.in/17/1/Current_Science_Sept2016.pdf</a></p>
<p>Manupriya
(2017): “Helping institutions embrace open access,” <em>IndiaBioscience</em>, <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/news/2017/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access">https://indiabioscience.org/news/2017/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access</a></p>
<p>Mukunth,
Vasudevan (2017):“<em>Scientists in the Lurch
After Imprecise MHRD Notice About 'Paid Journals</em>'”, <em>The Wire</em>,<strong> </strong><a href="https://thewire.in/education/mhrd-open-access-nit-predatory-journals-career-advancement-impact-factor">https://thewire.in/education/mhrd-open-access-nit-predatory-journals-career-advancement-impact-factor</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"> </span></p>
<p>Mukunth
Vasudevan (2019): “Six Concerns Over India Joining the Plan S Coalition for
Science Journals”, <em>The Wire</em>, <a href="https://thewire.in/the-sciences/six-concerns-over-india-joining-the-plan-s-coalition-for-science-journals">https://thewire.in/the-sciences/six-concerns-over-india-joining-the-plan-s-coalition-for-science-journals</a></p>
<p>Patwardhan,
Bhushan & Nagarkar, Shubhada & Gadre, Shridhar & Lakhotia, Subhash
& Mohan Katoch, Vishwa & Moher, David. (2018): “A Critical Analysis of
the ‘UGC-Approved List of Journals’”. <em>Current
science</em>. pp 114.</p>
<p>Poynder,
Richard (2019): “Plan S: What strategy now for the Global South?” <a href="https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Plan_S.pdf">https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Plan_S.pdf</a></p>
<p>Pushkar (2016):
“<em>The UGC Deserves Applause for Trying to
Do Something About Research Fraud</em>,” <em>The
Wire</em>, <a href="https://thewire.in/education/the-ugc-deserves-applause-for-rrying-to-do-something-about-research-fraud">https://thewire.in/education/the-ugc-deserves-applause-for-rrying-to-do-something-about-research-fraud</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"> </span></p>
<p>SCImago
(2018): “SJR – SCImago Journal and Country Rank” viewed on 2 April 2019 (<a href="https://www.scimagojr.com/countrysearch.php?country=in">https://www.scimagojr.com/countrysearch.php?country=in</a> )</p>
<p>Sinha, Anubha
(2016): “Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up”, <em>The Centre for Internet and Society</em>, <a href="https://cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up">https://cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up</a><span class="MsoHyperlink"> </span></p>
<p>Universities
Grants Commission (2018): “Annual Report 2017-2018” <a href="https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/5595965_UGC-ANNUAL-REPORT-English-2017-18.pdf">https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/5595965_UGC-ANNUAL-REPORT-English-2017-18.pdf</a></p>
<p>Vaidyanathan,
Gayatri (2019): “Indian payment-for-papers proposal rattles scientists,” <em>Nature India, </em><a href="https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/10.1038/nindia.2019.18?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureInd#.XGlrKLpUnPU.twitter"><em>https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/10.1038/nindia.2019.18?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureInd#.XGlrKLpUnPU.twitter</em></a><em>
</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/should-india-adopt-plan-s-to-realise-open-access-to-public-funded-scientific-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/should-india-adopt-plan-s-to-realise-open-access-to-public-funded-scientific-research</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2019-06-05T13:19:28ZBlog EntryStrategic Issues Emerging from Open Access Dialogues - Final Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/strategic-issues-emerging-from-open-access-dialogues-final-report
<b>A series of discussions - on the Chat Literacy forum of ELDIS and on Twitter - was organised during November 2012 to March 2013 to identify the global challenges in 'Navigating the Complexities of Open Access'. The discussions were facilitated by Eve Gray and Kelsey Wiens, in partnership with The African Commons Project (South Africa) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), through support from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. On behalf of CIS, Sumandro Chattapadhyay co-coordinated and contributed to these discussions.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>The final report of the Open Access Dialogues was published by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and can be accessed <a href="http://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/OpenAccessDialoguesReport.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>A sub-report summarising the experiences and arguments expressed by the Indian participants in the Dialogues was prepared by Sumandro, which can be read below or downloaded <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/sumandro-c-open-access-dialogues-2013/at_download/file">here</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Strategic issues emerging from the comments of Indian participants</h2>
<h3>1. Lacking OA awareness, even among scholarly communities</h3>
<p>Many, if not all, commentators emphasised the unfortunate lack of awareness about the notion and possibilities of Open Access across India, including among the scholarly and/or higher education related communities. Often the notion of Open Access is quite familiar, especially among scholars, but without a clear understanding of its benefits and how to make one's scholarly works openly accessible.</p>
<h3>2. Uneven geography of OA success stories</h3>
<p>The above point must be read along with strong success stories emerging from Indian OA journals, mostly from science disciplines. A recent study reveals that 970 Indian OA journals are included in the 'Journals Citation Report 2011' (science), and the Impact Factors of these journals are on the rise. This indicates towards a very uneven geography of OA awareness and adoption in India, with the OA agenda being pursued successfully by specific scholarly communities but not translating into widespread support across the higher academia landscape.</p>
<h3>3. Global businesses of scholarly works and complicity of Indian researchers</h3>
<p>The role of global businesses of scholarly works in impending the Open Access agenda in the India was mentioned by most of the commentators. The publication, and especially distribution, of publicly funded research is dominated by global publication houses. Additionally, the complicity of Indian researchers in reinforcing the culture of exclusive and 'prestigious' journals published by global publishers is also well understood and criticised.</p>
<h3>4. Citation Indexes as necessary evil</h3>
<p>While the discussants argued against an over-emphasis on Impact Factors in judging a quality and success of journals, especially for IF being biased against new journals, and thus against newly started OA journals. At the same time, measurement of citations remains a crucial way of understanding readership and impact of scholarly works. There was a strong recommendation of article-level metrics as opposed to journal-level ones. Studies were suggested to argue that article-level impact increases with OA journals. Another concern is bibliographic malpractices, including biases against citing works from Indian (or, developing world) scholars and against citing works published in non-'prestigious' journals.</p>
<h3>5. Open Access must not only be about access to journals</h3>
<p>A strongly expressed opinion was that the OA agenda must move beyond journal publications. The journal-centric approach emphasises the supply side of knowledge but fails to appreciate the demand of knowledge, especially in a country like India where primary and secondary education remain vital challenges. Further, even within higher academic circles, OA agenda must expand into other forms of scholarly works beyond journal essays, such as primary data and other research materials, especially since all such forms are also produced by public funds. Open Access to 'gray literature' (produced by private and non-profit research organisations) is also crucial, as much policy-making tends to be shaped by such works.</p>
<h3>6. Open Access and the consumers of knowledge</h3>
<p>The commentators emphasised the nature of OA to knowledge as a public good. The OA agenda must address the consumers of knowledge outside the university system, and especially across socio-economic classes. While open university education and participation in MOOC-models of learning are on the rise in India, there is a threat that this digital-centric approach reinforced existing digital divides in access to knowledge.</p>
<h3>Policy Suggestions</h3>
<p><strong>1.'Mainstreaming' the OA agenda:</strong> Instead of locating OA as a separate agenda, it will be useful to 'mainstream' it within larger development/research related funding initiatives by making OA publications of research outcomes a necessary grants condition.</p>
<p><strong>2.OA as the entry point to a broader 'open' agenda:</strong> The OA agenda can build upon its existing institutional and governmental acceptance and implementation to promote a broader 'open' agenda, including open sharing of research data, open formats for and sharing of bibliographic data etc.</p>
<p><strong>3.Moving the OA discussion and knowledge organisation beyond higher education communities:</strong> Addressing non-university circuits of learning, of both institutional (primary and secondary education) and non-institutional (informal learning groups around MOOC courses) varieties, is a crucial challenge for the OA agenda in the developing world. Another crucial community of potential OA supporters would be the non-governmental and non-profit organisations working in the field of education in particular, and development in general.</p>
<p><strong>4.Removing policy biases against Open Access journals in academic administration:</strong> Combined global and local efforts remains important to reshape national academic administration policies to stop discrimination against OA publication of scholarly works, such as higher academic benefit for publication in closed 'prestigious' journals.</p>
<p><strong>5.Encouraging and supporting scholarly communities (often with a disciplinary and/or thematic common ground) to undertake OA knowledge production:</strong> Promoting the OA agenda must also adopt a bottom-up strategy in the developing world, and this would require capacity and community building exercises involving local and global scholarly colleagues and enthusiasts gathered around thematic and/or disciplinary focii, as well as institutional and governmental recognition and support.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/strategic-issues-emerging-from-open-access-dialogues-final-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/strategic-issues-emerging-from-open-access-dialogues-final-report</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpennessOpen Access DialoguesOpen Access2015-10-11T04:39:10ZBlog EntryWhy Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up
<b>In an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://thewire.in/72286/open-access-academic-publishing/">published in the Wire</a> on October 12, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p><span>“…</span><i><span>if you are a member of the knowledge elite, then there is free access, but for the rest of the world, not so much … Publisher restrictions do not achieve the objective of enlightenment, but rather the reality of ‘elite-nment.” </span></i><span>Lawrence Lessig</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In 2011, </span><span>speaking impassionately</span> <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/1345337" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="to an audience at CERN"><span>to an audience at CERN</span></a><span> – one of the world’s largest institutions for nuclear physics research, headquartered in Geneva – Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a political activist, highlighted the crisis of access to scientific scholarship. Indeed, over the last six decades, public access to scholarly works has diminished. Works that can be freely searched and read represent only a sliver of the entire wealth of human knowledge. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>With the emergence of academic journals in the seventeenth century, the practice of exchanging manuscripts for review and comments became popular, leading to the establishment of the peer-review system. In fact, until the eighteenth century, there existed a strong belief in the intellectual commons and traditions of sharing knowledge between scholars. These traditions dated back to scholarship flourishing in ancient Greece. Open access was the default, and not the exception to the norm.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, by the nineteenth century, there occurred a game-changing shift in the approach to knowledge production. It was theorised that the commons approach was inefficient and that knowledge needed to be exclusively owned to spur further production. This was in line with the incentive theory of copyright law, which was an added justification to the commoditisation of knowledge. In such circumstances, all scholarly works increasingly came to be fortified within the expensive walls of academic journals. Journals left no stone unturned to capitalise on scholars vying to get published in prestigious titles (<i>Nature</i>, <i>Lancet</i>, <i>Cell</i>, etc.).</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The business model rarely rewarded authors or peer reviewers. On the contrary, some journals required authors to pay a considerable fee to publish their work. Subscription charges to such research, a large part of which was funded by the government (i.e. taxpayers), hit the roof and could be afforded only by elite institutions. And with the advent of the digital age, the fortresses moved online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, before the internet arrived, there had been efforts to counter the entrenchment of scholarly works. They were mostly in the nature of social movements, located broadly within the philosophical umbrella of openness. The nineties marked a significant increase in the modes of access, through devices connected to the internet. Previously a fringe movement, openness was now entering the realms of publishing, software, standards development, education and data. It manifested in Linux, Wikipedia, open web standards, open educational resources, open government data, Creative Commons and, particularly, open access publishing. Just last month, a UN report called for open access to research to improve public health. </span></span></p>
<p><span>Open access publishing was a breakaway from the traditional scholarly publishing model. It offered a different model of </span><i><span>online</span></i><span> research publication informed by the principles of transparency, free access and unrestricted access. </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="Three key definitions"><span>Three key definitions</span></a><span> exist, and the </span><span>Budapest Open Access Initiative</span><span> (2002) provides <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="a good overview">a good overview</a> of it:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; "><span><span>There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, open access is </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/writing/jbiol.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="compatible"><span>compatible</span></a><span> with </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#copyright" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="copyright"><span>copyright</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#peerreview" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="peer review"><span>peer review</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#journals" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="revenue"><span>revenue</span></a><span> (even profit), print, preservation, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322577" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="prestige"><span>prestige</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4552042" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="quality"><span>quality</span></a><span>, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature</span><span> (as Peter Suber </span><span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="wrote">wrote</a> in</span><span> 2004). The model broadly offers two routes: gold and green. Gold open access involves publication in an open access journal. The journal provides for peer-review, retention of copyright by the author and in most cases requires author-side fees. Green open access involves publishing a work in an online repository, with/without peer-review. The models have several variations, and adoption often depends on their suitability for a particular discipline. Many </span><span>institutions <a href="http://sparcopen.org/coapi/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="now have">now have</a> an</span> <span>Open Access Mandate policy</span><span>. </span></p>
<h3><span>Latest challenges to open access publishing</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>For a 15-year-old movement (formally), open access publishing is making a serious dent in the market for scholarly publications. It has emerged as a formidable competitor to the traditional model. How else do you explain the </span><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="unfortunate acquisition"><span>unfortunate acquisition</span></a><span> of SSRN –</span><span> one of the largest online open access repositories – by the largest publisher of academic journals, Elsevier, earlier this year? Where, within a few days of Elsevier gaining control, </span><span>users began to notice</span> <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="problematic takedowns"><span>problematic takedowns</span></a><span> of articles on SSRN.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The acquisition was a severe blow to open access publishing. To be fair, there remain certain issues intrinsic to open access publishing models that need urgent resolution. For instance, while some open access journals provide high quality services at levels comparable to that of paywalled journals, a large majority has been unable to reach reasonable standards of publication.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, as it has emerged lately, many are yet to crack the business model while a few are driven by malicious attempts to con authors. Most commercial open access publishers have resorted to a system of levying from the authors an article-processing charge (APC). These publishers include large players such as the <i>Public Library of Science</i> journals and BioMed Central. APCs are justified as necessary costs for publication. Thus, sometimes they are reasonably applied only to peer-reviewed submissions. However, sometimes they are blatantly misused by publishers who quote exorbitant APCs. As a result, APCs have become a serious concern for the academic community, with the reentry of an undesirable price barrier which has shifted the burden from the reader to the author.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In one noteworthy development, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint against the OMICS group for deceiving authors and misrepresenting its editorial quality. The OMICS group has its roots in Hyderabad and runs a multitude of open access journals. It carried a notorious reputation for soliciting articles profusely, and then holding the articles hostage unless the authors paid hefty fees for their publication. It apparently charged the fees for conducting peer-review, which as this </span><span>harrowing</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="account"><span>account</span></a><span> of an author</span><span> reveals, was an utter sham. It also seems that the group targeted unsuspecting scholars from developing countries, where there was a higher concentration of early-career researchers eager to get their works published.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Holding articles hostage and releasing unchecked versions must have already caused irreparable damage to several researchers’ reputations. In this day of web-caching and -indexing facilities, one wonders if the researchers will ever be able to obliterate linkages to their unchecked manuscripts. Further, in the long run, this phenomenon will ruin or suppress promising careers – especially from developing countries. As a result, the present </span><span>lack of diversity in top-rung academia</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="may not be eliminated"><span>may not be eliminated</span></a><span> for a long time.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Such harmful, predatory practices have not escaped the FTC’s notice, and it has stated that it will pursue cases of similar nature to protect authors and consumers. This is the first time in the world when a governmental authority has taken cognisance of predatory practices in OA publishing. This will hopefully lead to an appropriate cleansing effect of the players in this field, and enhance the credibility of open access journals.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Thus, self-regulation and standard-setting remains an area for improvisation in the open access publishing community. At the cusp of the movement, proposed structures were mired in legal and economic arguments. It is yet to overcome the challenge of economic sustainability and mature into a stable as well as replicable business model. The movement will be celebrating the Open Access Week for the ninth year later this month. It has gifted scholars immeasurably and lent itself to the progress of science and arts. Here’s hoping the community will iron out the remaining challenges to further strengthen the movement soon. <br /></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpennessOpen Access2016-10-12T16:22:10ZBlog EntryShould Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published
http://editors.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
<b>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.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Subbiah Arunachalam was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/1/Post-print_APC_paper.pdf">Indian Institute of Science Repository</a> on October 29, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.”<sup>1,2</sup> 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.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>Directory of Open Access Journals</i> (<i>DOAJ</i>) do not charge to make a paper open access<i>. Current Science </i>is such a journal. Many OA journals – about 26% according to Solomon and Björk<sup>4</sup> – and all hybrid OA journals levy an article processing charge (APC) to provide OA to a paper. However, according to Crotty,<sup>5 </sup>the 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">OA journal publishing, particularly by commercial publishers and in the field of biomedicine, is growing rapidly. According to <i>DOAJ</i> 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, <i>DOAJ </i>is growing at the net rate of 6 titles per day.<sup>6</sup> The <i>Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources</i> (<i>ROAD</i>) lists 14,031 OA journals published from some 140 countries.<sup>7</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Repositories, where full texts of research publications are deposited and made available online, are of two kinds: central repositories, such as <i>arXiv</i>, and distributed (or institutional) repositories, such as the University of Southampton institutional research repository, <eprints.soton.ac.uk>, the first of its kind. <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We assessed the current status of the use of OA journals by Indian researchers using bibliometric analysis of data gathered from <i>Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded</i> (<i>SCIE</i>). 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.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Methodology</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We searched for articles, letters, proceedings papers and reviews from India in OA journals</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">indexed in <i>SCIE</i> in the five years 2010-2014. The search made on 11 January 2016 resulted in</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">37,122 papers. Of these, 44 papers resulting from five international collaborations (CMS,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ATLAS, ALICE, STAR and FAITH), and appearing in journals such as <i>Physics Letters B</i>, <i>New Journal of Physics</i>, <i>Nuclear Physics B</i> and <i>BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders</i>, 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 <i>Essential Science Indicators </i>(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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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).</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Results</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We present here the key findings. Details of our bibliometric analysis are available from the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">authors and will soon be presented in a report.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of OA journals by researchers</i><b> – </b>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<b>,</b> 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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>8</sup> As Vessuri et al.<sup>9</sup> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>Scopus</i> we found that 4,231 of the 22,460 active titles (as of 6 February 2016) were OA (as seen from <i>DOAJ</i> on September 2015) and were listed in either or both of <i>DOAJ</i> and <i>ROAD</i>.<sup>10</sup> Of the more than</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12,000 journals covered by <i>Web of Science,</i> 1,313 journals are OA as of October 2015 as listed</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">by <i>DOAJ</i>.<sup>11</sup> Analyzing data from <i>Google Scholar</i>, Jamali and Nabavi showed that more than 61% of papers were accessible in full text.<sup>12</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of journals charging APC</i> - 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 2009<sup>13</sup> to 611 in 2014. More than half of the 611 journals levy APC.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not all journals charging APC have a fixed APC. There are many models. Of the 881 <i>SCIE</i>indexed 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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Crotty’s observation that the majority of OA papers are published by paying an APC,<sup>5</sup> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The APC OA journal used most often by Indian researchers in the five-year period is <i>PLoS One</i> with a total publication count of 2,404 and average cites per paper (CPP) of 7.32. Starting with 78 papers in 2009,<sup>13</sup> the number increased to 724 papers from India in 2014. Indeed, <i>Current Science</i>, which comes next in the list with 2,334 papers with a CPP of 1.74, was the leader until 2011.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Overseas collaboration </i>- 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Country of journal publication </i>- 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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>Web of Science</i> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i> </i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Citations to papers published in journals levying APC</i> – 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. <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i>, <i>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</i>, and <i>BMC Genomics</i>, 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, <i>Nucleic Acids Research</i> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>Bulletin of the World Health Organization</i> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Use of mega journals- </i>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).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Papers classified by field - </i>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.<i> </i></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Discussion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 14.4% of the 37,122 papers from India as seen from <i>SCIE</i> have been published in OA journals. The actual number of OA papers from India will be much larger since, for example,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Scopus</i> 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 study<sup>13</sup> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Potential spend on APC seen in perspective </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From a survey of a large sample of journals listed in DOAJ carried out in 2014, Morrison <i>et al</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">reported an average APC of US$964.<sup>14</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>15</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Studies to £2,248 for Durham University.<sup>16</sup> Over the 15-month period April 2013 – July 2014,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>17 </sup>University of Cambridge spent</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">£936,000 towards APC in 2014. For the 495 RCUK funded papers the average cost was £1,891.<sup>18</sup> 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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APCs.<sup>18</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>Scopus</i> for at least two years to be US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>SCIE</i>, at an average APC of €1,220.<sup>20 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>21</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of more than US$2000, while Asian, African and South American APC OA journals have average APC of less than US$1000.<sup>22</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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$16.75 million. This figure does not include the APC for the other 7% of papers published in journals charging APC on the basis of number of pages, submission fee, and so on. Nor does it include the expenditure on OA papers published in hybrid journals. These journals usually charge much more than journals with fixed APC. According to Björk and Solomon (2014), the average APC for publication charged by hybrid journals published by subscription publishers (such as Elsevier and Wiley) is US$</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2,727, almost double that chaged by fully OA journals published by non-subscription publishers (such as PLoS), US$ 1,418.<sup>19</sup> 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<b> ~</b>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Author pays model has failed </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.”<sup>23</sup> What we see in reality, however, is that the APC charged by <i>PLoS One</i> has gone up from US$1,250 when it was founded in December 2006 to US$1,450 now. The APC charged by <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> has increased from</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">US$1,500 at launch in 2003 to US$2,900 in 2012, a rise of 93% in nine years.<sup>23</sup> The situation at</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>24</sup> Neylon, a former employee of PLoS had recently conceded that “no functional market is emerging and it</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(APC model) might be the wrong economic model.”<sup>25</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">January 2014, SCOAP<sup>3</sup> is making papers available on an OA basis and it charges an average</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">APC of US$1,165.<sup>26</sup> According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">“</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/">SCOAP</a><a href="https://scoap3.org/"><sup>3</sup></a> <a href="https://scoap3.org/">n</a>early doubled in size this past year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(87% annual growth) for a total of 4,690 documents,” and “the <a href="http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en">Electronic Journals Library</a> added 3,612 journals that can be read free-of-charge in the past year, for a total of 52,000 journals, a</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">7% growth rate.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As early as 1999, Rosenzweig<sup>27</sup> 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.<sup>28</sup> Björk and Solomon<sup>19</sup> have shown that “among the established OA publishers with journals listed in <i>Scopus</i>, 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.</p>
<h3><sub>Affordable OA publishing</sub></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.’<sup> 29</sup> The most recent example is the <i>en masse</i> resignation of Rooryck and the other members of the editorial board of <i>Lingua</i> to start <i>Glossa</i>.<sup>30</sup> An early example was the resignation of the editor of <i>Evolutionary Ecology</i> along with many members of the editorial board to start <i>Evolutionary Ecology Research</i> in 1998.<sup>29 </sup>Suber maintains a list of such ‘Journal declarations of independence.’<sup>29</sup> 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 <i>arXiv</i> overlay journal called <i>Discreet Analysis</i>, owned by a group of researchers, in which the overall cost per article will be well below $30.<sup>31</sup> 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 <i>arXiv</i> before they submit them to journals, the only important function left for journals is organizing peer review.”<sup> 31</sup> How will these journals survive? Initially, the Association of Dutch Universities and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund <i>Glossa </i>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.<sup>32 </sup>Seed money from the University of Cambridge will see through <i>Discreet Analysis in</i> the first five years.<sup>31 </sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"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.<sup>32</sup> "We need an alternative, cheap system sitting there — at which point the commercial publishers will become redundant."<sup>33</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Should Indian researchers spend a large sum on APCs?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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,<sup>34</sup> 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.<sup>35</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>36</sup> Williams-Jones and colleagues belive that “for many sectors of academe, ‘paying to publish’ is ethically suspicious.<sup>37 </sup>Such an ethical concern has also been raised by Wilson and Golonka.<sup>38</sup> 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.<sup>39</sup> 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.”<sup>40 </sup>For 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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,<sup>41,42</sup> and more recently the Ministry of Human Resource Development announced some budgetary cuts for Indian Institutes of Technology<sup>43</sup> 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.<sup>44</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is the alternative model for making research OA?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>36,45</sup> Joshi has explained the advantages of depositing one’s papers in such repositories.<sup>46</sup> 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.<sup>47</sup> Use of repositories is picking up around the world. According to Morrison,<sup>6</sup> “Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (<i>BASE</i>) 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 <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>PubMed</i></a> <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/"><i>Central</i></a><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/">,</a> making all content immediately freely accessible, and making all content open access, continues to grow.” <a href="https://arxiv.org/"><i>arXiv</i></a> <a href="https://arxiv.org/">g</a>rew by over 107,000 documents to over 1.1 million documents during the last year.<sup>6</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is happening in India? </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are many OA journals in India, and 337 have been listed in <i>DOAJ </i>(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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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<b>.</b> The download statistics of Bioline journals (http://www.bioline.org.br/stats) are very impressive. Kirsop, a founding member of</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>48,49 </sup>CSIR-</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>50</sup> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">By contrast, China seems to have made considerable progress. It was only in 2014 that the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(NSFC) issued open access policies.<sup>51</sup> By mid-March 2016 , the Open Repository of the</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>52</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(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.<sup>53</sup> 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.”<sup>54 </sup>With these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <i>La Referencia</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/), and there are legislations in place in Argentina, Mexico and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Peru to make publicly funded research freely available through repositories.<sup>55</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>What needs to be done?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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,<sup> 56</sup> 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.</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Populate OA repositories that are already there, as empty and sparsely populated repositories will not reflect well on the research community.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.<sup>57</sup></li>
<li>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.”<sup>58</sup></li>
<li>Funding agencies and research organizations that are so far unconcerned about their funds being used to meet APCs should stop supporting this practice. </li>
<li>A cadre of scholarly communication workforce should be developed for building institutional repositories and persuading researchers to upload materials.</li>
</ol>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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’.<sup>59</sup></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.<sup>60</sup> As long as we continue to use APC based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Acknowledgement</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are grateful to Peter Suber and Ms Barbara Kirsop for their valuable comments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Fig1.jpg" alt="Fig 1" class="image-inline" title="Fig 1" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Figure 1.</b> Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 1.</b> Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2">
<p>Year</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (non-APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>All OA journals</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2010</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>242</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2557</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17550</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>237</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4131</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16301</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>479</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6688</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33851</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2011</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>263</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3067</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17367</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>244</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4280</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>507</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7347</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>30012</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2012</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>308</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2800</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15715</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>251</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4157</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9276</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>559</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6957</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24991</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2013</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>326</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3335</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12635</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>268</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4457</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6257</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>594</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7792</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18892</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2014</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>328</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3634</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6950</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>283</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4660</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3057</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>611</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>8294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10007</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15393</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>70217</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21685</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47536</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>37078</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117753</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 2.</b> 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</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Nucleic Acids Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>138</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1945</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.09</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,770</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>126</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1409</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.18</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Genomics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>123</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1330</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Nanomedicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>NZ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>94</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1555</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€1,843</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1116</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17.17</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Plant Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>44</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>579</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.16</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Pathogens</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>42</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>781</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.60</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecular Cancer</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>540</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>298</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecules</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>300</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.71</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Computational Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>342</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.68</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>721</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28.84</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,900</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>DNA Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>542</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22.58</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$750</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>354</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.75</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biogeosciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.78</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>278</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Translational Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>238</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.87</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Marine Drugs</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>256</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Neuroinflammation</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>179</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.92</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$450</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Science and Technology of Advanced Materials</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.08</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>374</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,785</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Remote Sensing</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>125</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.36</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Cryosphere</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>112</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>128</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.80</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$200</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1930</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.50</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1077</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15907</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>#</sup>Page charges</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 3.</b> 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</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Bulletin of The World Health Organization</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>515</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.56</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CA</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>173</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.36</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Environmental Health Perspectives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>188</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Machine Learning Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>118</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Materials Today</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20.25</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Earth System Science Data</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>29.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>60.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.67</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Folia Neuropathologica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>PL</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.50</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 4</b>. Mega journals used by Indian researchers</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS One</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2404</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17587</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7.32</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Scientific Reports</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>222</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1523</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£990</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>AIP Advances</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>196</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Springer Plus</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>170</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>235</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.38</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,290</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMJ Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>148</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>FEBS Open Bio</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4.10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PeerJ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$695</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biology Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>83</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9.22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,950</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3100</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20349</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.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'>http://editors.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</a>
</p>
No publisherMuthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ScienceOpen ContentOpen Access2016-10-29T14:47:52ZBlog EntryCancel the Subscription
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/cancel-the-subscription
<b>It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available, writes Prof. Arunachalam in an article published by the Indian Express on May 8, 2012.</b>
<p>Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher, you may have to read or refer to many journals, not two or three. And you will depend on your institution’s library for those journals.</p>
<p>Till 20-30 years ago, most academic libraries, at least in the West, did not find it difficult to subscribe to most journals needed by the scientists in their institutions. Then things started changing and journal subscription prices started skyrocketing — some costing $20,000-40,000 — leading to what librarians call the serials crisis. Much of the price rise was caused by commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. These three control most of the 24,000 science, technology and medicine journals and publish more than 40 per cent of all journal articles today. Elsevier reported a profit of 37 per cent of its revenue in 2011 (up from 36 per cent in 2010); the profit of the other two is no less than 30 per cent despite the recession.<br /><br />A few years ago, academic librarians, even in the US, had to cut down their budgets for books and monographs to keep journal subscriptions going. Early this year, Harvard, reputed to have the richest endowment among universities, announced that it was finding it to difficult to hold on to its subscriptions and requested its faculty to publish their work in “open access journals” which would be free to read and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. The irony of it all was summed up nicely by Professor Robert Darnton, director of libraries at Harvard: “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free, and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”<br /><br />A few months ago, a Fields Medal winner, mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge, made it publicly known that he had stopped publishing in, refereeing for and being on the editorial boards of journals published by Elsevier. Gowers created a website called The Cost of Knowledge and close to 11,000 scientists from around the world have signed it already, pledging to boycott Elsevier journals.<br /><br />Cost, however, is only part of the issue. A more serious issue is the exclusive control enjoyed by publishers over how research gets distributed and shared. They demand that authors surrender copyright to the papers they publish and use it to throttle scholarly communication and hinder the progress of science. It is common sense that if we make scholarly information freely available it will reach a larger audience and help advance further research and lead to wider economic benefits.<br /><br />The boycott had a salutary effect. Elsevier withdrew its lobbying for the rather absurd Research Works Act, which, if passed in the US Congress, would kill public access to federally funded research and reverse the mandate of the National Institutes of Health putting in one go all the 21 million freely available records in the PubMed library into a fee-to-see system.<br /><br />Long before Gowers’s boycott of Elsevier and Harvard’s request to its faculty, there have been many stellar initiatives to usher in an era of open access to science and scholarship. For example, all seven research councils in the UK have mandated open access to research funded by them. So has the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest private-sector funder of life science research. Apart from these funder mandates, there are many institutional mandates, including the ones at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, and the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. All these developments have been meticulously chronicled by the philosophy professor, Peter Suber, in the US and the technology writer, Richard Poynder, in the UK.<br /><br />Recently, the British government enlisted the cooperation of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. Says David Willetts, minister for universities and science: “Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research.”<br /><br />In India, though, there appears to be very little enthusiasm among the leaders of the science establishment. Neither the office of the principal scientific adviser nor the department of science and technology seems to have shown any interest in mandating open access to taxpayer-funded research. The National Knowledge Commission has recommended mandating open access to all publicly funded research, but it is not clear who will implement the recommendation. Right now, it is left to individuals to promote open access in India.</p>
<p>The writer is with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cancel-the-subscription/946723/0">Read the original article in the Indian Express</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/cancel-the-subscription'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/cancel-the-subscription</a>
</p>
No publisherSubbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen Access2012-05-09T03:44:50ZBlog EntrySecond Draft of Open Access Policy of the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science released
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/second-draft-of-open-access-policy-of-the-department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-released
<b>The Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India drafted an Open Access Policy (“Policy”) in consultation with several open access experts, government officials and CIS. The second draft of the Policy released last week and is open for comments till 17th November, 2014.
</b>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) commends the efforts of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India to make scientific research publicly available by developing an open access policy. The first and second drafts of the Policy may be accessed <a href="http://www.dbtindia.nic.in/news_management/PressreleaseDetails.asp?PressId=380&button=Edit" target="_top">here</a>. The following part highlights the changes inserted in the second draft of the Policy.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>Second draft of the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science</b></span><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> Open Access Policy</span></b></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) commends the efforts of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India to make scientific research publicly available by developing an open access policy. The first and second drafts of the Policy may be accessed <a href="http://www.dbtindia.nic.in/news_management/PressreleaseDetails.asp?PressId=380&button=Edit" target="_top">here</a>. The following part highlights the changes inserted in the second draft of the Policy.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The second draft has been titled “Policy on open access to DBT and DST funded research.” At the outset, the second draft reflects that the Policy is voluntary and not mandatory in nature. To reiterate this, the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science (“DBT-DST”) acknowledge and respect right of researchers to publish their work in a journal of their choice in the Policy. However, the DBT-DST maintains that it will not underwrite article processing charges. In addition, the Policy respects the limitations placed on research outputs under Indian law and intellectual property policies of the respective institutions.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The Policy lays out that the process for making a research output openly accessible will start at the institutional level, and it has been made mandatory for institutions which receive core funding from DBT-DST to set-up an Institutional Repository(“IR”). The DBT-DST will provide adequate assistance to set up institutional repositories. For other institutions, it is strongly suggested that they set up an IR. Meanwhile, institutions can submit their work in the central repository created by the DBT and DST (dbt.sciencecentral.in and dst.sciencecentral.in). The Ministry of Science and Technology will set up a central harvester (www.sciencecentral.in) that will harvest the full text and metadata of these publication.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The recommended deposit period of the works has been extended to two weeks after the acceptance by the journal, and the recommended embargo period is less than a year. Depositing in a suitable repository has been made mandatory for all research outputs. <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/cis-comments-to-the-department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-open-access-policy">CIS strongly recommended</a> an embargo period of one year, and making deposits in repositories mandatory, regardless of the open access routes ( Gold OA or Green OA) adopted by the scientist.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The draft makes it clear that the Policy does not intend to override the agreements between the researchers and publishers, however, it recommends the authors to bring to the notice of publishers their obligations under the Policy.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">In furtherance of creating awareness of open access, the DBT-DST intend to celebrate “Open Access Day” during the International Open Access Week (http://www.openaccessweek.org/) by organizing sensitizing lectures, programmes, workshops and taking new OA initiatives.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The second draft successfully addresses concerns raised by scientists and publishers on the first draft. The comments on the first draft may be accessed <a href="http://www.btisnet.gov.in/oap.htm">here</a>. In the comments, the scientific community requested clarification on the mandatory nature of the policy. It also raised the issue of impeding career advancement in view of limited number of open access journals and the dependence on publications in certain noteworthy journals while hiring.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"> </a>Therefore, the second draft of the Policy makes it voluntary to publish open access, however, depositing in repositories has been made mandatory.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Further, concerns about IRs and central repository have been addressed in the second draft with the DBT-DST committing to assist institutions in setting up IRs.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><a href="http://www.btisnet.gov.in/OPEN%20ACCESS/Elsevier_Response%20on%20DBT-DST%20OPEN%20ACCESS%20POLICY.pdf">Some publishers raised concerns about the stipulated embargo period</a>, and suggested it be extended to a variable of 12-24 months, instead of the 12 months period recommended in the Policy. However, the second draft retains the embargo period of one year because scientific research moves at a fast pace, and locking crucial research for more than one year runs the risk of rendering the research outdated.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">FAQs on the Policy will be released soon, as requested by several commentators.</p>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">About the Policy</span></b></p>
<p>CIS has been assisting the DBT-DST on developing the Policy since June 2014.<b> </b>The Policy document was drafted by the Open Access Policy Committee. I blogged about the <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-ministry-of-science-and-technology-government-of-india-release-open-access-policy" target="_top">exercise undertaken to emerge with the first draft</a> which was followed by a round of comments from the public. After releasing the first draft, the Open Access Policy Committee convened a meeting to review the Policy in light of the feedback received. CIS was invited to participate in the meeting and I attended it in furtherance of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/cis-comments-to-the-department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-open-access-policy" target="_top">submissions made by CIS previously.</a> The second draft is the outcome of the Open Access Policy Committee meeting.</p>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p align="LEFT"> </p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/second-draft-of-open-access-policy-of-the-department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-released'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/second-draft-of-open-access-policy-of-the-department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-released</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpennessOpen Access2014-10-30T00:33:49ZBlog EntryOpen Equitable Access (PDF)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access
<b>file</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-equitable-access</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:42:17ZFileOpen Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Status Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf
<b>The draft report was prepared in April 2011 by Prof. Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-scholarly-literature.pdf</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:46:11ZFileOpen Access to Scholarly Literature in India — A Status Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx
<b>This report was prepared by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madan Muthu on 9 April 2011.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/open-access-to-scholarly-literature.docx</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen AccessPublications2011-08-23T02:47:07ZFileHelping Institutions Embrace Open Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access
<b>World over, a large number of universities and institutions are making way for open access repositories. Why have Indian researchers shied away from it?</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Manupriya was <a class="external-link" href="https://thewire.in/197872/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access/">published in the Wire</a> on November 17, 2017</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On October 28, 2017, a group of panelists in the faculty hall at <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/iisc" target="_blank" title="Indian Institute of Science (IISc),">Indian Institute of Science (IISc),</a> discussed the framework of policies that can help academic institutions embrace open access in letter, spirit and action. The discussion was a part of week-long activities organised by <span class="caps">DST </span>Centre for Policy Research (<span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span>) at IISc to increase awareness and acceptability for open access publishing in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/OA.png/@@images/3939a474-dc8c-4f7b-b3ee-20b19b8f0e18.png" alt="OA" class="image-inline" title="OA" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The panel included Jayant Modak, deputy director, IISc, Satyajit Mayor, director of <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/ncbs" target="_blank" title="National Centre for Biological Sciences">National Centre for Biological Sciences</a> and <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/orgs/instem" target="_blank" title="inStem">inStem</a>, Padmini Ray Murray, vice-chair, <a href="http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/" target="_blank" title="Global Outlook: Digital Humanities">Global Outlook: Digital Humanities</a>, <span class="caps">N.V.</span> Sathyanarayana, chairman and managing director, <a href="http://www.informaticsglobal.com/" target="_blank" title="Informatics India Ltd">Informatics India Ltd</a> and Madan Muthu, visiting faculty at <a href="https://iiscdstcpr.wordpress.com/" target="_blank" title="DST-CPR at IISc."><span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span> at IISc.</a> The discussion was anchored and moderated by Sunil Abraham, executive director, <a href="https://cis-india.org/" target="_blank" title="Centre for Internet and Society.">Centre for Internet and Society.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open access is a form of publishing that makes the fruits of research, such as journal papers and other forms of data accessible to anyone interested in it, without a cost. World over, a large number of universities and institutions are beginning to give up the library subscription model of publishing to make way for open access, owing to the latter’s lower cost and higher visibility.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In India too, funding agencies like <span class="caps">DBT</span> and <span class="caps">DST</span> have laid out guidelines that require researchers to submit their research output in open access repositories. Ironically though, most researchers have shied away from submitting their work in the repositories. Which raises the question, why?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In fact, this was one of the first questions that the panelists debated upon. Abraham initiated the discussion by asking the panelists – What are the weaknesses of <span class="caps">DBT</span>–<span class="caps">DST</span> policy on open access? Why have a large number of scientists not followed the guidelines laid by the policy? Is it because the policy document does not talk about any punitive measures for scientists in the event of not depositing their work in the institutional repositories (IRs)? And, how can the policy be improved?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Modak opened the argument by saying that we as a nation are good at making provisions but bad with implementation. He agreed that scientists are yet to warm up to the idea of open access but was disinclined on using punitive measures to force scientists into submitting their work in IRs. Mayor, in agreement with Modak, said that the policy document is advisory in nature and sort of lacks ‘teeth’. However, he too was against the use of punitive measures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Murray, the third academician on the panel said that though the policy talks about staying away from publisher-based metrics like impact factor to assess a scientist’s work, it does not provide any information about what alternative metrics can be used to measure it. She suggested that the accessibility of a scientist’s work and how much effort she has put in to make it easily available to non-scientists could be used as a metrics for measurement. She also drew attention to the fact that the policy completely bypasses the requirements of independent scholars and those working in languages other than English. “Which institutional repository should they deposit their work in?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sathyanarayana, the fourth panelist and a strong advocate of open access said, the policy document “lacks an aggressive strategy” to drive a disruptive and “fundamentally voluntary model” of adopting open access. He asked the other panelists and the audience, “why have repositories like ResearchGate become so successful and attractive for researchers? Why can’t open access IRs be modelled along the lines of such repositories? His argument was that the IRs can be fashioned in a way to make them a ‘convenient step in the process of research’”. One suggestion that he offered was that IRs can be structured as a paper submission platform. So that anybody who is interested in publishing their work first puts it up in the <span class="caps">IR</span> and only after that the process of going to a journal begins.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Muthu, the fourth panelist and a long-time crusader for open access in India said that scientists in India have stayed away from the open access publishing because they don’t fully realise that in traditional models of publishing, you surrender all copyrights of your work to the publisher. He added that more scientists can be encouraged to adopt the open access model of publishing by making IRs institute-managed, easier to use and as a mandatory step in the process of publishing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mayor added to this argument by saying that the idea of submitting (unpublished) work in an <span class="caps">IR</span> is quite similar to the concept of pre-print archives which are fast becoming a powerful way of sharing work. Almost all top journals accept work that has been published in a pre-print archive. In fact, in the physical sciences, people have been using pre-print archives for a long time and now slowly, even the biology community is warming up to it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Murray emphasised on the need to talk to students about open access and making them aware of the ways to design their metadata so that it is amenable to open access repositories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the discussion inched closer to its final moments, it veered off towards the costs of open access publishing. Modak said that in the last year alone, the amount of money IISc has spent for publishing papers has doubled. If all researchers start opting for open access (<span class="caps">OA</span>) journals/hybrid-<span class="caps">OA</span> journals that charge the authors nearly double of what traditional journals do, then publishing papers will become unsustainable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To this, Sathyanarayana said, it may appear that the cost of publishing in <span class="caps">OA</span> journals is high, but on a macro-level, when you consider the cost of publishing and accessing all the papers published in a year, then the <span class="caps">OA</span> model costs much lesser. He added that scientific publishing is the only business in the world where authors (creators of proprietary material) give away all their rights to publishers.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Backing up the points made by Sathyanarayana, Murray said that in traditional models of publishing the publishers make close to 400% profits. We need to think about, “how much labour we as academics put in for publishers’ profits?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is authors’ inertia that is stopping open access from becoming the obvious model of publishing, said, Muthu.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In conclusion, Abraham summed up the arguments and acknowledged that there are many dimensions to open access and an institutional policy on <span class="caps">OA</span> cannot be framed in a vacuum. Common people need to participate in the debate to shape the direction the policy takes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Apart from the panel discussion a poster competition and a quiz competition were organised as part of the <span class="caps">OA</span>-week activities. <span class="caps">DST</span>–<span class="caps">CPR</span> was joined by the student’s council at IISc, Centre for Contemporary Studies, <span class="caps">JRD</span> Tata Library and IndiaBioscience in organising the activities.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>This article was originally published on </i><a href="https://indiabioscience.org/" target="_blank" title="IndiaBioscience">IndiaBioscience</a><i>. Read the original <a href="https://indiabioscience.org/news/2017/helping-institutions-embrace-open-access" target="_blank" title="here">here</a>. <br /></i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/manupriya-wire-november-17-2017-helping-institutions-embrace-open-access</a>
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No publisherAdminOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2017-11-27T15:11:34ZNews ItemThe Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma
<b>Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.</b>
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<img src="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-pad-ma-10-lessons-learned-from-running-open-access-online-video-archives-in-india-and-beyond/leadImage" alt="The Zen of Pad.ma - Lecture by Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Feb 03, 6 pm" />
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<h2>The Zen of Pad.ma</h2>
<p>Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.</p>
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<h2>Biographies</h2>
<p><strong>Sebastian Lütgert</strong>, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.</p>
<p><strong>Jan Gerber</strong>, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma</a>
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No publishersneha-ppPracticeDigital HumanitiesDigital MediaOpen AccessResearchers at WorkEventArchives2016-01-28T08:25:18ZEvent