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The city of Bhubaneswar is going Open
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-city-of-bhubaneswar-is-going-open
<b>Bhubaneswar supporting the concept of Openness movement has joined as one of the ambassadors of the movement in the world by giving citizens the right to access the content online produced by the government and make use of the work.</b>
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p dir="ltr">The Openness movement is a concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency, free and unrestricted access to knowledge and information. The movement across the world is trying to build on the interest of like-minded people and an urgent need of bringing new resources of knowledge for the benefit of people with a method of collaborative or cooperative management. Many successful projects such as OpenStreetMap, Github, Wikimedia projects are free, open for everyone and evolve both by contributions and review efforts by participant volunteers. Open Knowledge Projects across the world are embarking upon a silent revolution to change the way information and knowledge are consumed by people.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Bhubaneswar supporting the concept of Openness movement has joined as one of the ambassadors of the movement in the world by giving citizens the right to access the content online produced by the government and make use of the work. As the city turned 70-year-old as the capital of Odisha in April 2018, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik launched two websites — Bhubaneswar.me and Smart City Bhubaneswar under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/">Creative Commons license</a>. The websites were made to provide visitor or tourist information about the city and to showcase various projects being undertaken as a part of the Smart City mission.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;" dir="ltr"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/Access_Bhubaneswar.jpg/image_preview" alt="Wide image Mukteswar temple" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Wide image Mukteswar temple" /></p>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">A <a class="external-link" href="https://twitter.com/BDA_BBSR/status/984444486905249792">visual walk-through video</a> was released for the visit.Bhubaneswar.me and Smart City website over social media sites for the public to understand the features of the websites which ended saying “Knowledge now made more accessible”, anyone can use the content and data of the website under the campaign for Transparency in Governance. These websites have adopted Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license also known as CC-BY-4.0, which allows the citizens of Bhubaneswar to use the work of the government. Creative Commons licenses are a set of open licenses that are used worldwide to enable widen use and reuse of creative work that is otherwise restricted by the strict copyright laws. Currently, the majority of government websites under the Bhubaneswar administration are under an Open license.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Transparency is considered the traditional hallmark of an open government, meaning that the public should have access to government-held information and be informed of government proceedings, says an article from <a class="external-link" href="https://opensource.com/resources/open-government">Opensource.com</a>. Transparency, accountability, and participation are one of the needed conditions for the government to ensure that public resources are used efficiently, public policies are designed in the best interest of the population.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Though most of the government websites can be accessed online, the content of those sites are not open by default, the government has to adopt a specific license to open their content. In September 2017, Odisha became <a class="external-link" href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/09/18/odisha-social-media-free-license/">the first state</a> in India to release all of its social media contents under a free license such as Creative Commons license, initially eight social media accounts of the state government were part of the project and followed by few other departments under the state government releasing their content under the same license. Because of this initiative by the government, currently, ten or more websites and eight social media accounts are allowing people from all around the world to freely reuse the state government’s work.</p>
<p dir="ltr">As the content of the websites is under a free license it creates an impact on a project like Wikipedia-one of the most popular websites in the world and the largest online encyclopedia available on the internet, committed to free and open copyright licenses from its earliest days on the internet. Currently, a near about files from the websites and social media accounts of the Government of Odisha are added into Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s sister site and an open multimedia repository, under a content donation program of which 70% of files are used in different Wikipedia articles, all of which together has received over 25 million page views in last 18 months.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Cities opening their data and content for the citizens encourages individuals for new innovation and to form new ideas that help to bridge the gap in the city. A <a class="external-link" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2014/09/12/how-open-data-is-transforming-city-life/#661b56054104">report from Forbes</a> in 2012 says Open city data can help app developers, urban planners, and others understand a city’s problems and manage city services in ways that improve the quality of life and business prospects for its residents. When Bhubaneswar led the way of promoting the Openness movement in India, there is a huge scope for the rest of the cities to adopt open licensing to make knowledge more accessible for the citizens and enhance public trust in government. </p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-city-of-bhubaneswar-is-going-open'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-city-of-bhubaneswar-is-going-open</a>
</p>
No publishersaileshOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2019-03-07T11:41:16ZBlog EntryThe '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>
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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 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 EntrySting job by Hyderabad scientist exposes fake journals
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/business-standard-ians-october-11-2018-sting-job-by-hyderabad-scientist-exposes-fake-journals
<b>Scientists have at last found a cure for Schlodomoniasis -- a deadly brain infection caused by the "inter-galactic parasite Klaousmodium cruzi" -- they claim to have identified for the first time.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/sting-job-by-hyderabad-scientist-exposes-fake-journals-118101100439_1.html">Business Standard</a> on October 11, 2018. Subbiah Arunachalam was quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=beth+smith" target="_blank">Beth Smith </a>and co-workers at "<a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=sanchez+institute" target="_blank">Sanchez Institute </a>for Biomedical Sciences for Doopidoo Research" in <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=morocco" target="_blank">Morocco </a>have published their discovery in three science journals and also reported a novel method called "Magnetic Oddities <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=radiation" target="_blank">Radiation </a>Therapy (MORTY)" to treat the <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=infection" target="_blank">infection.</a> The study was carried out in "Wakandan population".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If readers are breaking their heads to understand the startling findings and decipher the strange words like "Wakandan" and "Doopidoo", Farooq Ali Khan, a <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=college+professor" target="_blank">college professor </a>and PhD student in <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=hyderabad" target="_blank">Hyderabad </a>and a co-<a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=author" target="_blank">author </a>of the paper, had the last laugh.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It was not intended to be a scientific paper," he told this <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=correspondent" target="_blank">correspondent </a>in an email. "It was my sting operation to expose publishers of predatory journals who are churning out fake science for profit."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open access journals are supposed to provide an <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=online+platform" target="_blank">online platform </a>for rapid dissemination of latest updates in science and technology. Their publishers don't charge the readers as access to these journals is free, but they charge the authors wanting to have their research papers published in these journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Inspired by previous publishing "stings", Khan wanted to test whether open access journals would publish an obviously absurd paper liberally salted with nonsense for the sake of money from gullible authors anxious to publish.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He created a spoof manuscript titled "Newer Tools to Fight Inter-Galactic Parasites and their Transmissibility in Zygirion Simulation", and submitted it to several suspect journals from the list kept online by <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=jeffrey+beall" target="_blank">Jeffrey Beall </a>-- an <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=associate+professor+and+librarian" target="_blank">associate professor and librarian </a>at the <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=university+of+colorado" target="_blank">University of </a><a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=colorado" target="_blank">Colorado </a>who coined the term "predatory journal" -- as a public service to his colleagues.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">All the hilarious fake names like "schleem", "dinglebop" and "schwitinization", that do not make any sense, as well as images and graphs published in the paper, were fabricated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The "Zyrgion simulation", and "intergalactic parasites" are all references to "Rick and Morty" -- a US Cartoon Network's animated science <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=fiction" target="_blank">fiction </a>programme about the misadventures of mad <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=scientist" target="_blank">scientist </a><a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=rick+sanchez" target="_blank">Rick Sanchez </a>and his grandson <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=morty+smith" target="_blank">Morty Smith.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Khan, a great fan of "Rick and Morty", submitted the paper with <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=beth+smith" target="_blank">Beth Smith </a>(Rick's granddaughter in the cartoon show) as the corresponding <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=author" target="_blank">author </a>and himself as co-<a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=author" target="_blank">author.</a> Two other authors' names were made-up, and Sukant Khurana -- a <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=scientist" target="_blank">scientist </a>at <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=central+drug+research+institute" target="_blank">Central Drug Research Institute </a>in Lucknow, who offered to help Khan in this sting, was another author -- all affiliated to an institution in <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=morocco" target="_blank">Morocco </a>that does not exist.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The so-called "Magnetic Oddities <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=radiation" target="_blank">Radiation </a>Therapy" developed by the authors to treat the brain <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=infection" target="_blank">infection </a>is again nothing but an expansion of "MORTY", a character in the cartoon show.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anyone with commonsense would have noticed all the nonsense and consigned the paper to trash, but Khan surprisingly found it was accepted for publication by 10 journals for fees ranging from $75 to $650.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After some bargaining over fees, three scientific journals -- ARC Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, IOSR Journal of Pharmacy and Biological Sciences, and Clinical <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=biotechnology" target="_blank">Biotechnology </a>and <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=microbiology" target="_blank">Microbiology </a>-- published the paper without a second glance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Khan says his "scientific prank" was intended to expose the seriousness of predatory journal industry and to create awareness among people who are beginning their careers in science. "These predatory journals are polluting the scientific record with junk science and are also resulting in fake news."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"When the Open Access Declaration was drafted in 2002, no one would have imagined that many unscrupulous individuals would pollute the entire system of scholarly communication with predatory journals solely with the idea of making money," Subbiah Arunachalam, <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=renowned+information+scientist" target="_blank">renowned information </a><a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=scientist" target="_blank">scientist </a>and Distinguished Fellow of the <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=centre+for+internet" target="_blank">Centre for Internet </a>and Society in Bengaluru, told this <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=correspondent" target="_blank">correspondent </a>in an email.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Unfortunately, many Indians -- both individuals and companies -- are in this business," he said. "Predatory journals pose a big threat to the integrity of research."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"These are shameful acts by greedy publishers," Subhash Lakhotia, a <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=professor+of+zoology" target="_blank">professor of zoology </a>at the Benaras Hindu University, told this <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=correspondent" target="_blank">correspondent </a>in an email. "Until we stop payments of all kinds of open access charges and modify the present faulty <a class="storyTags" href="https://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=assessment+system" target="_blank">assessment system </a>that relies on numbers of publications, predation in one or the other form would continue."</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/business-standard-ians-october-11-2018-sting-job-by-hyderabad-scientist-exposes-fake-journals'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/business-standard-ians-october-11-2018-sting-job-by-hyderabad-scientist-exposes-fake-journals</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2018-10-17T02:06:21ZNews ItemShould 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>44. Krishnan, V. and Peri, D., Govt. tells labs: fund research by yourself, <i>The Hindu</i>, 28 October 2015; http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-tells-labs-fund-research-byyourself/paper7811265.ece (accessed on 22, March 2016).</p>
<p>45. Dane, T., Professor Balaram talks Open Access, 15 November 2011; http://cisindia.org/openness/professor-balaram-talks-open-access (accessed on 27, March 2016)</p>
<p>46. Joshi, N. V., Institutional E-print Archives: Liberalizing Access to Scientific Research, <i>Sci.</i>, 2005, <b>89</b>, 421-422; http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Downloads/download_pdf.php?titleid=id_089_03_0421_0422_0 (accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>47. Poynder, R., Where are we, what still needs to be done? Stevan Harnad on the state of Open Access, <i>Open and Shut</i>, 2013; http://poynder.blogspot.in/2013/07/where-are-wewhat-still-needs-to-be.html (accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>48. CSIR open access mandate; http://www.csircentral.net/mandate.pdf (accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>49. DBT-DST open access policy, 2015; http://dst.gov.in/news/dbt-dst-open-access-policy (accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>50. ICAR adopts open access policy; http://icar.org.in/en/node/6609 (accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>51. Van Noorden, R., Chinese agencies announce open-access policies, <i>Nature</i>, 2014, DOI:10.1038/nature.2014.15255</p>
<p>52. Liping, K., Open access and open research data in china, <i>eifl blog</i>, 2016; http://www.eifl.net/blogs/open-access-and-open-research-data-china (accessed on 27, March 2016).</p>
<p>53. Babini, D., Repositories as key players in non-commercial open access - a developing region perspective, <i>COAR-SPARC conference</i>, 15-16 April 2015, Portugal; http://www.slideshare.net/CLACSOredbiblio/repositories-as-key-players-innoncommercial-open-access-a-developing-region-perspective (accessed on 24 March 2016).</p>
<p>54. SPARC, Open Access in Latin America: a paragon for the rest of the world, 2015, SciELO in perspective; http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/08/18/open-access-in-latinamerica-a-paragon-for-the-rest-of-the-world-originally-published-in-the-sparc-blog/(accessed on 27 March 2016).</p>
<p>55. Starczewski, M., and Referencia, L.A., – South American Open Science network, <i>ceon Otwarta Nauka</i>, 2015; https://otwartanauka.pl/analysis/nauka-otwartosc-swiat/lareferencia-poludniowoamerykanska-siec-otwartej-nauki/la-referencia-south-americanopen-science-network?showall=1&limitstart= (accessed on 27, March 2016).</p>
<p>56. Houghton, J. and Swan, A., Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold", <i>D-Lib Magazine</i>, 2013, <b>19</b>,1/2.DOI:10.1045/january2013-houghton</p>
<p>57. Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,Open Access and Research Funders: A Report on Challenges, Opportunities, and Collaboration, 2016, http://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/RWJF-SPARC-public-report.pdf (accessed on 15 April 2016).</p>
<p>58. Baeten, J., Estraillier, P., Kirchner, C., Moatti, A. and Romary, L., Open Access in Japan– a multi-institutional perspective, 19 March 2016. [Research Report] Ambassade de France au Japon. 2016. <hal-01290936></p>
<p>59. Harnad, S. and Swan, A., India, Open Access, the Law of Karma and the Golden Rule, <i>DESIDOC J. Lib. Inf. Technol.,</i>2008, <b>28</b>, 35-40; DOI:14429/djlit.28.1.150</p>
<p>60. Poynder, R., Open access: What price affordability?, <i>eCancer</i>, 2014, <b>41</b>; DOI:10.3332/ecancer.2014.ed41</p>
<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 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 EntrySeminar on Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research
<b>The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, is organising a seminar on open access in research on Tuesday, December 22, 2015. The seminar will focus on: 1) wider access to scientific publications and research data, 2) access to scientific information, and 3) challenges and opportunities of research data. The Centre for Internet and Society is supporting the event as a Knowledge Partner.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>Open Access has become central importance to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, business, and the public as well as librarians. Increasingly, research institutions require researchers to publish articles that report research findings openly accessible in open domain.</p>
<p>Open Access pursues to yield scholarly publishing to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not stop researchers from getting access to research data. Open Access, and the open availability and search ability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the research practice in various fields.</p>
<p>To explore why Open Access is so important to a number of groups, TERI Library along with The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as Knowledge Partner is organizing a half day seminar on <em>Open Access in Research Areas: a Strategic Approach</em> on December 22, 2015 at TERI Seminar Hall, IHC, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.</p>
<p>The Seminar will focus on:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>wider access to scientific publications and research data</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>access to scientific information, and</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>challenges and opportunities of research data.</p>
</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Schedule</h2>
<p>No registration is required to attend the seminar. Seats are limited, and will be provided on first-come-first-served basis.</p>
<p> </p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>13:45 - 14:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Registration and Networking</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:00 - 14:10</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Welcome Address - <strong>Mr. Prabir Sengupta</strong>, Distinguished Fellow and Director, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:10 - 14:20</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Special Address - <strong>Sumandro Chattapadhyay</strong>, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:20 - 14:35</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Keynote Address - <strong>Dr. K.R. Murali Mohan</strong>, Advisor, Big Data Initiatives Division, Department of Science and Technology</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:35 - 14:50</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Inaugural Address - <strong>Dr. Chandrima Shaha</strong>, Director, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:50 - 15:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Setting the Theme and Vote of Thanks - <strong>Dr. P.K. Bhattacharya</strong>, Fellow and Area Convenor, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:00 - 15:30</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Tea and Refreshments</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:30 - 17:15</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Plenary Session</strong><br />
Chair: <strong>Dr. Ramesh Sharma</strong>, Director, CEMCA<br />
<ul>
<li><strong>Puneet Kishor</strong>, Researcher and Independent Consultant - "Science, Data, and Creative Commons"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Beth Sandore Namachchivaya</strong>, Associate Dean of Libraries and Professor University of Illinois - "Developing Services, Infrastructure, and Best Practices to Conserve and Provide Access to Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi</strong>, Librarian, Indian institute of Public Administration</li></ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataFeaturedOpen ResearchOpen AccessOpennessEvent2015-12-22T05:37:44ZEventSeminar on Open Access for Scientific Information
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access
<b>Open-access provides free online access to quality scholarly material that can be defined as “open domain,” meaning publicly supported research information, and “open access,” so that it is copyrighted to be freely available scholarly material. Open-access publishing enables researchers in developing countries to establish priority for their research, which they could use later to defend their intellectual property. It removes excess barriers in terms of both price and permission, enhances national research capacity, and improves visibility for developing-country research. Open access thus enables a global platform for this research and collaboration and reciprocates the information flow from South to North among all countries.</b>
<p>In India, there is a large opportunity for open-access publishing. There are many non-commercial research and development institutions, both academic and research laboratories. For example, there are approximately 300 universities that offer both graduate and research programs. There are also many R&D laboratories operating within government science agencies, which cover domains like industrial research, defense research, agricultural research, medicine, ecology, environment, information technology, space, energy, and ocean development.</p>
<p>Many of these institutions, and also several professional societies, publish science journals. Tools like the Open Journal Systems could help many of these journals to come online in an open-access environment. Open Access is relevant to India because most research is funded from public money, institutional framework and information infrastructure, trained manpower and financial resources are adequately available. It widens distribution of information and knowledge and lowers the cost of reaching a fairly wide audience while maximising return on public money. The OA movement is being supported by research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public. </p>
<p>Open access publishing can foster the exchange of research results amongst scientists from different disciplines, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research, whilst providing access to research results to researchers world-wide, including from developing countries, as well as to an interested general public. </p>
<p>Access to and sharing of information, including scientific information, goes through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new communication and information technologies (ICTs) and the societal transformations that they generate. But what are the long-term strategies to efficiently harness the open access potential for developing new approaches to knowledge acquisition and sharing? What needs to be done to effectively integrate these strategies into forward looking and sustainable policy making? How can we harness the potential of open access to develop knowledge societies that are people-centred, inclusive and development oriented? What are the global environmental trends that will influence open access in the next few years? What are the main needs of the open access stakeholders in India and South Asia ? Which are the publishing models for open-access journals and what does it imply to finance and sustain open access journals in developing countries; how to overcome language and other barriers ? </p>
<p>These issues are of strategic relevance to UNESCO as they address key challenges linked to building knowledge societies, one of the overarching objectives of the Medium Term Strategy 2008-2013.</p>
<p>UNESCO, jointly with the Centre for Internet Society is well placed to mobilize interested stakeholders to develop efficient implementation strategies in the area of acquision and sharing of scientific information and to integrate them into forward looking and sustainable policies. </p>
<p>UNESCO believes that open access is an enriching part of the scholarly communication process that can and should co-exist with other forms of communication and publication, such as society-based publishing and conferencing activities. Open access publications are also more easily included and searchable in search engines and indexing databases.</p>
<p>In order to initiate a sub-regional dialogue on democratizing access to scientific and health-related information, on the economics of scientific publishing and the implications of the various open-access models and the copyright and intellectual property issues, UNESCO convenes a one day seminar on 16 March 2011 in New Delhi. The concept of « open access » and the inter-relationships between academic institutions, researchers, scientists and publishers will be examined, as well as the challenges and barriers which OA is currently facing in this part of the world. </p>
<h3>Overall objectives </h3>
<ul><li>Strengthen awareness of UNESCO’s stakeholders on the potential of open access in scientific knowledge sharing that are dramatically accelerated by ICTs; </li><li>Provide analysis for anticipating foreseeable trends end emerging challenges in order to enable Indian and South Asian stakeholders to develop strategies and policies to take them up;</li><li>Develop a partnership and collaboration among interested stakeholdesr in order to improve access to and sharing of scientific information and research through open access </li></ul>
<h3>Expected results </h3>
<div> </div>
<div>The discussion of the Open Access Seminar is expected to achieve the following results: </div>
<div>
<div>
<ul><li>UNESCO’s stakeholders enabled to understand trends and emerging challenges related to the impact of open access on scientific information acquisition and sharing; </li><li>Possible developments prospected in the area of scientific information sharing in the coming 5 years; </li><li>Specific technology generated trends, and their consequences for development in scientific information and research sharing </li><li>Highlight the collaborative and collective efforts and actions behind the Open Access movement</li><li>Discussions of best practices of Open Access Initiatives</li></ul>
</div>
<h3>Who should attend: </h3>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<ul><li>Science editors</li><li>Policy makers</li><li>Information professionals</li><li>Researchers </li><li>Open Access movement activists</li><li>Academics and all those interested in electronic publishing.</li></ul>
</div>
<h3>Terms of Reference:</h3>
</div>
<div><br />
<div>1) Initiatives within the open access movement (with focus on what all of this means for developing countries):</div>
<div>
<ul><li>discussion on the pros and cons of open access </li><li>different models used and paths to achieving open access to the health literature </li><li>research reports and open access </li><li>democratizing access to scientific and health-related information</li><li>economics of scientific publishing and implications of the various open-access models </li><li>copyright and intellectual property </li></ul>
</div>
<div>2) Open Access and the journals from developing countries</div>
<div>
<ul><li>what does it means to bring journals online </li><li>publishing models for open-access journals </li><li>financing and sustaining open access journals in developing countries </li><li>costs associated with open access in developing countries </li><li>language barriers and translation </li><li>training information specialists and users on searching and accessing health literature</li></ul>
<div> </div>
<div><em>This event is co-organised by UNESCO and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore</em></div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Download the agenda <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/open-access-agenda" class="internal-link" title="Agenda">here</a></div>
<div> </div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-06-09T12:41:22ZEventSecond 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 EntryResources
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources
<b>A collection of resources that will help one navigate through the arguments and evidence for and against the Indian "Bayh-Dole" bill.</b>
<p><u><strong><br /></strong></u></p>
<h2><strong>PUPFIP</strong></h2>
<h3>News-related/General Coverage</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/relook-at-publicfunded-r&d-bill-to-address-red-tape/376844/0">Relook at public-funded R&D Bill to
address red tape</a> (The Financial Express)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/12/01144901/CSIR-looks-at-commercializing.html">CSIR looks at commercializing, leasing
out patent</a> (Live Mint)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2008/02/exporting-bayh-dole-to-india-whither_21.html">Exporting Bayh-Dole to India: Whither Transparency Part II</a><span class="post-author"> (Shamnad Basheer)</span></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://ww.scidev.net/es/science-and-innovation-policy/intellectual-property/news/proyecto-de-ley-de-patentes-suscita-debate-en-la-i.html">Indian Patent Bill stirs debate among scientists</a> (Science and Development Network)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/legal.asp">Letter from the Knowledge Commission</a> (GoI)</p>
<h3>Scientific
Culture</h3>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.thehindu.com/delhi/?p=16251">Does Patenting research change the Culture of Science?</a> (The Hindu)</p>
<h3>Analytical Pieces<strong> </strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/indian-patent-bill-let-s-not-be-too-hasty.html">Indian Patent Bill: Lets not be too Hasty</a>(Shamnad Basheer)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2008/11/01001052/Not-in-public-interest.html">Not in public interest</a>(Live Mint)<a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/"><br /></a></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_6_128/ai_n32062853/">The Indian Public Funded IP Bill: Are we Ready?</a>(K. Satyanarayana)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>Bayh-Dole</strong></h2>
<h3>Technology
Transfer</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1476653">Innovation's Golden Goose </a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=10787664">Improving Innovation</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3><strong>Scientific
Culture</strong></h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-129366990.html">Patents and America's Universities</a>(The Economist)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/technology/07unbox.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print">When Academia Puts Profits Ahead of Wonder</a>(The New York Times)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_VPNSGGT">Bayhing for blood or Doling out cash?</a>(The Economist)</p>
<h3>Evaluative
Pieces</h3>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Thursby.pdf">University Licensing under Bayh-Dole: What are the Issues and
Evidence?</a>(Thursby and Thursby)</p>
<p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060262">Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US
Experience</a>(So et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272884/index.htm">The Law of Unintended Consequences</a>(Fortune Magazine)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V77-41NCXY8-6/2/fa828bbd7705f51ffd8fcf60338daf16">The Growth of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities and the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Mowery et al.)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5g.htm">Overall Assessment of the Bayh-Dole Act</a> (Nelson, Mowery, et al.)</p>
<p> </p>
<h2><strong>General Resources</strong></h2>
<p> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Joint Ventures and Intellectual Property</a>(Andreas Panagopoulos)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5c.htm">Patents vs. Other Knowledge Transfer</a>(Agrawal and Henderson)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5f.htm">Incentives Structure and Licensing Success</a>(Dan Elfenbein)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5e.htm">University Licensing and Research Behavior</a>(Lach and Schankerman)</p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2003_5b.htm">Open Science and Private Property</a>(Paul David)
<p> <strong><br /></strong></p>
<h2><strong>IP Alternatives</strong><br /></h2>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040293">New Approaches to Filling the Gap in TB Drug Discovery </a>(Casenghi, Cole and Nathan)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://keionline.org/misc-docs/Prizes/prize_tb_msf_expert_meeting.pdf">The Role of Prizes in Developing Low-Cost Point-of-Care Rapid Diagnostic Tests and Better Drugs for TB</a>(James Love)</p>
<p>How to boost R&D for essential drugs and diagnostics</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/333/7582/1279.pdf">Scrooge and intellectual property rights</a> (BMJ January 2006)</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/publications/pupfip/resources</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshBayh-DoleAccess to KnowledgeAccess to MedicineOpen AccessPublic AccountabilityOpen Innovation2009-10-20T03:29:16ZPageResearch Publishing: Is ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ Pragmatic Reform for India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india
<b>Anubha Sinha examines the feasibility of the proposed 'One Nation, One Subscription' approach in the draft national Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (2020) on access to scientific literature. This article was first published in The Wire Science on October 23, 2020.</b>
<p>The story of open access (OA) publishing in India has been a chequered
one. While we have had some progress with institutional initiatives, the
landscape remains fractured without a national OA mandate. And now <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4">some reports</a>
suggest that the Indian government is considering striking a ‘one
nation, one subscription’ deal with scholarly publishers for access to
paywalled research for all of India’s citizens. Only last year, India
had <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan/">decided against joining Plan S</a>. K. VijayRaghavan has been at the helm of these decisions, as the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India.</p>
<p>OA refers to the level of access different people have to a published
paper, like a scientific paper. Typically, a researcher submits their
manuscript to a journal to consider for publication. If the paper passes
peer-review, the journal publishes the paper in its pages, and online.
In the ‘conventional’ research publishing model, a reader who wishes to
read the paper pays a fee to the journal to do so. In the (gold) OA
model, the journal makes its money by having the researcher – or their
funder – pay to have their paper published.</p>
<p>While it is heartening to see the momentum towards settling on a
suitable OA approach, the ‘one nation, one subscription’ scheme is a
curious proposition for India. A consortium of Indian science academies
had <a href="http://insaindia.res.in/pdf/Publication_of_Literature.pdf">recommended it</a>
last year. The scheme entails the Government of India to negotiate for
and purchase a single, unified subscription from a consortium of
publishers of scientific books and journals, after which the books and
papers will be available to all government-funded institutions as well
as all tax-payers.</p>
<p>Around the world, this scheme has been implemented in Uruguay and Egypt,
while some European countries have adopted versions of it. Experts
around the world <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/03/06/plan-s-and-the-global-south-what-do-countries-in-the-global-south-stand-to-gain-from-signing-up-to-europes-open-access-strategy/">have suggested</a>
that the model could be a feasible interim solution for developing
countries. Note that both Egypt and Uruguay obtained financial
assistance from the World Bank to secure their deals.</p>
<p>In Uruguay, since 2009, citizens have enjoyed free access to (otherwise)
paywalled scientific and technological journals and platforms via the
online platform <a href="https://foco.timbo.org.uy/home">Portal Timbó</a>. However, some content remains <a href="https://gospin.unesco.org/frontend/full-info/view.php?id=1853&table=operational&action=search&order=general.country">available only</a> to scientific, academic, and educational institutions and researchers. The 2019 budget for Portal Timbó was <a href="https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Plan_S.pdf">$2.3 million</a> (Rs 16.94 crore).</p>
<p>Egypt launched its Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) initiative in 2015. EKB
provides a population of 92 million people access to journals, e-books
and archives from multiple publishers across the sciences, humanities
and cultural disciplines, and has certainly benefited society. However,
the question remains whether incurring an annual expense of <a href="https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/research_sites/cihe/pdf/Korber%20bk%20PDF.pdf">$64 million</a>,
in 2017 (Rs 416.47 crore), in subscription costs is justified. In both
Egypt and Uruguay, it is not clear if all material is readable
immediately upon publication or whether there is a delay.</p>
<p>So what could a ‘one nation, one subscription’ deal look like for India?</p>
<p>Currently, India spends <a href="https://thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan">Rs 1,500 crore a year</a>
to read research via journal subscriptions (about $205 million). So
while a shift to nationwide subscription could yield a low per capita
cost of access, our limited ICT infrastructure and digital divide remain
barriers to unlocking the full potential of the deal. It is equally
crucial to ensure that the deal covers <a href="https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/bitstream/handle/1912/4587/Cristiani%20PANEL_iamslic%202010.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">key journals and databases</a> – which may have to be negotiated with publishers with different types of collections across multiple disciplines.</p>
<p>Further, and perhaps more importantly, a nationwide subscription deal
will not solve for an uneven OA publishing culture among Indian
researchers. A <a href="https://thewire.in/the-sciences/plan-s-open-access-scientific-publishing-article-processing-charge-insa-k-vijayraghavan">rough calculation</a>
suggests India’s annual publishing spend is Rs 985 crore ($134.5
million), including article-processing charges (APCs) for both OA and
hybrid-OA journals (which have a mix of OA and ‘conventional’ publishing
policies). While a common national subscription could potentially lower
the cost of reading research, we don’t know if authors will still have
to pay APCs to publish their papers in publications covered by the deal.</p>
<p>Irrespective of how the deal plays out, the Indian research community is
currently divided over the issue of paying to publish. Some researchers
and disciplines argue that APCs should not be the basis for ruling out
publication in a journal – the choice should rather be balanced against
the journal’s disciplinary relevance and its ‘prestige’ factor (captured
in a controversial metric known as the <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/impact-factors-fail-in-evaluating-scientists-why-does-the-ugc-still-use-it/">journal impact factor</a>). In India, publishing charges are typically fronted by government grants and private funders, and it costs <a href="https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf">Rs 70,000</a> on average to publish in OA journals.</p>
<p>On the other hand, OA supporters and several institutional initiatives
advocate ‘green’ OA – which requires posting the preprint version of
papers in an open online repository, often immediately after
publication. It remains to be seen whether India will unanimously decide
to adopt green OA.</p>
<p>We also need to deliberate further as to what a nationwide subscription
would mean for the country’s and the world’s OA movement. While a ‘one
national, one subscription’ plan would appear to temporarily alleviate
the financial problem of access, how far can it really go towards
solving for legal and technical barriers of access? For example, the
reader may still not have legal permissions to reuse the article, or
reuse may be prevented technically by anti-copy measures. Or should we
brush these concerns aside since the deal is somewhat of an incremental
reform for India?</p>
<p>The OA movement was conceived to address global inequality in accessing
scientific research. Would India’s position and contribution to the
movement – as a large consumer and producer of scientific research – get
sidelined? It appears that the nationwide subscription deal could
feature in India’s upcoming ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Policy’
as well. Then, to address the gaps, it is necessary to add other policy
solutions to complement the deal’s impact. The goal for a national
science policy should be to create a sustainable, longer term
environment that improves the quality of access and production of
scientific research, and does so in alignment with the values of OA.</p>
<p>Access this article on The Wire Science <a class="external-link" href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/india-research-publishing-open-access-one-nation-one-subscription-k-vijayraghavan/">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-publishing-is-2018one-nation-one-subscription2019-pragmatic-reform-for-india</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2021-04-28T17:09:14ZBlog EntryResearch papers will be available in public domain
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 ItemQ&A on open access with Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore)
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam
<b>Amrit Dhir, a 1L at Harvard Law School, has been working with the Harvard Law School Library on open access activities. He recently had an opportunity to interview Subbiah Arunachalam of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The interview was published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University on May 5, 2011.</b>
<p><i>Thanks to the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/">HLS Library</a> for permitting us to share this Q&A!</i></p>
<p><b>Amrit Dhir</b>: What is your association with the Bangalore-based <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a> (CIS)?</p>
<p><b>Subbiah Arunachalam</b>: I am one of the founding members of the Board of the Centre for Internet and Society. Mr Sunil Abraham invited me to join and I agreed as I found the group to be a talented bunch of people much younger to me and interested in questions, the answers to which would be of interest to me.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What has been your involvement with the Open Access (OA) movement for the past ten years?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: For the past ten years, I have been literally breathing OA! I always believed that knowledge should be free and open, but my formal engagement with OA began in 2000. That was the year when Eugene Garfield, the well-known information scientist, turned 75. He has been a great influence in my life and so I wanted to celebrate his 75th birthday with a conference. Gene had written hundreds of essays and he had put all of them together in fifteen volumes (Essays of an Information Scientist). What is more, long before the formal movement for OA began, Gene had put all his essays - in fact, all his writings - up on the University of Pennsylvania website.</p>
<p>For the conference, I invited another friend of mine, Alan Gilchrist, Editor of Journal of Information Science, and a world leader in advancing knowledge about thesauri. For the second speaker I invited Stevan Harnad, as I had read his article on scholarly skywriting (which was included in Garfield's Essays). I was working as a volunteer at the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation whose main thrust was development, but my chairman Prof. M. S. Swaminathan helped me raise some funds. From then on I started dividing my time between development and promoting OA in India and the developing world. My prior experience as editor and publisher of science journals (at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Indian Academy of Sciences) was a great help. For one thing, I knew a large number of scientists and academics. For another, as I had no big official position I was free to make statements freely. And I took advantage of both.</p>
<p>In 2001, I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to convene a meeting of editors of Indian S&T journals and convince them of the advantage of their journals going electronic. About 50 editors were trained in two three-day workshops. One of them, Dr. D. K. Sahu is today the world's leading OA publisher who neither charges the authors nor the readers [<a class="external-link" href="http://www.medknow.com/">http://www.medknow.com</a>].</p>
<p>In 2005, the Open Society Institute (OSI) invited me to Toronto to plan a conference. I had proposed to bring scientists from India, Brazil and China and to promote OA in these three countries. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that if OA takes roots in these three countries then it would be easy to promote it in the rest of the developing world. The conference itself was held at the Indian Institute of Science in November 2006, with support from OSI and the Indian Academy of Sciences. It was at this conference, with the help of Barbara Kirsop and Alma Swan, that we produced the Bangalore Declaration, which could be used by governments and funding agencies in developing countries to mandate OA.</p>
<p>In January 2006, I organized a full session on OA as part of the Annual Science Congress held at Hyderabad. In 2008, I spoke to Prof. Samir Brahmachari, Director General of <a class="external-link" href="http://rdpp.csir.res.in/csir_acsir/Home.aspx?MenuId=1">CSIR</a> and convinced him of the need to adopt OA. He accepted the idea immediately and opened up all the sixteen journals published by CSIR's publishing arm, NISCAIR. I persuaded the Indian Academy of Sciences to set up a repository for all papers by all Fellows and currently the repository is getting ready and I expect it to be available online in July or August. The Academy took nearly four years, but I am glad it is finally happening.</p>
<p>I have groomed a number of young people to take up OA advocacy and implementation. In particular, Muthu Madhan (now at ICRISAT) has done well. He has helped six institutions set up their repositories. I took him along with me (CIS funded his trip) to the International Conference on Repositories in Amsterdam jointly organized by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jisc.ac.uk/">JISC</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.surf.nl/en/Pages/home.aspx">SURF</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>I have written about OA both on my own and in coauthorship with Peter Suber, Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan. I have given interviews to key outlets and spoken at many national and international conferences including two A2K conferences organized by Yale University, several Berlin conferences, and the ICSU-UNESCO conference where I was one of two keynote speakers.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What is the potential of OA, and what makes it unique to India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: OA has tremendous potential not only to India, but to the world as a whole. But its value to developing countries is much greater than to advanced countries, because the serials crisis and the access to knowledge problems are felt far more acutely in developing countries. Currently higher education and R&D (Research and Development) are in an unprecedented expansion phase and therefore we would need huge investments to meet information needs if only traditional methods of access were available to us. As large publishing corporations are raising subscription costs year after year at an unacceptably high rate, Indian researchers and students would benefit if more and more scientists in the West were to make their work OA.</p>
<p>There is nothing unique about OA in India. Whatever applies to India applies to the larger developing countries (China and Brazil, South Africa). That is why I believe these four countries should work together in promoting OA.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What do you see as the future of the OA movement in India?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: As far as India is concerned, currently, a higher proportion of Indian work (12.5%) appears in OA journals than the world average (estimated to be between 8.5 and 10%). The two major Academies and CSIR in favor of OA. I and others are trying to persuade other funding agencies and research councils to adopt OA. It is a question of time before OA becomes accepted by at least some of the leading institutions. There are about 40 active repositories, but the number has started increasing.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: What are the impediments to realizing that future? Are there any legal concerns or legal obstacles that you anticipate approaching?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: There are no impediments. At least I do not see any. You may then ask why the progress is slow. It is largely because of author inertia and general ignorance. Yes, ignorance. Not many scientists really know about what is possible and what is not possible with regard to depositing their papers in a repository. They are needlessly afraid of copyright infringements. Thus all the 'impediments' are imaginary!</p>
<p>When it comes to journals, it is easy. We publish the journals and we decide if we want to be closed or open. MedKnow publishes 150 journals, of which 148 are open. All 11 journals of the Indian Academy are open. Even when they entered into an agreement with Springer [Publishing], they retained the right to keep all of them open on their site!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you compare the institutional openness of India and the US to the potential and needs of OA?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: I have already explained why I believe OA is far more important to developing countries. But even in the West, the serials crisis is forcing librarians to adopt OA. In the West, prestigious institutions such as Harvard, MIT, NIH, Wellcome Trust, RCUK (Research Councils UK), have adopted OA and that has made a big difference. Now the US Congress is considering the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act). Eventually, all institutions will have to adopt OA.</p>
<p>There is one advantage of institutions in the developing countries adopting OA that may be missed by many. Often research done in the South in problems like SARS, tsunami, HIV/AIDS, climate change will be of global relevance. These issues do not know any national boundaries.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: You have spoken of a social mission and a human-rights-based justification for supporting greater OA, particularly with regard to the hard sciences and scientific research. What is the relationship between justice and OA, both on an international scale and as it relates to India more specifically?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: A very good question. When Kofi Annan was heading the United Nations, it came up with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On top of the list was poverty alleviation. What use is all the science that we do if fellow human beings are unable to even buy food and keep dying of hunger and malnutrition? This is the basis for the argument on opening up of scientific knowledge as an issue of justice. In India, the government has invested millions on R&D in atomic energy, space science, new biology and biotechnology and so on, and yet more than 60 years after we had became a Republic, poverty is rampant, the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and both the number of billionaires and the number of people below the poverty line are increasing every year. All our science and technology have not ensured basic necessities for the poor. We do not use what we know, and what we know is not known widely.</p>
<p>In an excellent article “The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector” in 22 Quarterly Journal of Economics 879 (2007), Robert Jensen of Harvard's Kennedy School used the example of how the introduction of mobile phones in coastal areas of Kerala opened up information and brought many benefits to the community as a whole and not just to fishing families.</p>
<p>There is another angle to the urgent need to reduce poverty, viz. the security angle. Two years ago, I was invited to write a short essay on information and livelihood and I began my essay with these words: "We live in a divided world where far too many people live in abject poverty. To help these people get out of poverty is good for the world as a whole, for great disparities in wealth will lead to violence and terrorism and no one can live in peace and harmony."</p>
<p>There is yet another issue. This is related to drugs and pharmaceuticals. Many pharma companies do not want to bring to market products from their latest research because the previous products are still doing well. Profit is the motive, and it trumps public good. Also, Western pharma companies send out scouts to the old world and learn from local wisdom the medicinal value of plants and herbs and take advantage but without sharing the profits with the local people. A clear case of the North exploiting the knowledge of the South. And yet their own drugs are all under patent protection!</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: Some see Indian civil society and even Indian government insisting on greater transparency and access to information, with such movements as the one behind the Right to Information (RTI) Act as an example. Are you optimistic about such efforts at governmental and legal reform? And, how does it relate to your work and the broader objectives you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: About two years ago, the Department of Biotechnology entered into a partnership with the Wellcome Trust. The was born with a view to providing generous fellowships to scientists at three stages of their careers. One of the features was that all papers published by these Fellows have to be OA. The Minister for science and technology (Mr Kapil Sibal at that time) announced this proudly. I wrote him that he should also make OA all papers by scientists receiving grants from DBT, but he did not bother to reply. There is a lot of political doublespeak. I also wrote to Members of Parliament belonging to all the major parties suggesting that they consider legislation similar to the one which brought OA to all NIH-funded research in the US. No one replied. The RTI Act and the recent happenings on the corruption front (the government yielding to the request of Gandhian Anna Hazare) are indeed very good. And I believe one day the need for OA will be recognized as important and worthy of legal status. But one may also achieve a lot through bottom-up approaches by talking to individual institutions, universities and scientists.</p>
<p>I am not losing hope. I will keep making my requests until OA is accepted as the norm.</p>
<p><b>AD</b>: How would you call upon American universities and institutes to act or reform in light of the OA measures you advocate?</p>
<p><b>SA</b>: The larger the number of American universities, research institutions and funding agencies adopting OA, the better it would be for us, as we would have more papers in the open domain. More than that, we could cite their example and convince Indian institutions to adopt OA.</p>
<div class="pullquote">Read the original interview published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society <a class="external-link" href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6825">here</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/an-interview-with-prof-arunachalam</a>
</p>
No publishersubbiahInterviewOpen Access2023-11-01T12:41:47ZBlog EntryPrivacy vs. Transparency: An Attempt at Resolving the Dichotomy
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency
<b>The right to privacy has been articulated in international law and in some national laws. In a few countries where the constitution does not explicitly guarantee such a right, courts have read the right to privacy into other rights (e.g., the right to life, the right to equal treatment under law and also the right to freedom of speech and expression).</b>
<hr />
<p><i>With feedback and inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Geetha Hariharan</i>. I would like to apologize for not providing proper citation to Julian Assange when the first version of this blog entry was published. I would also like to thank Micah Sifry for drawing this failure to his attention. The blog post originally published by Omidyar Network <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openup2014.org/privacy-vs-transparency-attempt-resolving-dichotomy/">can be read here</a>. Also see <a class="external-link" href="http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/">http://newint.org/features/2015/01/01/privacy-transparency/</a></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In other countries where privacy is not yet an explicit or implicit right, harm to the individual is mitigated using older confidentiality or secrecy law. After the Snowden affair, the rise of social media and the sharing economy, some corporations and governments would like us to believe that “privacy is dead”. Privacy should not and cannot be dead, because that would mean that security is also dead. This is indeed the most dangerous consequence of total surveillance as it is technically impossible to architect a secure information system without privacy as a precondition. And conversely, it is impossible to guarantee privacy without security as a precondition.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The right to transparency [also known as the right to information or access to information] – while unavailable in international law – is increasingly available in national law. Over the last twenty years this right has become encoded in national laws – and across the world it is being used to hold government accountable and to balance the power asymmetry between states and citizens. Independent and autonomous offices of transparency regulators have been established. Apart from increasing government transparency, corporations are also increasingly required to be transparent as part of generic or industry specific regulation in the public interest. For instance, India’s Companies Act, 2013, requires greater transparency from the private sector. Other areas of human endeavor such as science and development are also becoming increasingly transparent though here it is still left up to self-regulation and there isn’t as much established law. Within science and research more generally, the rise of open data accompanied the growth of the Open Access and citizen science movement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So the question before us is: Are these two rights – the right to transparency and the right to privacy – compatible? Is it a zero-sum game? Do we have to sacrifice one right to enforce the other? Unfortunately, many privacy and transparency activists think this is the case and this has resulted in some conflict. I suggest that these rights are completely compatible when it comes to addressing the question of power. These rights do not have to be balanced against one another. There is no need to settle for a sub-optimal solution. <b>Rather this is an optimization problem and the solution is as follows: privacy protections must be inversely proportionate to power and as Julian Assange says transparency requirements should be directly proportionate to power.</b><a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In most privacy laws, the public interest is an exception to privacy. If public interest is being undermined, then an individual privacy can be infringed upon by the state, by researchers, by the media, etc. And in transparency law, privacy is the exception. If the privacy of an individual can be infringed, transparency is not required unless it is in the public interest. In other words, the “public interest” test allows us to use privacy law and transparency law to address power asymmetries rather than exacerbate them. What constitutes “public interest” is of course left to courts, privacy regulators, and transparency regulators to decide. Like privacy, there are many other exceptions in any given transparency regime including confidentiality and secrecy. Given uneven quality of case law there will be a temptation by the corrupt to conflate exceptions. Here the old common-law principle of “there is no confidence as to the disclosure of iniquity” – which prevents confidentiality law from being used to cover malfeasance or illegality – can be adopted in appropriate jurisdictions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Around 10 years ago, the transparency movement gave birth to yet another movement – the open government data movement. The tension between privacy and transparency is most clearly seen in the open government data movement. The open government data movement in some parts of the world is dominated by ahistorical and apolitical technologists, and some of them seem intent on reinventing the wheel. In India, ever since the enactment of the Right to Information Act, 2003, 30 transparency activists are either killed, beaten or criminally intimidated every year. This is the statistic from media coverage alone. Many more silently suffer. RTI or transparency is without a doubt one of the most dangerous sectors within civil society that you could choose to work in. In contrast, not a single open data activist has ever been killed, beaten or criminally intimidated. I suspect this is because open data activists do not sufficiently challenge power hierarchies. Let us look a little bit closely at their work cycle. When a traditional transparency activist asks a question, that is usually enough to get them into trouble. When an open data activist publishes an answer [a dataset nicely scrubbed and machine readable, or a visualization, or a tool] they are often frustrated because nobody seems interested in using it. Often even the activist is unclear what the question is. This is because open data activist works where data is available. Open data activists are obsessed with big datasets, which are easier to find at the bottom of the pyramid. They contribute to growing surveillance practices [the nexus between Internet giants, states, and the security establishment] rather that focusing on sousveillance [citizen surveillance of the state, also referred to as citizen undersight or inverse surveillance]. They seem to be obsessed only with tools and technologies, rather than power asymmetries and injustices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, a case study to make my argument easier to understand – Aadhaar or UID, India’s ambitious centralized biometric identity and authentication management system. There are many serious issues with its centralized topology, proprietary technology, and dependence on biometrics as authentication factors – all of which I have written about in the past. In this article, I will explain how my optimization solution can be applied to the project to make it more effective in addressing its primary problem statement that corruption is a necessary outcome of power asymmetries in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In its current avatar – the Aadhaar project hopes to assign biometric-based identities to all citizens. The hope is that, by doing authentication in the last mile, corruption within India’s massive subsidy programmes will be reduced. This, in my view, might marginally reduce retail corruption at the bottom of the pyramid. It will do nothing to address wholesale corruption that occurs as subsidies travel from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. I have advocated over the last two years that we should abandon trying to issue biometric identities to all citizens, thereby making them more transparent to the state. Let us instead issue Aadhaar numbers to all politicians and bureaucrats and instead make the state more transparent to citizens. There is no public interest in reducing privacy for ordinary citizens – the powerless – but there are definitely huge public interest benefits to be secured by increasing transparency of politicians and bureaucrats, who are the powerful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government has recently introduced a biometric-based attendance system for all bureaucrats and has created a portal that allows Indian citizens to track if their bureaucrats are arriving late or leaving early. This unfortunately is just bean counting [for being corrupt and being punctual are not mutually exclusive] and public access to the national portal was turned off because of legitimate protests from some of the bureaucrats. What bureaucrats do in office, who they meet, and which documents they process is more important than when they arrive at or depart from work. The increased transparency or reduced privacy was not contributing to the public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Instead of first going after small-ticket corruption at the bottom of the pyramid, maximization of public interest requires us to focus on the top, for there is much greater ROI for the anti-corruption rupee. For example: constructing a digital signature based on audit trails that track all funds and subsidies as they move up and down the pyramid. These audit trails must be made public so that ordinary villagers can be supported by open data activists, journalists, social entrepreneurs, and traditional civil society in verification and course correction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I hope open data activists, data scientists, and big data experts will draw inspiration from the giants of the transparency movement in India. I hope they will turn their attention to power, examine power asymmetries and then ask how the Aadhaar project can be leveraged to make India more rather than less equal.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Videos</h3>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights</p>
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<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tDf8TFjxqiQ" width="560"></iframe></td>
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<td><b>Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector</b></td>
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<td><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lPHWkYZjqzo" width="560"></iframe></td>
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</tbody>
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<p>The videos can also be watched on Vimeo:</p>
<ol>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/111729069">Open Up? 2014: Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security, and Human Rights </a></li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/111748146">Open Up? 2014: Data Collection and Sharing: Transparency and the Private Sector </a></li>
</ol>
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<p>[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>].<a class="external-link" href="http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks">http://prospect.org/article/real-significance-wikileaks</a> “Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has.”</p>
<p>Read the presentation on Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy made at the Pecha Kucha session <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/risky-business.odp" class="internal-link">here</a>. (ODP File, 35 kb)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and positions expressed by the author(s) of this blog are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of Omidyar Network. We make no representations as to accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of any information presented by individual authors of the blogs and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries or damages arising from its display or use.</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/privacy-v-transparency</a>
</p>
No publishersunilPrivacyFeaturedVideoAadhaarOpennessOpen Access2015-03-08T06:26:21ZBlog EntryPanel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge
<b>Pranesh Prakash was a panelist and moderator in a panel discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge on October 23, 2018 at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The event was hosted by DST Centre for Policy Research (IISc), Bangalore.</b>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy3_of_FB.png/@@images/7840cc15-fc34-412c-8b60-196d35cb4009.png" alt="FB" class="image-inline" title="FB" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Open Access seeks to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose: to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not prevent students, researchers (or anyone) from getting access to research they need. Open Access, and the open availability and searchability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the practice of medicine to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.</span></p>
<h3><span>Panelists</span></h3>
<ul>
<li><span><span>Arul George Scaria - National Law University, Delhi</span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Carl Malamud - <a href="http://Public.Resource.Org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Public.Resource.Org</a> <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Pranesh Prakash (Moderator) - Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Richard Poynder - Journalist (covering OA movement around the world) <br /></span></span></li>
<li><span><span>S Nayana Tara - Indian Institute of Management Bangalore</span></span></li>
<li><span><span>Shahid Jameel - Welcome Trust DBT India Alliance </span></span></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>This event was a part of International Open Access week activities planned at IISc Bangalore, organized by DST-Centre for Policy Research at IISc in association with National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Karnataka State Library Association (KALA), JRD Tata Memorial Library, Science Policy Group (SPG) and International Scientific and Technological Education Program (i-STEP).</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>Read more about the event on <a class="external-link" href="https://www.facebook.com/events/174784246787715/">Facebook page</a><br /></span></span></span></p>
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<p> </p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iH_kjoFRjAQ" width="500"></iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/panel-discussion-on-equitable-access-to-knowledge</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen Access2019-02-22T15:32:46ZNews Item