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Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models
<b>Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.</b>
<p>Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/multimedia/archive/00929/Open_Access_929199a.pdf">Download the PDF</a></p>
<p>But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.</p>
<p>Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals. </p>
<h3>Boycott <br /></h3>
<p>Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. <br /><br />"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers. <br /><br />India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free. <br /><br />Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate. <br /><br />Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable. </p>
<h3>Trustworthy</h3>
<p>The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article2910344.ece">Read the article in Hindu</a>. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2012-02-23T09:12:10ZNews ItemWikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session
<b>On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a>'s <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge</a> team was invited to demonstrate the usefulness of Wikipedia for the consultants of <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nic.in/">National Informatics Centre</a> (NIC) working for the <a class="external-link" href="http://data.gov.in/">Data.gov.in</a> and the <a class="external-link" href="http://india.gov.in/">National Portal of India</a> at NIC's New Delhi office. Data portal being one of the very important open data portal of the Government of India has worked immensely to populate over 2400 datasets from 32 departments participating in it.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many of the data need to be transcribed in popular medias especially on web. Wikipedia being world's largest online encyclopedia could be one such primary platform to use these useful data. <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish">Subhashish</a> from A2K team explained the usefulness of Wikipedia for the people associated with this project. The session went with discussing about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_policies">policies</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style">Manual of style</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars">Five pillars of Wikipedia</a> followed by a demonstration of editing articles on English Wikipedia. Post editing session there was a discussion session about the notability and how to check accuracy of articles by using valid references.</p>
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<p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/11DMH5w">http://bit.ly/11DMH5w</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session</a>
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No publishersubhaOpen StandardsDigital GovernanceDigital AccessOpen DataOpen ContentOpen AccessOpennessOpen Innovation2013-07-17T06:33:20ZBlog EntryWhy Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up
<b>In an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://thewire.in/72286/open-access-academic-publishing/">published in the Wire</a> on October 12, 2016.</p>
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<p><span>“…</span><i><span>if you are a member of the knowledge elite, then there is free access, but for the rest of the world, not so much … Publisher restrictions do not achieve the objective of enlightenment, but rather the reality of ‘elite-nment.” </span></i><span>Lawrence Lessig</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In 2011, </span><span>speaking impassionately</span> <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/1345337" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="to an audience at CERN"><span>to an audience at CERN</span></a><span> – one of the world’s largest institutions for nuclear physics research, headquartered in Geneva – Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a political activist, highlighted the crisis of access to scientific scholarship. Indeed, over the last six decades, public access to scholarly works has diminished. Works that can be freely searched and read represent only a sliver of the entire wealth of human knowledge. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>With the emergence of academic journals in the seventeenth century, the practice of exchanging manuscripts for review and comments became popular, leading to the establishment of the peer-review system. In fact, until the eighteenth century, there existed a strong belief in the intellectual commons and traditions of sharing knowledge between scholars. These traditions dated back to scholarship flourishing in ancient Greece. Open access was the default, and not the exception to the norm.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, by the nineteenth century, there occurred a game-changing shift in the approach to knowledge production. It was theorised that the commons approach was inefficient and that knowledge needed to be exclusively owned to spur further production. This was in line with the incentive theory of copyright law, which was an added justification to the commoditisation of knowledge. In such circumstances, all scholarly works increasingly came to be fortified within the expensive walls of academic journals. Journals left no stone unturned to capitalise on scholars vying to get published in prestigious titles (<i>Nature</i>, <i>Lancet</i>, <i>Cell</i>, etc.).</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The business model rarely rewarded authors or peer reviewers. On the contrary, some journals required authors to pay a considerable fee to publish their work. Subscription charges to such research, a large part of which was funded by the government (i.e. taxpayers), hit the roof and could be afforded only by elite institutions. And with the advent of the digital age, the fortresses moved online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>However, before the internet arrived, there had been efforts to counter the entrenchment of scholarly works. They were mostly in the nature of social movements, located broadly within the philosophical umbrella of openness. The nineties marked a significant increase in the modes of access, through devices connected to the internet. Previously a fringe movement, openness was now entering the realms of publishing, software, standards development, education and data. It manifested in Linux, Wikipedia, open web standards, open educational resources, open government data, Creative Commons and, particularly, open access publishing. Just last month, a UN report called for open access to research to improve public health. </span></span></p>
<p><span>Open access publishing was a breakaway from the traditional scholarly publishing model. It offered a different model of </span><i><span>online</span></i><span> research publication informed by the principles of transparency, free access and unrestricted access. </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="Three key definitions"><span>Three key definitions</span></a><span> exist, and the </span><span>Budapest Open Access Initiative</span><span> (2002) provides <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="a good overview">a good overview</a> of it:</span></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; "><span><span>There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, open access is </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/writing/jbiol.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="compatible"><span>compatible</span></a><span> with </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#copyright" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="copyright"><span>copyright</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#peerreview" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="peer review"><span>peer review</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm#journals" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="revenue"><span>revenue</span></a><span> (even profit), print, preservation, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322577" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="prestige"><span>prestige</span></a><span>, </span><a href="http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4552042" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="quality"><span>quality</span></a><span>, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature</span><span> (as Peter Suber </span><span><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="wrote">wrote</a> in</span><span> 2004). The model broadly offers two routes: gold and green. Gold open access involves publication in an open access journal. The journal provides for peer-review, retention of copyright by the author and in most cases requires author-side fees. Green open access involves publishing a work in an online repository, with/without peer-review. The models have several variations, and adoption often depends on their suitability for a particular discipline. Many </span><span>institutions <a href="http://sparcopen.org/coapi/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="now have">now have</a> an</span> <span>Open Access Mandate policy</span><span>. </span></p>
<h3><span>Latest challenges to open access publishing</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>For a 15-year-old movement (formally), open access publishing is making a serious dent in the market for scholarly publications. It has emerged as a formidable competitor to the traditional model. How else do you explain the </span><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="unfortunate acquisition"><span>unfortunate acquisition</span></a><span> of SSRN –</span><span> one of the largest online open access repositories – by the largest publisher of academic journals, Elsevier, earlier this year? Where, within a few days of Elsevier gaining control, </span><span>users began to notice</span> <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/02211935003/just-as-open-competitor-to-elseviers-ssrn-launches-ssrn-accused-copyright-crackdown.shtml" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="problematic takedowns"><span>problematic takedowns</span></a><span> of articles on SSRN.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The acquisition was a severe blow to open access publishing. To be fair, there remain certain issues intrinsic to open access publishing models that need urgent resolution. For instance, while some open access journals provide high quality services at levels comparable to that of paywalled journals, a large majority has been unable to reach reasonable standards of publication.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Further, as it has emerged lately, many are yet to crack the business model while a few are driven by malicious attempts to con authors. Most commercial open access publishers have resorted to a system of levying from the authors an article-processing charge (APC). These publishers include large players such as the <i>Public Library of Science</i> journals and BioMed Central. APCs are justified as necessary costs for publication. Thus, sometimes they are reasonably applied only to peer-reviewed submissions. However, sometimes they are blatantly misused by publishers who quote exorbitant APCs. As a result, APCs have become a serious concern for the academic community, with the reentry of an undesirable price barrier which has shifted the burden from the reader to the author.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>In one noteworthy development, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint against the OMICS group for deceiving authors and misrepresenting its editorial quality. The OMICS group has its roots in Hyderabad and runs a multitude of open access journals. It carried a notorious reputation for soliciting articles profusely, and then holding the articles hostage unless the authors paid hefty fees for their publication. It apparently charged the fees for conducting peer-review, which as this </span><span>harrowing</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="account"><span>account</span></a><span> of an author</span><span> reveals, was an utter sham. It also seems that the group targeted unsuspecting scholars from developing countries, where there was a higher concentration of early-career researchers eager to get their works published.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Holding articles hostage and releasing unchecked versions must have already caused irreparable damage to several researchers’ reputations. In this day of web-caching and -indexing facilities, one wonders if the researchers will ever be able to obliterate linkages to their unchecked manuscripts. Further, in the long run, this phenomenon will ruin or suppress promising careers – especially from developing countries. As a result, the present </span><span>lack of diversity in top-rung academia</span> <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ftc-cracking-predatory-science-journals/" rel="external nofollow" target="_blank" title="may not be eliminated"><span>may not be eliminated</span></a><span> for a long time.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Such harmful, predatory practices have not escaped the FTC’s notice, and it has stated that it will pursue cases of similar nature to protect authors and consumers. This is the first time in the world when a governmental authority has taken cognisance of predatory practices in OA publishing. This will hopefully lead to an appropriate cleansing effect of the players in this field, and enhance the credibility of open access journals.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Thus, self-regulation and standard-setting remains an area for improvisation in the open access publishing community. At the cusp of the movement, proposed structures were mired in legal and economic arguments. It is yet to overcome the challenge of economic sustainability and mature into a stable as well as replicable business model. The movement will be celebrating the Open Access Week for the ninth year later this month. It has gifted scholars immeasurably and lent itself to the progress of science and arts. Here’s hoping the community will iron out the remaining challenges to further strengthen the movement soon. <br /></span></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/the-wire-anubha-sinha-october-12-2016-why-open-access-has-to-look-up-for-academic-publishing-to-look-up</a>
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No publishersinhaOpennessOpen Access2016-10-12T16:22:10ZBlog EntryWhy Do We Need Open Access to Science?: A Developing Country Perspective
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science
<b>Prof. Arunachalam's paper presented at the A2k3 conference in Geneva.</b>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science</a>
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No publisheradminOpen Access2008-10-11T09:45:01ZFileWhat Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india
<b>The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.</b>
<p>This was published by <a class="external-link" href="https://yourstory.com/2016/10/indian-language-wikipedia/">Your Story</a> on October 20, 2016.</p>
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<h3>State of Indian languages on the internet</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind <a href="https://blog.smc.org.in/policy-brief-mobile-indian-lang/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">mentioned</a> that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/price-war-idea-vodafone-and-bharti-airtel-to-slash-tariffs-to-compete-with-reliance-jio/articleshow/53971250.cms" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">declining data charges</a> because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in <a href="http://qz.com/56259/language-is-the-key-to-winning-indias-mobile-market/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rural India</a> is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over <a href="https://yourstory.com/2015/11/news-aggregators-vernacular/" target="_blank">90 percent of the users</a> being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Why open access is important for Indian languages?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://legacy.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/overview.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open access</a>, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-access-publishing-science-paywall-immoral" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paywalled</a>, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Creative Commons licenses</a> and <a href="https://opensource.com/education/16/8/3-copyright-tips-students-and-educators" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">several other licenses</a> that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/List_of_Indian_language_wiki_projects" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">23 Indian language Wikipedias</a>, including newest entrants like <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Konkani</a> and <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/08/24/digest-tulu-wikipedia/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tulu</a>. That said, these projects are growing with more and more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_encyclopedia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">encyclopedic content</a> written with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">neutral point of view</a>, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Open_Textbook_of_Medicine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">people’s encyclopedia</a> and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Open_Textbook_of_Medicine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Textbook of Medicine</a> ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Members" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">group of dedicated volunteer</a> medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.in/subhashish-panigrahi-/8-challenges-in-growing-indian-language-wikipedias/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">list of challenges</a> to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_community" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikipedia community</a> has created an ecosystem by having several <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikimedia_chapters" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia chapters</a> and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">other affiliates</a> that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia Foundation</a>, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, <a href="http://wiki.wikimedia.in/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wikimedia India</a>, Centre for Internet and Society’s <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Access to Knowledge program</a> (CIS-A2K) and <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Wikimedians" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Punjabi Wikimedians</a> are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the <a href="http://openaccessweek.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Access Week</a>—a week dedicated for promoting <a href="https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-access" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open Access</a> globally—around the corner with “<a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/theme-of-2016-international-open-access-week-to-be-open-in-action" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open in Action</a>” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india</a>
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No publishersubhaCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpen Access2016-10-22T04:12:40ZBlog EntryUse made of Open Access Journals by Indian Researchers to Publish their Findings
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings
<b>Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) ournals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><span class="person_name">Muthu, Madhan</span> and <span class="person_name">Subbiah, Arunachalam</span> (2011) <em>Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings.</em> Current Science, 100 (9). pp. 1297-1306.</strong><strong> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-of-open-access-journals-for-publishing-findings" class="internal-link">Download the full research paper</a></strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">How aware are Indian researchers of open access (OA) and its advantages 10 years after Stevan Harnad<a name="fr1"></a> visited India and spoke about the need for adopting OA archiving? To answer this question, we looked at India’s participation in both OA institutional archiving and Indian researchers using OA journals to publish their findings. In this article, our emphasis is on the use made of selected high impact OA journals, particularly Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crytallographica Section E, the three leading publishers of open access papers in terms of number of papers published annually.<a name="fr2"></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Registry of Open Access Repository (ROAR)<a name="fr3"></a> lists 2,047 repositories (data gathered on 17 December) of which 59 are from India. Included in the 59 repositories are the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) journals repository, the Institute of Integrative Omics and Applied Biotechnology Journal repository and repetitive entries of five institutional repositories, viz. EPrints@CMFRI, EPrints@IIMK, EPrints@MKU, repository of INFLIBNET and the repository at the Cochin University of Science and Technology. Many Indian repositories listed in ROAR are inactive. There are at least five other Indian repositories not listed in ROAR, viz. Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, and Vidyanidhi, Mysore, both repositories of theses; International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Ministry of Earth Sciences and SARAI. In all, there are 33 OA repositories in India which include 24 institutional repositories, 4 subject repositories and 5 dedicated theses and dissertation repositories. The quality of tese repositories varies widely as well as their maintenance. Considering that there are more than 450 universities and several hundred research laboratories in the government, corporate and the non-government sectors, one would expect a very large number of institutional repositories in India. Furthermore, many of these repositories are not filling fast enough.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Out of the 5,897 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or DOAJ (data accessed on 17 December 2010)<a name="fr4"></a> 276 are from India. Another database, Open J-Gate 5 , developed by the Bangalore-based Informatics India, lists 7,967 OA periodicals worldwide which include 4,773 peer-reviewed journals including 339 peer-reviewed Indian journals (Figure 1). There are a few other Indian OA journals which are yet to be listed in DOAJ and indexed in Open J-Gate. For example, two journals published by the Indian National Science Academy (Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy) and two journals published by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences) are neither indexed in Open J-Gate nor listed in DOAJ. DOAJ does not index Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources (formerly known as Natural Product Radiance), published by NISCAIR. In all, there are more than 360 Indian OA journals. Needless to say a vast majority of papers, published in the Indian OA journals, are mostly written by Indian researchers. Incidentally, two Indian journal publishers, viz. Indian Academy of Sciences and MedKnow Publications figure in the top 14 OA journal publishers in the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) survey. <a name="fr5"></a> Our focus here is papers published by Indian researchers in high-impact OA journals published outside India. We chose all seven journals published by PLoS, 10 BMC journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. We gathered data from the Science Citation Index – Expanded section of Web of Science between 11 and 29 December 2010. Countries were assigned to papers based on addresses in the by-line. If three authors then the paper was assigned to all three countries. Therefore, the sum of papers from different countries will be far more than the actual number of papers indexed in Web of Science.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Results</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>BioMed Central Journals</strong><br />BioMed Central, established in May 2000, is the world’s leading OA publisher<a name="fr6"></a> in the fields of medical research and biology and publishes 208 OA journals as noted on 28 December 2010. Not all of them commenced publication at the same time, not even the same year. Different journals started publication in different years. So far these journals together have published 99,717 articles, including 83,893 original research papers and 15,824 other types of articles (Table 1). Indian researchers have published 1,872 original research papers and 92 other types of articles (such as review articles) in these 208 journals. To see India’s record in perspective, we have provided data for 11 other countries. These include the other three BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China), South Korea and Israel, both of which have scientific enterprises comparable in size to that of India, and six advanced countries. USA stands out with close to 29,300 papers, followed by Great Britain (9,464 papers) and Germany (9,340 papers). China is way ahead of other BASIC countries, and India is ahead of Israel, Korea and South Africa in the number of papers published. Brazil is ahead of India in total number of papers but falls behind in the number of original research papers. It will be interesting to see why researchers from Brazil publish such a large number of review articles.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of these 208 journals, only 77 have been listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2009 and assigned an impact factor. (For a journal to get indexed in JCR it should have been in existence for longer than two years). We list in Table 2 those journals with impact factor greater than 4.000. Among BMC journals, Genome Biology has the highest impact factor (6.626). Other high impact factor journals are Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases (5.825), BMC Biology (5.636) and Breast Cancer Research (5.326). The following nine journals have published more than 2,000 papers so far (since they became OA journals): BMC Bioinformatics (4,078), BMC Genomics (3,204), Critical Care (2,787), BMC Public Health (2,580), Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica (2,575), BMC Cancer (2,344), Arthritis Research and Therapy (2,286), Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research (2,255) and Genome Biology (2,069). Ten journals have published more than 1000 papers but less than 2000. Four journals have published less than 100 papers. Five journals have citations per paper (CPP) higher than 10. These are Genome Biology (18.35), Veterinary Research (12.27), Genetics Selection Evolution (11.71), Respiratory Research (11.03) and Breast Cancer Research (10.33).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The number of papers published by authors in India in 10 BMC journals during 2003–2010 (data gathered on 13December 2010), the number of citations to these papers and cites/papers are provided in Table 3. To see the Indian papers in perspective, we have also given the total number of papers published in these 10 journals during the same period, number of citations received by them and the average number of citations per paper (CPP) as well as similar data for 11 other selected countries including five scientifically middle-level countries and six advanced countries. A quick look at the table reveals that there is a perceptible difference between the middle-level countries and the advanced countries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers have published 4.53% of the papers that have appeared in Malaria Journal, 2.49% of papers appearing in BMC Genomics, 1.77% of papers appearing BMC Public Health, 1.7% of papers appearing in BMC Bioinformatics, and 1.61% of papers appearing in BMC Evolutionary Biology. India’s participation in the other five journals is rather meagre. Looking at CPP, Indian contributions in nine of the ten journals have a lower CPP than the world papers. Year after year, Thomson Reuters’s ScienceWatch has shown that Indian research papers on an average have been cited less often than world papers in every field<a name="fr7"></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But Indian papers in BMC Public Health have been cited on average 7.45 times compared to the world average of 5.59 CPP. This is rare and the researchers responsible for this deserve to be congratulated. It will be worth examining if India’s performance in public health research is of a higher class overall than research in other areas of medicine. The number of papers from China in BMC journals accounts for a much larger per cent than papers from India. For example, papers from China account for 10.0% in BMC Cancer, 7.75% in BMC Genomics, 5.74% in BMC Bioinformatics and 5.41% in BMC Evolutionary Biology. This is to be expected, as China is second only to USA in the number of papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and publishes more than three times the number of papers as India. Except in Breast Cancer Research, in which journal China publishes about 1% of papers, in all other journals, China’s CPP value is less than the journal average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although Brazil publishes fewer papers than India, it has an enviable CPP record in at least five journals considered here: Arthritis Research and Therapy (15.88; journal average 8.64), Genome Biology (23.43; journal average 22.50), Critical Care (11.96; journal average 8.23), Breast Cancer Research (10.71; journal average 8.52) and BMC Public Health (6.54; journal average 5.59). Israel, a small country with only a few research institutions and universities, has published fewer papers, but has a CPP higher than the journal average in seven of the ten journals. South Korea has a higher CPP for its papers in Arthritis Research and Therapy than the journal average.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Except for BMC Public Health, in all the other journals USA accounts for not less than 25% of papers and in some well over 40%. Also, in each of the 10 journals, USA has recorded higher CPP than the journal average. Great Britain is a distant second, but its share of papers in BMC Public Health and Malaria Journal is even higher than that of USA. Britain’s interest in public health and malaria research could be explained by over two centuries of her colonial connections. Also, in both these journals, Britain’s CPP is greater than the journal average. In fact, in both BMC Genomics and Malaria Journal, the CPP is highest for Britain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Germany has published a larger number of papers in BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Cancer than Britain and France and these have been cited more often as well. Germany has published close to 10% of the papers in Genome Biology and these papers have recorded the highest CPP (33.08 compared to 25.78 for USA).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Acta Crystallographica<br /></strong>The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) publishes Acta Crystallographica in six sections. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online is the IUCr’s first electronic-only journal<a name="fr8"></a> It is a rapid communication journal for the publication of concise reports on inorganic, metal-organic and organic structures. Unlike other fee-based OA journals published in the western world, this journal charges a modest USD 150 per article and it also offers a fee waiver for authors from developing countries.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">During the seven years 2003–2009, this journal published 22,887 papers which were cited 35,078 times (Table 4). China accounted for more than 47% of these papers, followed by India (9.1%). However, papers from India averaged a higher CPP (2.13) than Germany, Britain and USA. Crystallography is a known area of strength in India. The earliest Indian paper in this field by Banerjee<a name="fr9"></a> of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science appeared in 1930. Today, chemical crystallography is arguably stronger than all other aspects of crystallography in India, although in the early years physicists dominated the field. Work in biological crystallography started when G. N. Ramachandran, a physicist, started his work at the University of Madras in the 1950s. It will be interesting to look at the historical evolution of crystallography in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>PLoS journals</strong><br />We will now turn our attention to the PLoS journal<a name="fr10"></a> There are seven journals in all. PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is somewhat different from the other six PLoS journals. It is an international, peer-reviewed, OA, online publication that accepts reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. In-house PLoS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards ensure fast, fair, and professional peer review. In Table 5, we provide data on the number of papers published each year by authors from the 12 countries during 2006–2010. The USA has published the largest number of papers, viz. 6,501, which is more than four times that of Britain, its nearest rival. India has published 262 papers and has the least CPP, viz. 2.34, whereas all the other countries have a CPP of above 3.0. Britain has the highest, viz. 4.76, closely followed by Germany (4.73). The values for other countries are: USA (4.36), France (4.23), Canada (4.29), Israel (3.98), Japan (3.86), South Korea (3.82), South Africa (3.46), China (3.24) and Brazil (3.01). The journal has published during this period 14,071 papers at a CPP of 3.99. The number of papers published by the other six journals, number of times they are cited and impact factors of these journals are given in Table 6. In these journals, India has published 120 papers and these have been cited 1,022 times for an average of 8.52 CPP. The corresponding figures for other middle-level countries are: China (212 papers and 11.39 CPP), South Korea (62 papers and 17.47 CPP), Brazil (131 papers and 10.21 CPP), South Africa (137 papers and 18.42 CPP) and Israel (184 papers and 15.46 CPP).</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Looking at individual journals (Table 7), one sees that in general the middle-level countries have published very few papers compared to the advanced countries. There are exceptions though. Israel has published 73 papers in PLoS Computational Biology, comparable to France’s 92 and higher than Canada’s 55 and Japan’s 46. In this journal Israel’s CPP (8.5) is comparable to the world average (9.1) and the CPP of Britain and higher than the CPP of Japan. In PLoS Medicine, India’s 38 papers have a CPP of 6.92, far below the journal average of 14.12, and less than that of the other 11 countries considered. In PloS Biology, India has a CPP of 15.77, far below the journal average of 31.69, whereas South Korea (54.78) and China (32.12) have a CPP higher than the journal average. In PLoS Genetics, Brazil, South Africa and Israel have a higher CPP than the journal average. Authors from USA publish the largest number of papers in each of the six PLoS speciality journals, followed by Britain. But USA leads in CPP in only two of them, viz. PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Computational Biology. Britain has the highest CPP for PLoS Genetics followed by USA. Japan has the highest CPP for PLoS Medicine followed by France. Canada has the highest CPP for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS Biology, the first of the PLoS journals.</p>
<h3 align="JUSTIFY">Discussion</h3>
<p align="JUSTIFY">There has been a perceptible increase in the number of OA papers published in journals. Björk et al. have shown that the number of OA papers has been growing and for articles published in 2008, it stood at 20.4% of all papers published – 8.5% in journals (publisher sites) and 11.9% in searchable repositories.<a name="fr11-12"></a> A recent forecast by Springer based on Web of Science data has shown that at the current rate of growth journal articles which are OA will likely grow from 8.7% in 2010 to 27% by 2020 assuming a constant annual growth rate of 20% as against 3% growth rate of papers indexed in Web of Science.<a name="fr13"></a> It will be interesting to see if the number of papers published by Indian researchers in OA journals also increase year after year. Sathyanarayana of Informatics India tells us that the per cent of OA papers published by Indian researchers as revealed by Open J-Gate is higher than the world average (private communication), but we need a proper scientometric study to confirm this. Evans and Reimar have shown that for authors from developing countries free-access articles are cited much higher when they make them freely accessible over the Internet and that free Internet access widens the circle of those who read and make use of scientists’ investigation.<a name="fr14"></a>An analysis of many MedKnow journals has shown that OA journals do not lose subscribers to print editions; on the contrary, the number of subscribers is increasing in most cases. Again, OA has helped MedKnow journals attract a larger number of paper submissions, hits and downloads, win more citations and improve impact factors.<a name="fr15"></a>The Indian Academy of Sciences has also seen similar trends for their journals (G. Chandramohan, pers.commun). Data in Table 5 show that the number of papers published by each one of the 12 countries in PLoS ONE has increased over the years dramatically. We found similar trends for all PLoS journals (except PLoS Medicine) and several BMC journals including BMC Public Health, BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Genomics <a name="fr16"></a></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Both BMC and PLoS charge article processing fees as do many other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $ 1450 and $ 1640, PLoS ONE charges $ 1350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $ 2900 and other PLoS journals $ 2250. This could be a deterrent to most Indian and other developing country researchers. However, these journals waive the processing fees if authors request before submitting their papers. But not all Indian scientists would like to request such waivers. Here is what Balaram<a name="fr17"></a>a leading Indian molecular biophysicist, says: ‘As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds to be subsidising Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals or any other non-Indian open access journal. Some journals waive these charges for authors from developing countries. But I do not think we should go begging for waivers.’</p>
<h3 align="JUSTIFY">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian researchers publish a large number of papers in OA journals, not necessarily because more than 360 Indian journals are OA. Their contribution to high-impact international biomedical OA journals is modest at best. However, India’s contribution to Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports is substantial. There are two reasons for this: India has a strong and vibrant community of inorganic crystallographers and the journal charges only $ 150 for processing a paper. A similar study on India’s participation in international OA journals in other fields, such as physics, chemistry, earth sciences and engineering will be interesting.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Ideally though, Indian researchers and funding agencies should prefer the institutional archiving route recommended by both Harnad <a name="fr18"></a> and Balram One hundred per cent OA through archiving should be the national goal. As pointed out by Joshi<a name="fr19"></a> and as has been demonstrated most recently by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi<a name="fr20"></a> starting and filling an institutional EPrints archive is easy, inexpensive, and immensely beneficial to all. However, six years after the first workshop on setting up OA repositories was held in May 2004, we have not more than 40 active repositories in the country. We believe that such repositories would come up in most, if not all, higher educational and research institutions in the country if the Ministers in charge of both higher education and science and technology send out a note stating that from now on all publicly-funded research should be available through OA channels.</p>
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<p><i>Muthu Madhan is in the ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324, India and Subbiah Arunachalam is in the Centre for Internet and Society, No.194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071, India</i>. <br />*For correspondence. (e-mail: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com">subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn1"></a>]. Arunachalam, S., Advances in information access and science communication. Curr. Sci., 2001, 80, 493–494.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn2"></a>]. Dallmeier-Tiessen, S., First results of the SOAP project. Open access publishing in 2010; http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0506v11</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn3"></a>]. Registry of Open Access Repositories; http://roar.eprints.org</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn4"></a>]. Directory of Open Access Journals; http://www.doaj.org</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn5"></a>]. Open J-Gate; http://www. openj-gate.com</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn6"></a>]. BioMed Central: The Open Access Publisher; http://www.biomedcentral.com/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn7"></a>]. Science in India 2004-2008, Scib ytes 2010, ScienceWatch.com; http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/10/jan10-10_2/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn8"></a>]. Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online;http://journals.iucr.org/e/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn9"></a>]. Banerjee, K., Structure of anthracene and naphthalene. Nature, 1930, 125, 456.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn10"></a>]. Public Library of Science Journals; http://www.plos.org/journals/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn11"></a>]. Björk, B.-C., Roos, A. and Lauri, M., Scientific journal publishing – yearly volume and open access availability.<br />Inform. Res., 2009, 14, Paper 391; http://InformationR.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn12"></a>]. Björk, B.-C., Welling, P., Laakso, M., Majlender, P., Hedlund, T.and Guðnason, G., Open access to the scientific journal literature: Situation 2009.PLoS One, 2010, 5 (6), e11273; http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn13"></a>]. Hendriks, P., Open Access Publishing at Springer, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8_OA_Conference_PH_v1.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn14"></a>]. Evans, J. A. and Reimer, J., Open access and global participation in science. Science, 2009, 323, 1025.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn15"></a>]. Sahu, D. K., MEDKNOW: Open Access Publishing for Learned Societies and Associations, Presented at Berlin 8 Open Access Conference, Beijing, China, 2010; http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/Berlin8.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn16"></a>]. Comparison of BioMed Central’s article processing charges with those of other publishers; http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn17"></a>]. Jayaraman, K. S., Open archives – the alternative to open access, interview with Prof. P. Balaram, SciDev.Net, 9 July 2008; http://www.scidev.net/en/features/q-a-open-archives-the-alternative-to-open-access.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn18"></a>]. Harnad, S., How India can provide immediate open access now? Curr. Sci., 2008, 94, 1232.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn19"></a>]. Joshi, N. V., Institutional E-print archives: liberalizing access to scientific research. Curr. Sci., 2005, 89, 421–422.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a name="fn20"></a>]. Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute; http://eprints.cmfri.org.in</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/use-made-of-open-access-journals-by-indian-researchers-to-publish-their-findings</a>
</p>
No publisherMadhan Muthu and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ContentOpen Access2013-07-04T04:45:39ZBlog EntryTowards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge
<b>There is growing recognition that the capacity to conduct research and to share the resulting knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from improving health care delivery to increasing food security, and from enhancing education to stronger evidence-based policy making. This article by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was published in PLoS (Public Library of Science) on March 29, 2011.</b>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpen Access2011-08-18T05:04:54ZBlog EntryThe Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma
<b>Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.</b>
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<img src="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-pad-ma-10-lessons-learned-from-running-open-access-online-video-archives-in-india-and-beyond/leadImage" alt="The Zen of Pad.ma - Lecture by Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Feb 03, 6 pm" />
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<h2>The Zen of Pad.ma</h2>
<p>Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.</p>
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<h2>Biographies</h2>
<p><strong>Sebastian Lütgert</strong>, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.</p>
<p><strong>Jan Gerber</strong>, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppPracticeDigital HumanitiesDigital MediaOpen AccessResearchers at WorkEventArchives2016-01-28T08:25:18ZEventThe Violence of Knowledge Cartels
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels
<b>We are all struck with a sense of loss, grief and shock since we heard of the death of Aaron Swartz, by suicide. People who have been his friends have written heart-felt obituaries, saluting his dreams and visions and unwavering commitment to a larger social good. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The blog post was <a class="external-link" href="http://hybridpublishing.org/2013/01/the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels/">published in the Hybrid Publishing Lab</a> on January 17, 2013.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/">Colleagues</a> who have worked with him and have been inspired by his achievements have documented the quirky intelligence and the whimsical genius that Swartz was. <a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/2013/01/the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels/#disqus_thread">His fellow crusaders</a>, who have stood by him in his impassioned battle against the piracy centred witch-hunt have helped spell out the legal and political conditions, which might not have directly led to this sorry end, but definitely have to be factored in his own negotiations with depression. All these voices have enshrined Aaron Swartz, the 26 year old boy-wonder who was just trying to make the world a better place where information is free and everybody has unobstructed access to knowledge. They have shown us that there is an ‘Aaron sized hole’ in the world, which is going to be difficult to fill. These are voices that need to be heard, remembered, and revisited beyond the urgency of the current tragedy and it is good to know that this archive of grief and outpouring of emotional support will stay as a living memory to the legend that Swartz had already become in his life-time.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, I want to take this opportunity to not talk about Aaron Swartz. I am afraid that if I do, I will end up either factualising him – converting him into a string of data sets, adding to the already burgeoning details about his life, his achievements, and of course the gory court case that has already been the centre of so much rage and debate. I am also afraid that if I do talk about Aaron Swartz, I will end up making him into a creature of fictions – talking about his dreams and his visions and his outlook and making him a martyr for a cause, forgetting to make the distinction that Aaron died, not for a cause, but believing in it. I, like many people who were affected, in many degrees of separation and distance, am taking the moment to mourn the death of somebody who should have lived longer. But I want to take the moment of Aaron’s death to talk about heroisms and sacrifices and everyday politics of what he believed in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let me talk about Shyam Singh, who is as far removed from Swartz as possible. Shyam Singh is a 74 year-old-man in India, who runs a corner photocopying shop on the Delhi School of Economics campus in New Delhi. Singh is not your young, charismatic, educated, tech-savvy oracle. He spent a large part of his life – 3 decades – working at the University’s Central Research Library and the Ratan Tata Library, operating unwieldy machines that were panting to keep up with new innovations in technologies of digital reproduction. It took him thirty years of work to muster enough savings so that he could buy a couple of photocopying machines and start a small photocopying shop at Ramjas College in New Delhi. After his retirement, the Delhi School of Economics actually invited him to come and set up the Rameshwari Photocopying shop on the campus, for the students at the school. He had an official license from the University, for which he paid a sum of 10,000 Indian Rupees, to work on a profit model that depended on high volume and low costs. The shop was more or less a landmark for students and professors alike, who would come to get their course material photocopied out of books that they could almost never afford to buy and were not easily available in public lending libraries. The shop keeper also compiled course-packs, which allowed students to buy all the texts prescribed for their curricula (but not necessarily available in multiple or digital copies in the library), at affordable rates.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It came as quite a shock to Singh, when one day, he was told that a consortium of publishers – Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor and Francis Group – had filed a case in the high court of New Delhi against him, claiming damages of 6 million Indian Rupees for wilful copyright infringement for commercial gains. Singh did not have the ideological apparatus that was available to Swartz, nor the competence to talk about the unfairness of the legal claim. He did, in several interviews, talk about India’s avowed policy on universal education and how he had always thought of himself as helping in that process of equal access to students who would otherwise have been unable to afford the education. The case against Singh is already in the courts, and the High Court has issued an injunction restraining him from providing copies of chapters from textbooks published by the three international publishers who have moved the court. And while he has found support from the academic, legal and student community from around the country, there is no denying that he is going to be fighting an expensive battle against a large Intellectual Property protection conglomeration of publishers who are all ready to make a ‘scapegoat’ and an ‘example’ of this small photocopy shop, in their efforts at enforcing paid access to scholarly and academic material in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I desperately hope that Singh shall not find himself as persecuted as Swartz did, by the publishers, by the public prosecutors, and by an indifferent citizenry who is quite happy to benefit from the fruits that might fall out of this case about loosened Intellectual Property and symbolically support the idea that knowledge should be free, but do not think that this is a problem that affects them in particular. True, in both these instances, we have seen people oscillating between rue and rage, expressing their dissatisfaction with these market driven information cartels which refuse to unleash the information and knowledge that we all believe should be made free. But in those expressions of anger and shock, is also a denial of the fact that we have all been complicit in building, supporting and sustaining these worlds because doing otherwise would inconvenience our schedules, lives and careers. Swartz and Singh, in their own way, had to become the poster-children, the martyrs, for us to take notice about a battle that affects us uniformly but doesn’t feature in our everyday practices and conviction.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/">Intellectual Property and Openness</a> are seen as legal battles for somebody else to fight. Even with academia and research, which is the most complicit in building these exploitative knowledge industries, there is very little discussion or even recognition of the untenable behemoths that we have been feeding in our quest for tenures, publications and popularity. For an everyday person, as you can imagine, this is even more removed from their quotidian life practices. The distancing and alienation gets even more acerbated by the fact that these battles are often fought silently. We have legal stalwarts fighting it out in court rooms. Academic scholars and researchers are drawing their pens and swords in academic journals. Political activists are championing their causes in conferences and summits. And in all of this, we have produced a gated activism, where the threshold of engagement and investment is so high that unless there are these dying and the wounded to hold out for public scrutiny, the world moves on, grumbling slightly at the restriction on torrent downloads or the unavailability of its favourite book in the local markets, but thinking that it has nothing to do with them. They are not even an audience to these battles. And if indeed, they are audiences, they are the kinds that go to a play, eat loudly out of crinkly wrappers, talk on their cellphones in the middle of the denouement and leave before the play ends, because they don’t want to miss their favourite TV show about dancing animals back at home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I do not want to hyperbolise and so I will not endorse the often suggested idea that knowledge should be as free as air and water – for a lot of us who have been looking at the private-public nexus in developing globalised countries already know that free air and water are a myth and that there are heavy prices to be paid for them. But I do want to suggest that it is time to think of the knowledge wars as human wars, as deeply implicated in our understanding of who we are, what kind of societies we want to live in, and what worlds we want to build for the future generations to inherit. These are fights that are not only about getting things for free – they are about understanding what is sacred and central to our civilization impulse and disallowing a small clutch of private bodies to make their profits by selling it to us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is time to maybe look around and see how manipulations of power and the algebra of survival has made us support corrupt and corrupting systems that restrict free information and knowledge. It is time to learn about the issues at stake – from providing cheap drugs to those in underprivileged areas to offering conditions of affordable education for the masses – when we talk about intellectual property regimes. It is time to organize, question, re-evaluate our own everyday practices, and realise that the fights against intellectual property are not battles that are fought once-every-heroic-death. That these are things that we need to strive for on a daily basis, without the need of an external catalyst or a dramatic death of somebody who died believing in a cause that was supposed to make the world a better place for those in the audience.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The next time, let us not wait for shame, guilt, horror, or surprise to catalyse us in taking note of the growing restrictions on information and knowledge in our world. Let us not wait for the emergence of another Swartz or Singh, persecuted by exploitative knowledge cartels that do untold harm to our sense of being human and being free in information societies. And let us keep our fingers crossed, that wherever he is, Swartz has found peace, solace, and the freedom that he was fighting for, and that Singh does not suffer a fate that might denude him of his livelihood and life’s savings.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah (<a href="https://twitter.com/latelyontime" title="latelyontime">@latelyontime</a> / <a href="mailto:nishant.shah@inkubator.leuphana.de">nishant.shah@inkubator.leuphana.de</a> )is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels</a>
</p>
No publishernishantOpennessOpen Access2013-01-18T07:33:53ZBlog EntryThe STI Policy Proposes a Transformative Open Access Approach for India
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sti-policy-proposes-a-transformative-open-access-approach-for-india
<b>Anubha Sinha explains what the draft national Science, Technology and Innovation policy means for open access to scientific literature for Indians. This article was first published in The Wire Science on January 21, 2021.</b>
<p>Indians may soon be able to read scientific papers for free.</p>
<p>Reading scientific papers is currently an expensive affair. Many
scientific journals charge a couple of hundred dollars for a single
article. Under a proposed ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ plan of India’s
fifth (draft) Science, Technology and Innovation (<a href="https://dst.gov.in/draft-5th-national-science-technology-and-innovation-policy-public-consultation">STI</a>)
Policy, the government will negotiate with journal publishers to enable
access for everyone. The policy also suggests that research produced in
Indian publicly funded institutions be made freely accessible to
everyone, at the time of publication.</p>
<p>These proposals are a big shift in how we learn and do science, as a country. The previous edition of the policy (<a href="https://icar.org.in/files/sti-policy-eng-07-01-2013.pdf">2013</a>)
did not even recognise affordability or availability of scientific
literature as problems. While ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ could
alleviate this issue partly, its success will depend largely on how
negotiations with publishers materialise. The approach is uncommon: it
has been tried in two countries, with limited success, as I <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/india-research-publishing-open-access-one-nation-one-subscription-k-vijayraghavan/">discussed here</a>, in an analysis of the idea’s feasibility.</p>
<p>While it is crucial for people to be able to access locked-in research,
it is equally important to address the practices that prevent research
from being openly accessible in the first place.</p>
<p>The STI policy prescribes a green open access (OA) approach to ensure
that research output and data produced with public funds are immediately
accessible to the people – as opposed to taxpayers funding the research
and paying again to access the results. Under green OA, researchers
will be obligated to place their publications and data in online
repositories, without any restrictions on how the output may be used.</p>
<p>Individual research and funding agencies, such as the Departments of
Science & Technology and of Biotechnology, the Indian Council of
Agricultural Research and the Wellcome Trust adopted green OA a while
ago. A national STI policy stands to provide an extra impetus to adopt
and enforce it.</p>
<p>These promising shifts come at a time when the biggest research publishers have launched a <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/academic-publishing-access-elsevier-sci-hub-alexandra-elbakyan-libgen-copyright-claims-delhi-high-court/">copyright infringement lawsuit</a>
in India to block Sci-Hub and LibGen on the Indian web. Sci-Hub and
LibGen host copyrighted and paywalled research articles and ebooks.
Anyone can download this material for free from their servers. As such,
these ‘shadow libraries’ serve a vital function for everyone, and the
Delhi high court <a href="https://spicyip.com/2021/01/issues-in-scihub-case-a-matter-of-public-importance.html">has already deemed</a>
this litigation to be one of public importance. The Indian scientific
research community will be intervening as well. While the case will
proceed at its own pace, it would definitely be in the public interest
for the STI policy to implement green OA as a mandatory requirement.</p>
<p>It is also notable that the policymaking process was a <a href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/sti-policy-2020-dst-psa-ease-of-doing-research">collaborative effort</a>
by academics, scientists and policymakers. There were multiple thematic
consultative rounds with stakeholders. It has been heartening to see
the results of a democratic consultation reflected in our national open
access approach.</p>
<div>However, as is the case with high-level policies, bringing meaningful
implementation often requires more operational and committed work at
all levels. It would be a shame to not capitalise on the direction and
vision of OA as described in the policy.</div>
<div> </div>
<p>Access this article on The Wire Science <a class="external-link" href="https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/the-sti-policy-proposes-a-transformative-open-access-approach-for-india/">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sti-policy-proposes-a-transformative-open-access-approach-for-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sti-policy-proposes-a-transformative-open-access-approach-for-india</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaOpen AccessAccess to Knowledge2021-04-28T17:22:43ZBlog EntryThe 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>
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<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>
<p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
<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>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dark-fibre-files</a>
</p>
No publishersiddharthhistories of internet in Indiainternet and societyDigital AccessIntellectual Property RightsYouTubeart and interventionPiracyOpen Accessinnovationdigital artists2011-08-04T04:41:31ZBlog 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>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">References</h3>
<ol>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Fig1.jpg" alt="Fig 1" class="image-inline" title="Fig 1" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Figure 1.</b> Share of papers published by different countries in open access journals indexed in <i>SCIE</i>, 2010-2014.* Data gathered on 29 February 2016. Great Britain includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">*Only articles, letters, proceedings papers, and reviews are considered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 1.</b> Distribution of research papers published by Indian scientists in open access journals by publishing year</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[Data gathered on 11 January 2016]</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="2">
<p>Year</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>OA journals (non-APC)</p>
</td>
<td colspan="3">
<p>All OA journals</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of journals</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2010</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>242</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2557</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17550</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>237</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4131</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16301</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>479</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6688</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33851</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2011</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>263</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3067</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17367</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>244</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4280</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>507</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7347</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>30012</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2012</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>308</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2800</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15715</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>251</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4157</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9276</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>559</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6957</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24991</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2013</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>326</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3335</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12635</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>268</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4457</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6257</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>594</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7792</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18892</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>2014</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>328</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3634</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6950</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>283</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4660</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3057</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>611</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>8294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10007</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15393</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>70217</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21685</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>47536</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>37078</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117753</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 2.</b> OA journals charging APC in which Indian authors have published at least 10 papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Nucleic Acids Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>138</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1945</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.09</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,770</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>126</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1409</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.18</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Genomics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>123</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1330</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Nanomedicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>NZ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>94</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1555</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€1,843</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>65</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1116</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17.17</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Plant Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>44</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>579</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.16</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Pathogens</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>42</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>781</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.60</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecular Cancer</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>540</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Molecular Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>298</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Molecules</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>300</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.71</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Computational Biology</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>342</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.68</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>25</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>721</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>28.84</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,900</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>DNA Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>542</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22.58</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$750</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>24</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>354</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.75</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,250</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biogeosciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>294</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.78</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>278</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Translational Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>238</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.87</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,145</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Marine Drugs</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>256</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,800</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Neuroinflammation</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>179</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14.92</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$450</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Science and Technology of Advanced Materials</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15.08</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMC Medicine</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>374</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>34.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$2,785</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Remote Sensing</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>125</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.36</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CHF1,600</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Cryosphere</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>112</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>€25<sup>#</sup></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Progress in Electromagnetics Research-PIER</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>128</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.80</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$200</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Articles in 33 other journals with CPP > 10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>117</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1930</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>16.50</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Total</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1077</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>15907</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><sup>#</sup>Page charges</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 3.</b> Non-APC journals in which Indian authors have published their papers that have been cited not less than 10 times on average in the five years</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Bulletin of The World Health Organization</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>515</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.56</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CA</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>14</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>173</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>12.36</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Environmental Health Perspectives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>188</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>18.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal of Machine Learning Research</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>118</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.80</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Materials Today</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>81</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20.25</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Earth System Science Data</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>DE</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>88</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>29.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Astronomia Y Astrofisica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>181</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>60.33</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Geologicas</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>MX</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>41</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13.67</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Folia Neuropathologica</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>PL</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>23</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>11.50</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>10.00</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Table 4</b>. Mega journals used by Indian researchers</p>
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Journal</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Publishing country<sup>*</sup></p>
</td>
<td>
<p>No. of papers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Sum of citations</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CPP</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>APC</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PLoS One</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2404</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>17587</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>7.32</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Scientific Reports</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>222</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1523</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£990</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>AIP Advances</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>196</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>645</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3.29</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Springer Plus</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>CH</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>170</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>235</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.38</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,290</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>BMJ Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>148</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.64</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>£1,350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>FEBS Open Bio</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>21</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>86</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>4.10</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1350</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>PeerJ</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>13</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>33</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>2.54</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$695</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Biology Open</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>GB</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>1.00</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,495</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>G3 - Genes Genomes Genetics</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>US</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>83</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>9.22</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>$1,950</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p>3100</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>20349</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>6.56</p>
</td>
<td>
<p> </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>ISO 3166 country code</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-29-2016-muthu-madhan-siva-shankar-kimidi-subbiah-gunasekaran-subbiah-arunachalam-should-indian-researchers-pay-to-get-their-work-published</a>
</p>
No publisherMuthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah ArunachalamOpennessOpen ScienceOpen ContentOpen Access2016-10-29T14:47:52ZBlog Entry