Talk on Opening Up of Access to Publicly Funded Research: Status and Wayforwad at OpenCon2018 New Delhi.

1. Opening Up of Access
to Publicly Funded Research in
India: Status and Way Forward
@SridharGutam

2. Open Access?
Open Access literature is digital, online,
free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions
(Peter Suber, 2004)

3. Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Conference convened in Budapest by
the Open Society Institute on December
1–2, 2001 to promote open access
(Free Online Scholarship).
• On the occasion of the 10th anniversary
of the initiative (2012), recommended
"the new goal that within the next ten
years, OA will become the default
method for distributing new peer-
reviewed research in every field and
country”.

4. Why Open Access?
Open Access seeks to return scholarly
publishing to its original purpose: to
spread knowledge and allow that
knowledge to be built upon
(righttoresearch.org).
It ensures that the community has free
and immediate access to the literature
before and after it has been reviewed and
published (jneurosci.org).

6. Source: http://mofapp.nic.in:8080/economicsurvey/pdf/119-130_Chapter_08_ENGLISH_Vol_01_2017-18.pdf

7. "…national laboratories and other publicly funded
R&D institutions need to make much stronger efforts
to engage with the public and not make their
research centers quintessential ivory towers.” –
Economic Survey 2018
Source: http://mofapp.nic.in:8080/economicsurvey/pdf/119-130_Chapter_08_ENGLISH_Vol_01_2017-18.pdf

8. Scimago Journal & Country Rank
http://www.scimagojr.com

9. India’s Open Access Output (SJR)
http://www.scimagojr.com

10. • DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
• Journals 200
• DOAJ Seal
• International Journal of Physiotherapy (Print 2349-5987; Online
2348-8336
• Article processing charges
• No (129)
• Yes (70)
• No Information (1)
• ISSN - Indian Journals
• Assigned during 1986 – 2015 : 18,702
• During 2015 : 2,462
• During 2016 : 855

11. Availability and Accessibility of Research
Outputs in NARS: A case study with IARI
(2002)
• “While publications from IARI are available to subscribers of the
Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture (CeRA), public availability to
IARI publications is very meagre”
• Availability and accessibility of IARI publications were examined for
2008–2010, of the 221 indexed journals, only 19 (9%) were open access
journals indexed in DOAJ.
• Additionally, 14% of the published articles could be found on
Eprints@IARI (now Krishikosh). Thus, up to 23% of the published
literature is available and accessible to the public.
• The percentage of articles available in CeRA was 69%. This shows that a
little more than 30% of the articles published were not available to the
researchers in CeRA, a closed consortium model that makes articles
available through subscription to NARS constituents.
Source: Tandon et. al. 2012 (src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/86/232)

12. “The policy (of DBT-DST), therefore, has the
potential to have a significant negative
effect on India’s economy” -The Association of
Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Open Access
Policies/Mandates
(India)
• NIT, Rourkela
• CSIR
• ICAR
• DBT/DST

13. Registry of Open Access Repository
Mandates and Policies (World)

14. Registry of Open Access Repository
Mandates and Policies (India)

15. @simosacchi | @seis_matters
Source: From my Twitter Feed

16. “We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$ 2.4
million annually on APCs paid to OA journals and the amount would
be much more if we add APCs paid to make papers published in
hybrid journals open access “ - Muthu et al. 2017
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf

17. Fig 2. Number of journals changing from small to big publishers, and big to small publishers per year of
change in the Natural and Medical Sciences and Social Sciences & Humanities.
Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

18. Publishing Companies
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was
acquired by Elsevier $2 billion publishing company.
• Study published in PLoS, revealed that Reed-
Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis
and Sage published more than 50% of all research
articles in 2013.
• Its time for authors to move away from these for-
profit publishing corporations?

19. Institutional Repositories
● “Institutional repositories increase visibility and
opportunities for researchers” -Sarah
Tanksalvala
● “Institute’s research reputation increases when
all the scholarly outputs are showcased (abilities
and expertise)”.
● ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories
● India – 123
● Eprints – 64
● Dspace – 38

20. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Open-access-The-sorry-state-of-Indian-repositories/article17108642.ece

21. Status of Open Access
Repositories
Kumar and Mahesh, 2017. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/02/0210.pdf

22. Dr. G. Mahesh, NISCAIR, New
Delhi
• “Ideally, pre-prints of papers should be deposited
in a repository. A large majority of publishers of
subscription journals have no problem in
researchers depositing preprints in a repository.”
• “Researchers get greater visibility when they
deposit their pre-prints in a repository as anyone
can read them. The institutions too gain. So it
difficult to say why researchers don’t do it,”
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Open-access-The-sorry-state-of-Indian-repositories/article17108642.ece

23. SHERPA/RoMEO
Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving
Source: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
120 publishers from India (52 Green)

24. Pre-Prints and Post-Prints
• Pre-Prints
• First draft of the article - before peer-
review, even before any contact with
a publisher
• Post-Prints
• Version of the paper after peer-
review, with revisions having been
made.

25. Preprint Repositories
Source: @jeroenbosman
On OSF Preprints as of Feb. 2, 2018: 2,154,434

26. “everything else can wait, but not agriculture.” -Jawaharlal Nehru.
Preprints for Agriculture

27. https://osf.io/preprints/agrixiv
/

28. Open Access India
• Advocating Open
Access, Open Data and
Open Education
• Launched as online
advocacy facebook
group on July 8th, 2011
• Facebook group
membership: 10864
• Grown into community
of practice

29. Memberships & Partnerships
• GODAN - Global Open Data for Agriculture and
Nutrition
• ICORE – The International Community for Open
Research and Education
• OA2020 – initiative for large-scale transition for
open access
• Open Policy Network
• CLACSO Working Group - Bienes Comunes y
Acceso Abierto (Common Goods and Open Access)
for the period 2016 – 2019

30. Works & Initiatives
• Actively participated in discussions/deliberations for ICAR
Open Access Policy
• Developing Indian Journals' copyright policies to be
integrated with the databases like Sherpa/RoMEO.
• Working with DOAJ in building whitelist of Indian Journals
• National Open Access Policy of India (Draft) Ver. 3
• A draft ‘National Open Access Policy’ for India was
prepared and submitted to: Ministries - Human
Resource Development and Science & Technology,
Government of India on 14th February, 2017, the 15th
anniversary of the BOAI (Budapest open access
Initiative). <https://zenodo.org/record/1002618>

31. OA Communities in South Asia

32. Forum for
Open
Access in
SAARC

33. http://thinkchecksubmit.org/

34. https://zenodo.org/

35. Thank you for your kind attention
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.