Box 10, Institutional Repository @NAL

Scientists' views

While there is widespread support for open access among scientists in the advanced countries, only a few Indian scientists have expressed their views on open access. Here is what Prof. Balaram, Director, Indian Institute of Science, and a Member of the National Knowledge Commission as well as the Prime Minister's Science Advisory Council, wrote in an editorial in Current Science, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India. The introduction of legislation that vests copyright with institutions, in the case of publicly funded research, may also provide the necessary legal framework to avoid any contentious issues.” He continued, “Mandating open access for all publicly funded research publications is easy to do by legislation. It is also a requirement that can be insisted upon by philanthropic private funding bodies like the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.”¹¹⁶ In one of his interviews, he reiterated this point: “I want to argue for 'open archives'. Every institution should be encouraged to set up a repository. This is a problem-free model I want to promote. There may be a few glitches at start, but the next generation of scientists will be comfortable with it. One issue that is yet to be resolved, however, is copyright. I argue that we should be permitted to put in the repository the full text article as it appears in a journal. For this, countries such as India should have a law specifying that the copyright for articles published with publicly-funded research always vests with the authors and their institutions.”¹¹⁷

However, Stevan Harnad believes that ideally authors should self-archive the final refereed author's version of their papers and not the published journal version. Welcoming the IEEE's change of author self-archiving policy, which no longer allows authors to archive the published version of papers but only the final peer reviewed author's version, he said, “That's the procedure that will work, and the policy that can and will scale to all other universities, funders and publishers worldwide. Mandated self-archiving of authors' final drafts is also what will usher in universal Green open access and eventually also publisher downsizing and transition to Gold open access, with journals reducing their services and costs to just overseeing peer review — offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of mandated institutional repositories.”¹¹⁸ If institutions keep relying on importing the publisher's PDF, such a policy and procedure will not smoothly scale to the rest of the world's universities, funders and publishers, Green open access will be needlessly delayed and hamstrung, the current status quo and its modus operandi will be locked in, and any eventual cost-cutting, downsizing to peer review alone, and transition to Gold open access will be made far less likely, says Harnad.¹¹⁹

The most succinct expression of Balaram's support to open access, however, came out in his conversation with Leslie Chan.¹²⁰ Unfortunately his forceful arguments have fallen on deaf ears. Besides, the Indian Institute of Science he directs has not so far adopted an open access mandate. Scientists at IISc are not self-archiving their papers; whatever archiving is taking place is done by a few intermediaries trained in library science [See Box 3, EPrints@IISc — The First Indian Institutional Repository].

While Balaram welcomes the idea of setting up repositories for journal articles in every research performing institution he has reservations when it comes to theses and dissertations. Interviewed for SciDev.Net, he said “When I say 'open access', I mean open access to all published work. If your work is already published in a journal, then there is nothing to hide. The publisher may not make the work accessible to other people. On the other hand, putting up PhD theses that contain unpublished work may be a little bit debatable.”¹²¹ The reason may be that in the sciences, researchers mostly refer to published papers and rarely theses. Also there is a wide variation in the quality of Ph D and Masters theses submitted to Indian institutions.

But Peter Suber, a philosopher by training, believes it is worth archiving theses. He narrates how difficult it was during the print-on-paper era to obtain a copy of a dissertation from University Microfilms Inc. (UMI). Says Suber: “I wrote on a fairly obscure topic for which there wasn't much existing literature — a fairly common phenomenon, given the assignment.  But I found a handful of dissertations on neighbouring topics in the UMI catalogue and one was better than every book I found on the same subject.”¹²² In fact, there is a worldwide movement, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and

In an editorial in Current Science, Prof. N V Joshi reiterates the advantages of open access: “… obvious that starting and filling an institutional e-print archive (containing the

Many open access journals charge from the authors a manuscript processing or publishing fee. No journal published in India charges a fee though. Both BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) charge article processing fees as do many other open access journals. BMC journals charge between $1,450 and 1,640, PLoS ONE charges $1,350, and PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology $2,900, and other PLoS journals $2,250. Should Indian scientists publish in journals that charge a fee? There are conflicting views on this issue. Here are the views of three professors of Indian Institute of Science on this issue. Prof. M Vijayan, former President of INSA, believes that the funding agencies such as DST and DBT should include publication costs as an item in project budget.¹²⁵ Indeed, in the West, both NIH and the Wellcome Trust do provide grants to cover such costs charged not only by purely open access journals such as the BMC and PLoS journals but also by toll-access journals which are ready to make individual articles open access against a fee. Major publishers also enter into agreements with universities under which if the university pays a certain amount of money annually, the faculty can publish any number of papers without paying per paper fees. But Prof. P Balaram, opposes this view vehemently: “As an Indian scientist, I do not want my government funds to be subsidising…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. They do nothing to counter the ever-present danger that authors who cannot pay will be squeezed out.”¹¹⁷Talking about ‘pay to publish and read for free’ business model, Raghavendra Gadagkar, renowned ecologist, says, “The argument that it is the granting agency and not the author that pays does not wash” as the playing field for grants is grossly uneven and this practice of paying for publication “will undermine, rather than encourage, the whole area of grant free research.”¹²⁶

To Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum publicly-funded information is part of the knowledge commons and it needs to be protected from commercial barriers. He would like us “to resist a property discourse that conflates property rights with academic rights and turns the collegiality of academe into the hierarchy of property. No one could ‘own’ knowledge and that the greatest scientists are often called ‘gifted’, implying that their contribution was given to the world openly. The concept of selling such knowledge was alien to the academic world.” Property in the English sense, he says, the conflation of ‘self’ and ‘own’ resting on exclusion, is something not common to other languages. In Hindi, ‘apnapen’ is not a matter of owning, or property, but of closeness. Ownership in this sense has the obligation of care.¹²⁷

Prof. T V Ramakrishnan, a former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society, is a great supporter of open access too: “I believe that open access to all publicly funded research is a moral obligation, in the following sense. The greatest strength of science is that it is cooperative and 'open'. This is the main way I can understand the size and strength of the flood of knowledge represented by science. Given this, it is natural and a matter of self sustenance to have open access to its results.”

When asked why open access was not picking up in India, a senior scientist told “I do not think that the science managers of India by and large think this is an important question. They are concerned about other issues, and generally in the spirit of 'prabhavah samayadushita' (changing colours with changing times), in the language of Bhartrihari, the great poet and author of the Nitishataka (among other things). He says that the lords, the ones with power, have lost the capacity of surprise or being surprised, or the impurity of self satisfaction is within them.” [Private communication]