Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India 9 April 2011 (Draft) Table of Contents
The Evolution of Open Access in India
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- Box 2, Medknow Publications – An Innovative Open Access Journal Publisher
The Evolution of Open Access in IndiaIndian Academy of Sciences, founded by Sir C V Raman in 1934, is a remarkable organization in many ways. It takes up issues relevant to India at the right time and selects a balanced mix of people to discuss them. In 1999, the Academy hosted a meeting on geographical information and virtually every one of the speakers focused on public access to geographical information. The proceedings of the meeting were published in Current Science in its issue dated 25 August 2000. A seasoned science writer wrote a detailed report.65 This meeting is probably the earliest in India in the area of openly accessible data.66 The evolution of an open access policy in India began at a two-day conference on Advances in Information Access and Science Communication held at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, (MSSRF) on 16 – 17 September 2000, as a tribute to Dr. Eugene Garfield on his 75th birthday. At this conference Prof. Stevan Harnad, open access archivangelist, spoke about ‘scholarly skywriting’ and the need for every research-performing institution to adopt open access self-archiving of preprints.67 To many in the audience Harnard's ideas were an eye opener. The Indian Academy of Sciences convened a meeting in April 2001, a few weeks after the Second ICSU-UNESCO International Conference on Electronic Publishing in Science,68 where it was decided to encourage Indian S&T journal publishers to adopt electronic publishing.69 Subsequently, two three-day workshops for editors of S&T journals were held at the Indian Institute of Science during 8 to 10 and 13 to 15 March 2002. These workshops, conducted by Dr. Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto and Ms. Barbara Kirsop of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development emphasized the need to increase visibility of Indian journals by adopting open access. A fledgling publisher of medical journals who attended this workshop, Dr. D K Sahu of MedKnow70 , currently publishes 150 journals of which 148 are open access [See Box 2, Medknow Publications – An Innovative Open Access Journal Publisher]. Box 2, Medknow Publications – An Innovative Open Access Journal Publisher
and is today the world's largest open access publisher that does not charge a fee either from the author or from the readers. [Although 750 open access journals are published under the label SciELO, it cannot claim this distinction. Strictly speaking SciELO, as its website says, is a meta publisher or a virtual library or a network of collections of journals with the journals themselves being published by many publishers located in 16 countries spread over Latin America, Caribbeans and Western Europe. ] In 2001, Dr. T B Rajasekhar of the National Centre for Science Information, IISc, assigned a trainee a project on setting up a repository using EPrints. That led to the setting up of India's first repository, EPrints@IISc, in November 2002 at a time when not many repositories were there in the world [See Box 3, EPrints@IISc – The First Indian Institutional Repository]. Download 1.29 Mb. Share with your friends:
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