Box 4, Open Access Versions of Indian Medical Journals hosted by Indian Medlars Centre, NIC

Box 4, Open Access Versions of Indian Medical Journals hosted by Indian Medlars Centre, NIC

In May 2004, MSSRF organized two three-day workshops on setting up institutional repositories using e-prints software with the help of Dr. Leslie Carr of the University of Southampton and Dr. Leslie Chan. Dr. D K Sahu and Dr. T B Rajasekhar also served as resource persons. These workshops, a follow-up to the suggestion made by Stevan Harnad during his visit to India in 2000, gave hands-on experience to 48 participants, mostly librarians but also some editors and R&D managers. Several participants went on to set up OAI compliant institutional repositories, but not always using e-prints!

In September 2004, Journal of Post Graduate Medicine celebrated its golden jubilee with an international conference on writing, editing and publishing at Seth G S Medical College, Mumbai, and a number of editors, publishers and open access experts spoke at this meeting. A number of medical journal editors attended this conference and learnt about the advantages of open access.

At the Annual Meeting of the Indian Science Congress Association held at Hyderabad in January 2006, a full session was devoted to open access. Dr. P M Bhargava, then Deputy Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission and an eminent life scientist, told that the times were changing and even private pharmaceutical companies were ready to share data from ongoing research into neglected diseases. Alma Swan, who took part in this meeting with support from OSI, also met a small group at ICRISAT and spoke about the advantages of open access institutional repositories. This meeting eventually led to the setting up of an open access repository at ICRISAT and Dr. William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT, joining the Board of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) [See Box 5, Mandating open access in an International Research Organization: The ICRISAT Story].