In January 2006, at the time of the Indian Science Congress in Hyderabad, an informal meeting took place between Alma Swan and Arunachalam and a small group of research managers at International Crops Research Centre for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). This was a time when almost no agricultural research faculty or organization had adopted an open access mandate. ICRISAT, founded in 1972 by a consortium of international agencies comprising the World Bank, FAO, UNDP and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, was meant to carry out scientific research on specific crops that are important for food security in the rain-fed, drought-prone areas of the tropics. Over the period of its existence, ICRISAT scientists have published about 4,500 papers in peer-reviewed journals; about 300 books have been published as well. A reasonable volume of training materials have been generated. At the time when this meeting took place, ICRISAT did not have a repository where at least all the research publications could be accessed publicly. The library services had been operating a bibliographic service providing citations only. A key research director of ICRISAT agreed that open access was a potential route that ICRISAT could make use of.
William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT86 since 2000 is a champion of making research results and documents freely and openly available. In his stint in the Philippine agricultural research bodies in the ‘90s, he had promoted the use of web as a medium to make available farmer extension material on mango and banana, important crops of the Philippines. He started a process of frequent discussions in the committee of ICRISAT research leaders on open access for peer-reviewed research publications. The practicing researchers and the library staff were generally concerned about potential copyright infringement issues in relation to making available peer-reviewed papers. In this background, he initiated a large scale digitization and publication of all the printed research publications where ICRISAT owned the copyright. By late 2008, about 48,000 pages equivalent of printed publications were digitized and PDF copies were made available via ICRISAT web site. This step, which involved much planning and meticulous work, was primarily carried out by the staff of the library services.
This step also enabled the advocates of open access to take the discussions towards the open access mandate for peer-reviewed publications. By now, a broad understanding that the setting up of an institutional repository would not contravene any intellectual property obligations had emerged among the group of research leaders, thanks to the championing by the Director General. In this background, William Dar, in a meeting of the top management in May 2009 asked that a formal open access mandate be endorsed which was accepted. Since then the IR at ICRISAT, hosted on a DSpace platform, has increased its holding, and stands at nearly 3,000 full text publications in peer-reviewed journals. The repository of printed publications of ICRISAT has been merged with this repository. It was also the reason for ICRISAT holding a special workshop on open access for Indian national agricultural research institutes and universities and professional societies in that sector that publish peer-reviewed journals (Sep 2009). Indian Agricultural Research Institute (founded in 1905), the premier multi-disciplinary research and education institute of India, launched its IR within a few weeks of this workshop. Two professional societies in agricultural sciences have made their journals open access.
In a related development, a group in the Computer Science Department of IIT-Kanpur, built a new platform hosting agricultural research publications called the OpenAgri, and went on to develop a software application called the AgroTagger which helps generate domain-specific tags for a given scholarly publication as a service that can be built on DSpace or e-prints. This is the first ever automatic tagging application in agricultural sciences. The tags were jointly developed by ICRISAT and a group affiliated to IIT-Kanpur.
What emerges from this experience is that a process of top-level championing should be followed up by ground-up awareness building. One compliments the other to great effect. Secondly, there should be close alliance of champions with capable IT groups since setting up and initial maintenance of repository software does require professional support. An ecosystem of information managers, IT specialists and champions with subject matter expertise need to come together in particular sectors. Institutional boundaries should be transcended.
ICRISAT is a member of the international consortium called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.87 There are 15 international agricultural research centres that are members of this consortium. It would have been great if all the other members had followed the initiative of ICRISAT. A group of leading workers in open access from across the world wrote the Chair of the Consortium Board and the Directors General of the member centres. The group is yet to receive a response after about 10 months.
Dr. Venkatraman Balaji
Director, Technology and Knowledge Management
Commonwealth of Learning (COL)
Vancouver, BC Canada
Email: vbalaji@col.org
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