Berlin 6 Open Access Conference: Arun Arunachalam
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Transcript of Berlin 6 Open Access Conference: Arun Arunachalam
Open access for science and developmentThe case of India
Subbiah ArunachalamCentre for Internet and Society
Bangalore, India
"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present."
Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in
the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even
when the present is a revolution."
- Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution
It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the
burden of the past and really move on to the present.
The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves
largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-
paper and libraries subscribing to a large number of print
journals and making them available to scholars and
scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more
convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet
and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in
many parts of the world.
The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription
prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians to
look for alternatives in the West. And men like Paul Ginsparg
and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to
facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge
helped others - especially in the physics community - to
make the transition from the past to the present and become
contemporaneous with the present.
The online revolution went far beyond speeding up
knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge.
It helped the very process of knowledge production in
myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing,
data mining, international collaboration, grid computing,
and ushered in the era of eScience.
Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the
transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with
the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of
transformative impact of science and technology as the
advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of
the new technologies and adopted open access to science
and scholarship.
Even China and South Korea, both of which have made
rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade
or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access
movement.
In my talk I will present the situation in India. Together with
China, India is widely perceived to be a rising global power.
As the Harvard Business School Professor Tarun Khanna
has pointed out China has gone way ahead of India in many
respects. It is the same in science as well, with China
accounting for three times the research output as India.
Apart from China, Japan, India and Korea, some other Asian
countries are also stepping up investment in science and
soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science.
There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development.
With a huge population and a history going back to several
millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an
advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected
in growth rates upwards of 8% over several years, Indian
companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign
investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is
also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and
is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be
solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences.
The benefits of the high growth rate has not percolated to the
poor and there is tension between the two Indias.
India needs to perform research that will make it competitive
in global science and to perform science that can address
local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the
evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced
countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the
second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria Eve
Gray suggests for South Africa and other developing
countries.
In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting
open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open
access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed
opportunities and half-hearted attempts.
India has an efficient space programme, a controversial
nuclear energy programme and a network of national
laboratories under different research councils. Science is
managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory
bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and
the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and
several departments under the Ministry of Science and
Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.
But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt
open access. The one exception is CSIR – three of its 37
laboratories have OA IRs and the director general of CSIR
has appointed a committee to set up IRs in other labs.
The CSIR Director General is promoting open source drug
discovery [http://www.osdd.net/] and has secured substantial
funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level
repository for all researchers to deposit their papers
irrespective of their affiliation. Last month CSIR made two its
19 journals open access.
Agriculture is key to India’s survival and India has many
agricultural research laboratories and universities.
None of them has an OA repository. ICRISAT, a
CGIAR outfit, has its own IR. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has
set up its own IR.
India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and
diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as
It deserves. No medical research laboratory or college has an
IR.
Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks
to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National
Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set
up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research.
Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago
and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The
same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow.
The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed
the Berlin Declaration five years ago, and it took a while to
make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences,
Bangalore, made all its ten journals OA a few years ago.
The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA
in their meetings, but nothing much happens. A few months
ago INSA convened a meeting on open access and
copyright. Both Dr Sahu and I were invited to speak and
INSA is now considering the recommendations. Their top
priority is for requesting the government to pay page
charges and publication fees to journals that charge such
fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded
research.
A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent
of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of
all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is still awaiting
action.
The Academies could be proactive and advise both the
government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA,
but they are reluctant.
Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and
the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an
ardent advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current
Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is
one that must be vigorously promoted in India.” The
Academies would do well to listen to him.
The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60
Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres
meet annually. Seven years ago the plan for setting up IRs
in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not
materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of
the coordinators meetings.
Early this year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint
Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three
levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement
for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T
proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows
will be available freely on the Internet.
If the Wellcome Trust funded research is made OA why not all
Government funded research be mandated to be OA?
Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by
research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties
of Arts and Science and Law and the Stanford University School
of Education have not influenced Indian funding agencies and
researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of
Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA
and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors
and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s
addenda when signing copyright agreements with journal
publishers.
The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the
kinds of economic and sociopolitical transformations taking
place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic
divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation,
one would think India should invest as much on social science
research as on science and technology. But social science
research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think
tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even
they have not adopted OA.
The National Knowledge Commission has made clear
recommendations on the need for mandating open access
for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the
recommendations would be implemented.
In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s
best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium
and have made available some excellent material for
undergraduate courses in engineering
The open access revolution can go far beyond helping
scientists and social scientists in universities and research
Institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor
and the marginalized, as well.
In many developing countries, development organizations
working with the poor have shown how improving access to
information – relating to weather, market prices, location of
large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements,
availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a
variety of technologies can make a difference.
If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health
workers can access medical information relevant to the
current needs of their communities they will be far more
effective.
The power of sharing medical information was amply
demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The
unprecedented openness and willingness to share
critical scientific information led to the quick identifica-
tion of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and
Its geneome mapped within weeks.
The same way farmers around the world can benefit
from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are
freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR
laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we
should resist privatization of knowledge, especially
knowledge generated with public funds.
Open access is making slow progress in India. The main
reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among
policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to
most developing and possibly some advanced countries.
Focused advocacy, especially among research students
and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up
OA IRs can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT
project has shown, foreign collaborators can help.
Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country
institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a
global repository for developing country researchers.