Open Access Initiatives in India

Sukhdev Singh

The Big Question

The Bigger Question! Why Open Access is even more relevant to

India?

• Most reputed journals are published in developed countries (U.S / Europe) and are monopolized by few publishers

• Purchases are in foreign currency

• Even best indigenous research is published in foreign journals

India as consumer of research results

would benefit from world wide Open Access Movement

What about visibility of Indian Research?

• Poor in academic publishing trade• Poor visibility and impact of Indian Publication• Authors prefer to publish in High Impact

Publications, hence best of the research is published outside India

India as producer would benefits from world wide exposure through Open Access

publications. Exposure Impact

Online or Invisible? Steve Lawrence. Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001.

Open Access (OA) means free and online access to scholarly literature that can be freely disseminated further with proper author attribution.

It brings down barriers to scientific communication by using Internet

Open Access Publishing

• Open Access Journals perform peer review like their conventional counterparts and then make the approved contents freely available to the world.

http://www.doaj.org/

Lists 3834 journals as on 27th January 2009

Open Access Repositories

• Open Access Repositories allow authors / right holders to deposit their articles

• May allow preprints (pre-published manuscripts)• Normally allow post-prints (peer-reviewed and

published articles)• Most reputed academic publishers allow authors

to deposit some version of their articles in such repositories [http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php]

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) had 1240 registered repositories as on 27th January 2009.

http://roar.eprints.org/

Indian Open Access Initiatives

Open Access Journals

http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=findJournals&hybrid=&query=india

Open Access Hosts / Publishers

http://www.ias.ac.in/

http://insa.ac.in/html/home.asp

http://medind.nic.in/

http://medknow.com/

Standalone Journals

And a Special Mention

Repositories

Open Access Repositories 40+

National Aerospace Laboratories

20099

3566

2926

2381

2154

2088

2429

1213

National Center for Catalysis Research, IIT Madras

727

DSpace at Bangalore Management Academy: Home (558 records)

National Center for Antarctic Research , Goa , India (532 records)

DSpace @ INFLIBNET: Home (505 records)

Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (483 records)

National chemical Laboratory - Pune (407 records)

Institutional repository at MDI (343 records)

ETD@IISc Electronic Theses and Dissertations at Indian Institute of Science (328 records)

DSpace at ICFAI BUSINESS SCHOOL (IBS), Ahmedabad (213 records)

Librarians' Digital Library (188 records)

DU Eprint Archive (178 records)

Indian Institute of Astrophysics Repository

Kautilya (173 records)

OneWorld South Asia Open Archive Initiative (91 records)

Eprints@SBT MKU (71 records)

Any many others

Support

Open Knowledge Society

http://www.oksociety.org

Some Other Initiatives

Conclusion

• We have seen many initiatives from India• Many are in Pipeline• However we need create an awareness about

true “soul” of Open Access – Knowledge grows by sharing.