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.