Open Access:

By Subbiah Arunachalam, Consultant, e-Library,CECRI

India is emerging as an important player in the global economy and geopolitics and is seen as an emerging scientific power. Universities like Harvard and Oxford are setting up new programmes on Indian studies and journals like Chemical & Engineering News are devoting special sections on science in India and its implications for the world. But for Indian science to really have global impact, it is important for Indian scientists to have much better access to worldwide S&T information than is currently available and for Indian research work to reach a much larger audience than is happening now. Thanks to advances in technologies, specially the Internet, World Wide Web and broadband connectivity, both of these are well within the realm of possibility. But translating what is possible into the realm of reality seems to pose problems.

In this talk I will list the major achievements so far and give my own views on how to go forward to fulfill the tremendous promise of OA in India. Thanks to proctive advocacy by a few, India has held many workshops and hands-on training programmes on setting up OA repositories and OA archiving software. Following the example set by the Indian Institute of Science, about twenty archives have been set up, although most of them are filling up rather slowly. Among the success stories are two central archives, OpenMED of the National Informatics Centere for biomedical research and the repository for Library & Information Science set up at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, and Vidya Nidhi, a repository for dissertations set up at the University of Mysore, and the institutional archives at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, National Chemical Library at Pune, the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, the national Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore, and Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. The Indian Institutes of Technology at Bombay and Delhi, have also set up institutional archives, and the IIT at Madras will soon have its own archive. The team at IISc, Bangalore is now crawling all OA archives in India and are making them accessible through a single window.
In the first week of January, a special session on OA was organised as part of the annual session of the Indian Science Congress Association, where developments in India were reported and the articipants came up with a recommendation that all papers resulting from publicly funded research should be made available through OA journals or archives.

About a month ago an Indian company had come out with a free OA search service called Open J-Gate for OA journals, and it covers more than 3,000 serials, about half of which are peerreviewed STM journals.
The most serious problem India faces today is author/institutional/policy maker indifference. There is a great need for continued advocacy and training programmes.

Open Access in India: Hopes and Frustrations

Proceedings ELPUB 2008 Conference on Electronic Publishing - Toronto, Canada - June 2008- Subbiah Arunachalam

Open Access Journals

The research articles in all journals published by BioMed Central are 'Open Access'. They are immediately and permanently available online without charge. A number of journals require an institutional or a personal subscription to view other content, such as reviews or paper reports. Free trial subscriptions to these journals are available.

The open electrochemistry journal is an open access online journal, which publishes original full length, short research articles (letters) and reviews on all areas of fundamental and applied electrochemistry. The open electrochemistry journal, a peer reviewed journal, aims to provide the most complete and reliable source of information on current developments in the field. The emphasis will be on publishing quality articles rapidly and freely available worldwide.

The Nano Archive is part of the ICPCNanoNet project, funded by the EU under FP7 for four years from 1st June 2008 (contract number 218282). It brings together partners from the EU, China, India and Russia and aims to provide wider access to published nanoscience research and opportunities for collaboration between scientists in the EU and International Cooperation Partner Countries. This electronic archive of nanoscience publications has a simple interface for the deposit of full-text papers and incorporates facilities for retrieval by browsing or searching. It is freely accessible to researchers around the globe, making research papers and other scholarly publications widely available.

The Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 3918 journals in the directory. Currently 1400 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 262860 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The collection currently comprises 44 South African journals, which may be searched individually, and provides immediate access to the PDF versions of 6 000+ full-text articles. Of the journals in the collection, 14 appear on the Approved South African Journals list, the ISI list, or the IBSS list. New journal titles and issues are added to the collection on an ongoing basis. Some journals also contain metadata records (including abstracts) for older articles where full text is not available.

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 4793 open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.