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Scholarly Communication and Open Access
Subbiah Arunachalam, FCLIPCentre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, IndiaElectronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK
I dedicate this talk to Dr Eugene Garfield, information
scientist extraordinaire, who has made outstanding
contributions to both scholarly communication and open
access. He made virtually all his writings – in particular,
fifteen volumes of Essays of an information scientist –
freely accessible on the Net long before the open access
movement took shape.
My own interest in information science, science studies
and public understanding of science was largely shaped by
my association with Gene Garfield over four decades.
"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. Scholarly
communication is no different from other human endeavours.
“Scholarly communication — the process used by
scholars and scientists to share the results of their
research — is fast approaching a crossroads. Individual
disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will
soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how
scholarly information is formally and informally
exchanged, because current methods of scholarly
communication are increasingly restrictive and are
economically unsustainable.” – Cornell University Library
<http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/>
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.
From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed
considerably both in the way the content is presented
and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely
descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday.
Today the text is terse and most experimental details are
omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no
longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but
use personal computers and laptops to compose the text.
We no longer use the four-line composing system for
mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We
now use sophisticated visualization techniques and
multimedia tools.
"I purpose, in return for the honor you do us by coming to see what
are our proceedings here, to bring before you, in the course of these
lectures, the Chemical History of a Candle. I have taken this subject
on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer
to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that
attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet
which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not
a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does
not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is
no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the
study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical
phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in
choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could
not be better, were it even so good."
~~Michael Faraday, "The Chemical History of a Candle" (1861)
ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudogap
region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains
an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap
appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi
surface, which simply terminates. In the antinodal region the gap
remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments
there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi
surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various
theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties
this region of the pseudogapSimple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps:
By Philip W Anderson, 2008
For those interested in the history of scholarly
communication, I will refer you to the work of Alan Jack
Meadows and Christine Borgman.
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 physics and computing
communities - to make the transition from the past to the
present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both
of them facilitated open access.
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. There are three
sides to knowledge: Education, Research and Innovation. We
will begin with some indicators and set the context.
Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global
power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.
It is the same in science as well, with China performing far
better.
Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment
in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European
Union in science.
In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars),
India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs
are better equipped than labs in the West.
Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP
Japan 3.67%
Sweden 3.60%
Finland 3.48%
USA 2.70%
EU average 2.16%
China 1.40%
India ~1.00%
About 70% of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing.
India publishes about 35,000 papers annually and these
appear in about 2,500 journals. As not all of these journals
are available in most institutional libraries in India, many
Indian researchers will not know what other Indians are doing
in their own field.
About 123,000 Indian students were studying abroad in 2007,
83,000 of them in USA and 25,000 in UK. India sends a very
large number of students overseas.
There are 400 universities and new ones are coming up.
Hundreds of labs under different government agencies carry
out a large part of research. An ever increasing number of
foreign companies are setting up labs.
Despite all these, India is not performing to its potential in
science.
Let us see the number of papers published by India and
China in different fields.
India China
MathSciNet, 2006 1,949 11,762
Engineering Village, 2006 25,954 199,881
SciFinder, 2007 41,697 235,309
Web of Science, 2007 35,450 98,241
Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th
rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the
largest number of papers. In the same period China
moved up from ninth to second.
Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field
does India receive citations on par with world average.
But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking
up. Both investments and research output are increasing.
New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities –
are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs
are coming down.
Work done by development organizations has shown that
access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only
researchers but also common people.
Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to
knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the
interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators
of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the
Knowledge commons to the creators.
Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons
in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed
knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective
action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social
capital to thrive.
But the OA movement is spreading unevenly.
Information is key to science development. It forms the
‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said.
Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to
Access and Visibility.
Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption
of open access.
We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many
advocates are already doing and things are improving.
India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take
advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make
the field level playing. But most of us still live in the
print-on-paper era.
The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia
subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten
consortia, big and small. A recent study has shown that these
journals are not used well.
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 – some 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. CSIR has made two of
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 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 lab 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. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abrahan and I were invited to
speak and INSA is now considering the recommendations.
Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay
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
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
addendum 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. IGNOU has recently
opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are
available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is
planning to make virtually all educational content freely
available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.
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 identification
of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and
its genome 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.
What is there already?
World-class Open Course Ware.
More than 100 OA journals. Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way. A small group is promoting OJS.
There are about 35 repositories. IISc was the first to set up.Its EPrints archive has crossed the 12,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the only Indianinstitution to have an OA mandate in place.
There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,Library and information science, Catalysis.
Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.
Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list:
IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.
The Catalysis repository is not listed.
There are some efforts to digitize theses.
Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service calledOpen J-Gate.
An Indian LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA softwareInto a library management software. It is open source.
But we are a country of 1.14 billion people. We should do much more.
Major concerns: fear of publisher action, copyright, researcher
apathy.
But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda
is rather low among both researchers and policy makers.
What we need is advocacy and more advocacy. We should
also adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches.
On the policy front
Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a
discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of
INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the
Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to
IASc.
Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of
OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded
research.
There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics
community provides a classic example.
As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one
wonders if top-down approaches will work better than
bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both.
Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of
them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation.
There are two online lists for OA, but most members are
librarians and they believe they cannot implement OA on
their own.
International collaboration and ways forward
A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come
up to promote all things open, including open source
software and open access.
The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts
from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and
Europe may have an influence on him.
India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter
Academy Council.
It may help if international champions of OA could be
brought to India for discussion with science administrators
and public lectures.
eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to
include India in their programmes.
One never knows when things will happen in India. They
happen when they happen. So we should be pushing
all the time!
Thanks