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