Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India 9 April 2011 (Draft) Table of Contents

The Evolution of Open Access in India

Indian Academy of Sciences, founded by Sir C V Raman in 1934, is a remarkable
organization in many ways. It takes up issues relevant to India at the right time and
selects a balanced mix of people to discuss them. In 1999, the Academy hosted a meeting on geographical information and virtually every one of the speakers focused on public access to geographical information. The proceedings of the meeting were published in Current Science in its issue dated 25 August 2000. A seasoned science writer wrote a detailed report.⁶⁵ This meeting is probably the earliest in India in the area of openly
accessible data.⁶⁶

The evolution of an open access policy in India began at a two-day conference on Advances in Information Access and Science Communication held at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, (MSSRF) on 16 – 17 September 2000, as a tribute to Dr. Eugene Garfield on his 75th birthday. At this conference Prof. Stevan Harnad, open access archivangelist, spoke about ‘scholarly skywriting’ and the need for every research-performing institution to adopt open access self-archiving of preprints.⁶⁷ To many in the audience Harnard's ideas were an eye opener.

The Indian Academy of Sciences convened a meeting in April 2001, a few weeks after the Second ICSU-UNESCO International Conference on Electronic Publishing in Science,⁶⁸ where it was decided to encourage Indian S&T journal publishers to adopt electronic publishing.⁶⁹ Subsequently, two three-day workshops for editors of S&T journals were held at the Indian Institute of Science during 8 to 10 and 13 to 15 March 2002. These workshops, conducted by Dr. Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto and Ms. Barbara Kirsop of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development emphasized the need to increase visibility of Indian journals by adopting open access.

A fledgling publisher of medical journals who attended this workshop, Dr. D K Sahu of MedKnow⁷⁰ , currently publishes 150 journals of which 148 are open access [See Box 2, Medknow Publications – An Innovative Open Access Journal Publisher].

Box 2, Medknow Publications – An Innovative Open Access Journal Publisher

Medknow Publications, founded 12 years ago by Dr. D K Sahu, a paediatrician, is a publisher for peer-reviewed, online/print+online journals in the area of STM. MedKnow is the largest open access publisher in the world which does not charge author or author institution for submission, processing or publication of articles. Medknow has shown that open access does not adversely affect print subscriptions.  Publishing on behalf of learned societies and associations, currently MedKnow publishes 150 journals (all but two of which are open access). Medknow pioneered the ‘fee-less-free’ model of open access publishing and provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals majority of which do not charge the author or author's institution for submission, processing or publication of the articles. MedKnow has successfully put in place an original electronic manuscript submission and peer review system in India.^71 This system is in use for more than seven years and over 50,000 manuscripts have been processed through it. Each MedKnow journal has its own professional, sophisticated and easy to use website. See, for example the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine.^72 All journals use the OpenURL standard, making it easy for libraries to link users as directly as possible from citation to the full text of the article. MedKnow achieved more than a hundred thousand page downloads in a month.  Most MedKnow journals are archived at multiple places including OAI-compliant e-print repositories and sites such as Bioline International^73. All the journals are searchable from a single interface on the MedKnow site. The journals are also linked from DOAJ^74 and PubMed through LinkOut.  MedKnow has collaborations with the major bibliographic agencies, subscription agents, internet search engines and secondary aggregating agencies. These collaborations help in increasing the visibility and accessibility of the published papers across the world. The MedKnow website provides statistical information everyday and it is truly impressive. Here is what one found on 6 April 2011: 150 Total journals, 130 Total associations / societies, 60,682 Total articles, 52,995 Full text articles, 0,155 Manuscripts submitted in 2011, 1,542,153 Articles downloaded in Mar '11, and 50,306 Articles downloaded on Apr 5, 2011. Writing about a presentation by Dr Sahu, Heather Morrison said: “It is absolutely exquisite — a must-read for every open access advocate! D.K. Sahu illustrates how open access made it possible for the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine to move from fairly limited, India-based accessibility (less than 400 print subscriptions) to awesome usage statistics - often over 3,500 visits per day - from around the world. Citations and article submissions have increased, and the JPGM's impact factor is projected to increase by a very great deal. International submissions have increased, too - perhaps authors from North America and Europe are going to India for their open access solution???” Subbiah Arunachalam [Compiled from the MedKnow website^75 and other sources]

and is today the world's largest open access publisher that does not charge a fee either from the author or from the readers. [Although 750 open access journals are published under the label SciELO, it cannot claim this distinction. Strictly speaking SciELO, as its website says, is a meta publisher or a virtual library or a network of collections of journals with the journals themselves being published by many publishers located in 16 countries spread over Latin America, Caribbeans and Western Europe. ]

In 2001, Dr. T B Rajasekhar of the National Centre for Science Information, IISc,

assigned a trainee a project on setting up a repository using EPrints. That led to the setting up of India's first repository, EPrints@IISc, in November 2002 at a time when not many repositories were there in the world [See Box 3, EPrints@IISc – The First Indian Institutional Repository].