Author Archives: Sridhar Gutam

Preprints South Asia Survey 2020: A Report

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A survey on conducted to know the status of awareness and attitude, particularly towards preprints among the research scholars, scientists and librarians in the South Asian region during the months of April and May 2020 had maximum responses from India (83.71%) and majority of Agricultural Sciences (54%) discipline. Respondents ranked ‘Journal’s Impact Factor’ at the top factor for selecting journals to publish. Seventy five percent had at least 25% of their publications in Open Access and had paid the APCs (65.33%) for publications and the source of funds are personal pooling (30.34%). While 61.72% read preprints, 27.03% have not heard about preprints and 11.26% never read the preprints. However, those read, 64.42% trust the preprints. And why they share preprints is because of ‘belief in open access’ (39.91%), ‘rapid feedback’ (23.53%) and ‘timely sharing results’ (21.72%). With regard to citing preprints, 60.36% never cited any preprints and 79.73% respondent’s preprints were never cited. However, the respondents mentioned that indexing, citing, visibility, consideration in assessment & evaluation will motivate the authors to share preprints. 

Access the report here. Preprints South Asia Survey 2020: A Report via @IndiaRxiv

Setting up Forum for Open Access in South Asia

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Dear All,
To take the steps further with respect to the Open Access movement in this region of South Asia (SAARC), lets join together and form the Forum for Open Access in South Asia.As of now, we have communities:
OA Bangladesh
OA India
OA Nepal
OA Pakistan
We need to support our friends from Bhutan Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives who are yet to form a community in their respective countries.
Please see the WordPress site and other social media sites which had been setup for outreach.
Want some of you to volunteer to take up the tasks of website and social media channels. Soon we will have a meeting to take the further steps. You may please sign up at https://goo.gl/forms/0kPkxbz1Olukq17A3
Thanks & Regards
Sridhar

AgriXiv – Preprints for Agriculture

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The agriculture in the world under the changing climate scenario is facing many challenges and needs utmost attention and support for the development of adaptive, resilient and sustainable livelihoods. Research outputs generated in addressing these challenges faced by agriculture need to be immediately available to all the stakeholders for understanding and developing suitable solutions. Therefore, the Open Access India  is proposing AgriXiv, a preprints repository for agriculture with the support of Open Science Framework to facilitate the sharing of interim research results.

????? ????? Mukth Abhigam – Hindi translation of Open Access

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????? ????? Mukth Abhigam – Hindi translation for Open Access.

India celebrates ????? ???? (Hindi Diwas/Hindi Day) every year on 14th September and also celebrates Hindi Chetna Maas (?????? ????? ???) for a month during September – October.

To commemorate Hindi Diwas and Hindi Chetna Maas and also Open Access Week, it is proposed that we shall popularise the use of ????? ????? (Mukth Abhigam) for Open Access in Hindi. It is to be noted that that Acceso Abierto is the Spanish translation for Open Access.

See http://opendefinition.org/od/2.0/hi/ or http://openaccessindia.org/tag/hindi/ for Open Definition in Hindi.

ICAR adopts Open Access Policy

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Here is the full policy on Open Access adopted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)

ICAR adopts Open Access Policy

  • Each ICAR institute to setup an Open Access Institutional Repository.
  • ICAR shall setup a central harvester to harvest the metadata and full-text of all the records from all the OA repositories of the ICAR institutes for one stop access to all the agricultural knowledge generated in ICAR.
  • All the meta-data and other information of the institutional repositories are copyrighted with the ICAR. These are licensed for use, re-use and sharing for academic and research purposes. Commercial and other reuse requires written permission.
  • All publications viz., research articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins, summary of the completed projects, speeches, and other grey literatures available with the institutes to be placed under Open Access.
  • The institutes are free to place their unpublished reports in their open access repository. They are encouraged to share their works in public repositories like YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook ®, Google+, etc. along with appropriate disclaimer.
  • The authors of the scholarly articles produced from the research conducted at the ICAR institutes have to deposit immediately the final authors version manuscripts of papers accepted for publication (pre-prints and post-prints) in the institute’s Open Access repository.
  • Scientists and other research personnel of the ICAR working in all ICAR institutes or elsewhere are encouraged to publish their research work with publishers which allow self- archiving in Open Access Institutional Repositories.
  • The authors of the scholarly literature produced from the research funded in whole or part by the ICAR or by other Public Funds at ICAR establishments are required to deposit the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript in the ICAR institute’s Open Access Institutional Repository.
  • Scientists are advised to mention the ICAR’s Open Access policy while signing the copyright agreements with the publishers and the embargo, if any, should not be later than 12 months.
  • M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis/dissertations (full contents) and summary of completed research projects to be deposited in the institutes open access repository after completion of the work. The metadata (e.g., title, abstract, authors, publisher, etc.) be freely accessible from the time of deposition of the content and their free unrestricted use through Open Access can be made after an embargo period not more than 12 months.
  • All the journals published by the ICAR have been made Open Access.  Journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly literature published with the financial support from ICAR to the professional societies and others, to be made Open.
  • The documents having material to be patented or commercialised, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the institute and/or the author, may not be included in institute’s Open Access repository. However, the ICAR scientists and staff as authors of the commercial books may negotiate with the publishers to share the same via institutional repositories after a suitable embargo period.

Implementation

The DKMA to function as nodal agency for implementation of the ICAR Open Access policy. The DKMA will organize advocacy workshops and capacity building of scientific & technical personnel, repository administrators, editors and publishers on Institutional Repositories, application and usage of Free and Open Source Software.

End Note

OA initiative is not a single event. It is a process and expects full compliance over a period of three years.  Therefore, the proposed modest policy is a first step in the journey towards formal declaration of openness and then after reviews progress, compliance and impact periodically.

Open Access India: Movement for Making Public Funded Research Open

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A group of agricultural researchers formed a voluntary group called ‘Open Access India’ (OAIndia) in July 2011 on ‘Facebook’ with an aim to take up the advocacy on ‘Open Access’ and to make agricultural information openly available, accessible and effectively used for farming in the country.

The aims & objectives of ‘OAIndia’ are as follows:

  • Advocacy – sensitizing the researchers, policy makers and general public on the need to make data & information generated through public funds openly available.
  • Development of community e-infrastructure, capacity building and framework for ‘Open Access’ policies for sharing data & information.

I have blogged on Open Access India on Australian Science. Here is it Open Access India: Movement for Making Public Funded Research Open.

Sridhar Gutam

Facebook Group ‘Open Access India’ Formed

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For creating more awareness on open access to publicly funded research in India, a facebook group ‘Open Access India’ is formed. This group would be a platform for advocating open access and sharing success stories of open access movement in the world and India.

It invites anyone who is involved and interested in the open access movement to discuss and raise issues related to open access in general and in specific to India.

The group would work for influencing the policy makers, managers, researchers, scholarly socities to adopt open access policy for their research and to take forward the open access movement in India. Within few days after its formation, it membership had reached to 450.

Everyone is invited to join the ‘Open Access India‘.

 

URL for more info: 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/oaindia