India will pitch for the interlinking of the national archives of G-20 countries to make scientific papers published by researchers accessible freely at the G-20 chief scientific advisors meeting.
Abstract: The present study aims to determine the current status of open access journals published in India in terms of numbers, yearly growth, funding organizations, major subject area, indexing, and abstracting status, publication charges, and open access licensing models of such journals. The study used the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as the source database and retrieved the bibliographic records of selected 306 Open Access (OA) journals published in India from 2003 to May 20, 2021. Further, the study referred to other web sources such as Web of Science, and Scopus to examine the indexing status of 306 open access journals and Journal Citation Report (JCR) database was referred to know the impact factor (IF) status of these journals. As per DOAJ database records, India ranks 16th as an OA journal publishing country across the globe. The yearly growth of open access journals in India was found to be 22.36%. Among these 306 open access journals, about 44.11% of journals are indexed in Scopus, 34.96% of journals are indexed in Web of Science, and 7.18% of journals with impact factor (IF) are indexed in JCR. Almost 74% of open access journals published in India do not charge Article Processing Charges (APC). The quality and quantity of OA journals published in India will surely attract authors, researchers, and academicians to rethink open access journals and their extensive use will boost the impact of research in India.
“Today, Wiley, global publisher has signed an open access agreement with Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE). Beginning in 2023, this agreement will be in effect with MAHE, an institute of eminence.
The agreement, which represents Wiley’s first in India, provides authors affiliated with the Manipal Academy of Higher Education with access to Wiley’s journal portfolio and enables participating researchers to publish articles open access in nearly 2,000 hybrid and gold open access journals, including those published by Hindawi….”
The Microbiology Society and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore have signed a transformative Publish and Read agreement starting in 2023. This is the Microbiology Society’s first agreement in India.
“…During the months of March and April, we will conduct initial exploratory research focusing on three regions: Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Our research team has conducted desk research to identify key stakeholders to reach out to each of the world regions and are in the process of setting up interviews and designing a conversation guide for this work. You can find out more on our Regional Research project webpage. We’re prioritizing research on Africa and Latin America in particular. Later this month, members of the IOI team will be in Ghana to learn more about open infrastructure needs and funding and to connect with key stakeholders in the region. Similarly, next month, we’ll be in Argentina, joining csv,conf,v7 and the “Accelerating Open Science in Latin America” workshop hosted by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to learn more about needs and funding in Latin America.. At the same time, we’ve started a virtual listening tour of India. We hope to later expand the tour to include other countries in the vast Asian continent. This exploration is fundamental in informing and shaping key pieces of work that we’re looking to advance this year, including the next phase of the collective funding pilot, funding trends research, the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs), and the fund we’re aiming to launch in 2024….”
“Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) and the UNESCO Co-Chair on Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, with support from the Asia Democracy Research Network, organised a seminar on “Knowledge Democracy: Bridging knowledge cultures” in February in New Delhi, India.
A total of 57 participants, from academia, grassroots organisations and civil society sectors, attended the seminar. It was an opportunity for them to share their perspectives and experiences of identifying practical ways in which authentic bridging may be practised and taught to the next generation….”
“Abstract: This research study aims to measure the Open Access (OA) friendliness of National Institutes of Technology (NITs) of India that are listed in the overall category of NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework), 2021 by taking into consideration four important OA parameters – i) OA publication share; ii) OA licensing scenario; iii) citation impact of OA publications; and iv) altmetric scores of OA publications. It deals with 64,485 publications of the selected 11 NITs during the period from 2012 to 2021 (10 years), citations received by these publications (5,42,638 citations), and altmetric attention scores of the documents (5,213 publications) during the period under study. A data carpentry tool, namely OpenRefine, and open access bibliographic/citation data sources such as Unpaywall, Dimensions, and Altmetric.com have been deployed to accomplish this large-scale study for ranking NITs by their Open Access Friendliness (OAF). The OAF indicator, as applied in this study, is a distributed weightage based 100-point scale built on top of the aforesaid OA parameters. The ranking framework shows that Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat (est. in 1961) has achieved the top position with a score of 52.12 (out of 100), but in totality only 3 NITs (out of the selected 11 NITs) crossed the 50 per cent mark in the adapted OAF scale.”
Roy, A., & Mukhopadhyay, P. (2022). Assessing Open Access Friendliness of National Institutes of Technology (NITs) A Data Carpentry Approach. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 42(5), 331-338. https://doi.org/10.14429/djlit.42.5.18263
“The Government of India is considering a one nation, one subscription (ONOS) policy to enable green open access to readers in India to journal articles published by the identified publishers. However, even if this succeeds, it will not provide green open access to pay-walled articles published by Indian researchers to readers outside the country or to readers in India to journals not covered under the ONOS. On the other hand, adoption of RRP by country’s educational and research institutions will enable free access to the country’s research output everywhere in the world. The ‘Open Science Policy’ (2014) of Departments of Biotechnology, and Science & Technology of the Government of India (https://dst.Gov.in/sites/default/files/ APPROVED%20OPEN%20ACC-ESS%20POLICY-DBT& DST(12.12.2014)_1.pdf) requires final accepted manuscript resulting from research projects, fully or partially funded by DBT/DST to be deposited at the institutional repositories or the interoperable institutional open access repository or the central harvester (www.sciencecentral.in). A rigorous implementation of this policy and the adoption of RRP by different academic and research institutions in the country will indeed open a wide door to the muchdesired open science…”
Updates on the ongoing Sci-Hub case in the Delhi high court, India.
“Open access to scientific knowledge and research is a critical component of advancing knowledge and promoting scientific progress. The Budapest Open Access Initiative, established in 2002, has been leading the charge in advocating for open access. Now, as the initiative turns 21, it is time for the Open Access community in India and South Asia to join forces and take action to promote open access in the region.
During this community call, we will discuss the importance of open access, the challenges, and opportunities in advancing open access in India and South Asia, and concrete steps that the Open Access community can take to lead the charge in the region. Participants will have the opportunity to share their experiences, ask questions, and network with other advocates for open access.
Join us for a dynamic and interactive conversation about “Leading the Charge for Open Access: A Community Call for Action”. Let’s work together to make open access a reality for all in India and South Asia….”
“It is advised that all the scholarly works produced by the University funds or by other public funds either at Central University of Haryana (CUH) or elsewhere with CUH affiliation are to be deposited in the University’s open access institutional digital repository i.e. Gyan Pravah…. The University shall also set up a central harvester** using the OAI-PMH to harvest the publications of CUH researchers, faculty and students from the World Wide Web for the wider accessibility of the shared resources…. It is advised that all the archives, current/ future scholarly and grey literature viz., research articles, popular articles, book chapters, books, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, project reports, class/lecture notes, presentation slides, photos, videos, speeches, keynote addresses, patent grant publications, data sets etc., produced by the University or by the faculty/researchers/ students with CUH affiliation are to be made available in CUH- IDR…. In case of any copyright/ intellectual property rights issue/s with the data, information, or materials to be patented or commercialized, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the University and/or the author, such data, information, or materials may be exempted from this Policy. However, after an embargo period once they are available in public domain/ open sharing/ archiving, the work/s is/are to be made accessible to the public via CUH-IDR…. All institutional publications of the University, journal articles, educational resources (text-books), edited books, book chapters, working papers, policy briefs, memorial lectures, research datasets, scientific data, final reports of sponsored projects, conference/ seminar proceedings, conference reports, information bulletins, newsletters, annual reports, audited annual accounts (which can be made public), booklets, convocation souvenirs and any other documents of institutional importance are to be made available in the CUH-IDR…. Preferably, the institutional publications such as journals, text books, proceedings, etc. may be published with open licenses. The authors of the publications may retain copyright of the work/s. 1.7. The University’s open access contents/ documents shall be licensed for public use under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY- NC-4.0) and the same shall be registered with SHERPA/ RoMEO database. The faculty members, researchers and students are advised to refer to SHERPA/ RoMEO to know about publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving…. All the faculty, researchers, and students are advised to use ‘Author’s Addendum’ at the time of acceptance and while signing the publishers’ copyright agreements mentioning the University’s Open Access Policy to deposit the publicly funded research outputs publicly available. Therefore, the publishers should allow the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript to be made available via CUH-IDR. And in case of any embargo, it should not be later than 6-8 months from publication date for making the deposits open to the public….”
Abstract: In developing countries like India, taxpayers’ money is utilized for research and development. The researchers conduct their research using public money and publish their research papers in commercial journals. Firstly, the researcher uses Government funds for research. Secondly, government funds are also spent on subscribing to high-cost journals. Also, many Indian academic institutions can not subscribe to reputed commercial journals due to a lack of funds. In other words, research output generated using public money is not accessible to all. OA journals can solve this problem smoothly. In this study, researchers analyze the trends in Open Access publications and Closed access publications by India’s top research institutes, IITs. Researchers found that IIT Hyderabad (26%) published the highest number of open-access publications. Old established IITs’ open-access publication figures are lower than newly set-up IITs. However, there is an increase in Open Access publications by IITs over the last decade.
“In terms of open access to knowledge, India could have been the Vishwa Guru — the world’s teacher.
As early as 2000, India was making moves to allow taxpayer-funded research to be freely available for anyone in the world to read, share and distribute. But India has squandered that advantage.
Fast forward to 2022, and much of India’s research is still locked up behind the paywalls of corporate academic publishers, while the global science community increasingly questions why taxpayer-funded research should not be available for everyone to read….”
“To build this future for our society, we need to adopt the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to inverse the information asymmetry between citizens and Big Tech-Big Government. This can only happen if we build alternative networks of information infrastructures that support these ideas. These information networks can’t be built overnight, but we need to strive towards them. Sci-Hub and LibGen are some examples of these information infrastructures and not only do we need to support them, we need to build more of them.”
“Only about 35% of India’s scientific research publications is open–access, even though a large chunk of the research itself is public-funded, an analysis of research data by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) has found. It has also found that less than a third of Indian research papers have women as lead authors….
The analysis has produced interesting findings. For instance, researchers found that a sizable percent of research is not available as open access despite being funded by the government. According to its records, 35.13% of India’s research was open-access in 2019; out of the 20 countries considered, India was ahead of only China (34.45%) and Iran (32.49%)….”