Open Access and the Developing World

Discusses the problems of the Researchers in developing world. Many University Libaries in the developed Countries boasting much higher budget than than those of academic libraries in developing countries. These financial constraints of subscribing to print copies of journals published by for profit companies and the advent of the internet have in part fuelled the cry for alternative business models. And discuss the advantages of open Access Archiving

India's march towards open access

Discusses India's movement towards Open Access. And the need to break away from the existing model of publishing and communicating scientific knowledge.One way of doing this is to embrace the 'open-access' approach being promoted by the Budapest Open Access Initiative with its two complementary strategies of setting up interoperable open archives and promoting open-access journal

Use made of open access journals by Indian researchers to publish their findings

Most of the papers published in the more than 360 Indian open access journals are by Indian researchers. But how many papers do they publish in high impact international open access journals? We have looked at India’s contribution to all seven Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, 10 BioMed Central (BMC) journals and Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports. Indian crystallographers have published more than 2,000 structure reports in Acta Crystallographica, second only to China in number of papers, but have a much better citations per paper average than USA, Britain, Germany and France, China and South Korea. India’s contribution to BMC and PLoS journals, on the other hand, is modest at best. We suggest that the better option for India is institutional self-archiving

インドにおけるオープンアクセスと機関リポジトリ

DRFIC2008 Session 1. Open Access and Institutional Repository in Asia-PacificDRFIC2008 セッション1:アジア・環太平洋地域におけるオープンアクセスと機関リポジトリ 報告

Improving access to research literature in developing countries : challenges and opportunities provided by Open Access

The Open Access movement has grown from pockets of regional initiatives to an increasingly coordinated world wide movement, facilitated by common technical standards and open source software. While debates on open access have focused on the so-called “serial crisis” and copyright issues, relatively little attention has been paid to the myriads of benefits OA provide, particularly to researchers in the developing countries. In this paper, we highlight important developments and experimentations in knowledge sharing enabled by different modes of open access, and point to collaborative and sustainable models that will be highly beneficial to research institutions in the developing world in the long term. The recommendations in this2 paper will have important implications for library and information professionals working in resource poor countries

Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development

Leslie Chan and colleagues discuss the value of open access not just for access to health information, but also for transforming structural inequity in current academic reward systems and for valuing scholarship from the South

The Case for Reform of Scientific Publishing

The publication and dissemination of the results of scientific inquiry are essential processes by which scientific knowledge and ideas are circulated and exchanged, scrutinized and tested. The efficient circulation of scientific output through a global network is vital to the production and use of knowledge. It has been, and will continue to be, the means by which distant minds interact to create new understanding and develop solutions to many of the problems confronting society. Humanity has benefitted greatly from the development of scientific publishing, which enabled the open science of recent centuries. A new era of open science, enabled by the digital revolution, now beckons. A globally effective publication system is indispensable to this new era. It is for these reasons that the International Science Council (ISC) has published its eight principles for scientific publishing shown in the companion piece to this paper, ‘Key Principles of Scientific Publishing’. The first and foremost principle stresses the central role of publishing as the enabler of the efficient and effective global network of ideas and information. The digital revolution of recent decades should have been a timely moment for step change in network functionality, providing the interactive communications system needed to satisfy the increasing demands placed on science. While some progress has been made (for example, the use of digital object identifiers for persistent reference linking across publishers), science publishing has so far failed to harness the full potential of digital functionality. Fully adopting the tools of this revolution could have vastly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge dissemination; created discriminatory navigation tools that gathered all new knowledge relevant to any researcher’s interests; ensured that data relevant to a published claims could be readily accessed and scrutinized; greatly improved the highly inefficient and ad hoc processes of peer review; more effectively opened the process of publication to innovation and greater bibliodiversity; maximized the extent to which the results of science are made available as a global public good; and made publication systems more accountable to the scientific community. Instead, we have a system where the dominant commercial players allow the interests of investors to take precedence over the needs of science. Excessive prices and profits fracture the international science community based on the ability to pay. Moreover, too much scientific output is unreproducible or shown to be fraudulent, damaging trust in the scientific enterprise. A major cause of these and other problems has been the way that scientists and their institutions use bibliometric indices to evaluate scientific careers. This has incentivized a ‘publish or perish’ culture, enabled large profits to be made, spawned a vast predatory publishing industry which adds little of value to the record of science1 , and deflected scientists from other scientific roles that will be vital to a new era of open science. The urgent need for reform has been recognized by many stakeholders in the scientific process, including governments. Such reforms must include the abandonment of bibliometric indices as sole indicators of excellence and the creation of a comprehensive index of the record of science. We should work towards a new cultural norm in which publishing, as an integral part of the scientific process, is accountable to the scientific community and to those that fund its work. The ISC will work with other stakeholders to achieve this, ensuring that scientific output is treated as a global public good, that scientific papers are freely accessible to all through a variety of open-access models, that a full index of the scientific record is created, that the peer review process is reformed, and that all of the ISC’s eight principles are observed. Digital advances will continue to change the publication and dissemination of scientific knowledge. If the ISC does not take an active role in leading and structuring this transformation, we risk having a system imposed on us which does not prioritize the interests of science, the very issue that caused this crisis in the first place