User:Filippo Morsiani/Open Access in India

Open Access in India has seen rapid growth in digitized and born digital research as well as data. Government research establishments such as CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and laboratories, institutes of higher learning such as universities, both central and state level, and the funding agencies like Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology along with reputed institutes such as IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institute of Management) are driving open access in India. Research and development organizations such as Regional Research Labs and Industrial R&D divisions also contribute open access scientific data.

History
Open access is the practice of making research available online free of restrictions, especially subscriptions. In India open access traces its roots back to circa 2000. In the year 2000 the conference Advances in Information Access and Science Communication was organised at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation as a tribute to Eugene Garfield's 75th birthday. The country's first open access repository ePrints@IISc was established by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in November 2002. And for all this, the credit should go to Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun). He is fondly called as Mr. Open Access.

In 2004 the Indian National Science Academy signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and other notable signatories from India are Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Association of India (2011) and Agricultural Research Service Scientists’ Forum (2012).

In July 2011 ‘Open Access India’ was formed as an online community for open access, open data and open education in India. It is partner of Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) and the International Community for Open Research and Open Education (ICORE). Open Access India has open access ambassadors and conveners across India and has established e-infrastructure for agricultural researchers to share their research outputs, AgriXiv in collaboration with Center for Open Science on 14 February 2017.

In March 2015 UNESCO and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre For Asia (CEMCA) jointly launched an Open Access Curriculum for Researchers, and an Open Access Curriculum for Library Schools.

Government initiatives
The National Knowledge Commission recommended Open Educational Resources and open access in November 2007 In January 2012 the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy was launched by the Government of India. In September 2012 Government of India unveiled Data.gov.in the Open Government Data (OGD) platform for India, to implement the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy.

Open access journals
In 2008 there were around 100 open access journals in India. As of July 2015, DOAJ indexes 576 open access journals which are published in India. 69 open access digital repositories are registered in OpenDOAR.

Open access repositories
The country's first open access repository ePrints@IISc was established by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in November 2002 and as of 2015 it housed 41,101 publications dated since 1914. By the end of 2015 India based researchers produced 94,156 open access articles.

In 2015 the India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) specialized service Unit for Research and Development of Information Products (URDIP) launched a portal, "Listing of Open Access Databases" or LOADB. The objective of LOADB is to create a web-enabled, linked, classified and categorized collection of open access databases which one can access from a single portal. Although initial focus of LOADB is on science and technology subjects, the ultimate aim is to include all subject areas. CSIR-URDIP also launched a portal 'ScienceCentral.in', which is the Centralized Institutional Repositories Hosting Service for DST-DBT Labs and a Harvester service for DST-DBT Institutional Repositories.

Madhan Muthu won the 3rd Open Access Annual Award awarded by the EPT and is involved in setting up many open access repositories noted among them are Open Access Repository of ICRISAT and Open Access Thesis Repository of NIT Rourkela. Alok Khode is the architect of two successful centralized platform for open access institutional repositories, namely CSIR-CENTRAL and SCIENCE-CENTRAL to support Open Access Mandate of Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), and Department Of Science & Technology(DST) and Department of Biotechnology(DBT). He has setup, customized and maintaining more than 35 Institutional Repositories on these Platforms.

Open access policies
As of 2015 14 open access policies were registered in ROARMAP which are at the institutional and funder levels.

The National Institute of Technology, Rourkela (NIT Rourkela) mandated open access in May 2006.

In May 2009 the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, which is headquartered in India, mandated open access for all its scientific and scholarly publications.

Shodhganga of the INFLIBNET was launched in 2009 to provide an open access platform for thesis and dissertations of students in Indian Universities. Thus it implements the open access policy of the UGC Notification (Minimum Standards & Procedure for Award of M.Phil/PhD Degree, Regulation, 2009) dated 1 June 2009, which provides that theses and dissertations must be submitted in electronic version with an aim to facilitate open access to Indian theses and dissertation to the academic community worldwide. As per the Regulation, the responsibility of hosting, maintaining and making the digital repository of Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertation (Shodhganga) accessible to all institutions and universities is assigned to the INFLIBNET Centre.

In 2011 the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) adopted an open access mandate Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) adopted its Open Access policy in September 2013.

In December 2014, India’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) released a new open access policy. Under the new policy researchers who receive or have received funding since 2012 or use resources from these departments are mandated to deposit, within two weeks after acceptance by a journal, copies of the final papers and supporting data in institutional repositories where the information can be accessed by the public. DBT and DST are the nation's two top most scientific departments.

Barriers to open access
According to the UNESCO Global Open Access Portal there are several barriers to open access in India:


 * The absence of a national mandate on open access publishing.
 * Lack of publications by Indian scientists in local open access journals and articles published in such journals not being cited by Indian scientists. Reason for this are lack of awareness, poor subscriber base and preference of the scientists to publish in foreign journals that have much higher impact factor that the Indian counterparts.
 * Lack of funding and mandate towards publishing in institutional repositories could be one more reason.

Open data projects
The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) Platform: a CSIR-led team India Consortium with global partnership with a vision to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global open scientific platform where scientists can collaborate and collectively endeavor to discovering therapies for neglected tropical diseases like Tuberculosis, Malaria, Leishmaniasis etc.

Open educational resources
The National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) launched in August 2013 which had paved the way for the establishment of  ePG Pathshala for postgraduate students in India by INFLIBNET with the support of MHRD in the same year (2013) and the NSOU-OER Repository by the Netaji Subhas Open University in collaboration with CEMCA in 2017.

Predatory open access publishing
India has seen cases of predatory open access publishing. As of 2012, as open access journals became more popular under an author-pays model, it became more popular for scam publishers to solicit papers with payment. As of 2015, a study found that large amounts of fake open access journal publishers were located in India and are despartly making bid to become authentic and geninue.