Open Access and INFLIBNET s Initiative for Indian Scholarly Contents

Transcription

1 Open Access and INFLIBNET s Initiative for Indian Scholarly Contents Rajesh Chandrakar Scientist B (LS), INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad rajesh@inflibnet.ac.in, rchandrakar@yahoo.com Jagdish Arora Director, INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad jarora@inflibnet.ac.in Abstract Purpose: the purpose of writing the article is to explain the current position of the open access of scholarly contents in India especially the initiatives of the INFLIBNET Centre taken in this regard. It also provides the mode of open access for Indian contents made by Indian aggregators. Design/methodology/approach: the approach of study is based on the aggregators working for open access of scholarly contents in India. Apart from that the paper also explains various steps and initiatives taken by the INFLIBNET Centre on open access for its member universities and academic users. Findings: In the Indian context, the scholarly contents are available mostly on open access and fee-less-free access. Apart from that the contents are accessible on login based free access mode. Whereas, Institutional repositories are available on intranet mode especially the Ph.D. theses and rest IRs are open to everyone. Research limitations/implications: It covers major aggregators and institutions that publishes number of scholarly journals and not touches institutions having one or two publications. Originality/value: the paper brings major open access publishers of India in one place. It also list out the open access initiatives of the INFLIBNET Centre in one place from the plethora of activities. Keywords Open Access, Scholarly Content, INFLIBNET, Institutional Repositories, Electronic Publishing, India Preamble We all very much know the birth of the open access of the scholarly content. To name it, the most important reason of the open access of scholarly content would be the term serials crisis which is christened due to the unprecedented rise of the subscription cost of the scientific and technical journals started in the 80 th Century. The term serials crisis badly affected to the libraries of the developing countries, where important journals of the science subject went out of the subscription reach.[1] Now, the technology like Internet and web is helping the term open access in widening the wings globally irrespective of region and languages. A number of organizations and individuals have given various definitions of the term open access. The definition of the open access is based on the scholarly literature that is available free of charge on the Internet without copy right and licensing restrictions. The Budapest initiative [2] on open access is most cited definition, says, its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full-texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. Based on the number of definitions provided by the various initiatives, organizations and individuals, Peter Suber, a famous Open Access supporter and a guru of open access says in his blog [3], open access to scientific article means online access without charge to readers or libraries. Committing to open access means dispensing with the financial, technical and legal barriers that are designed to limit access to scientific research articles to paying customers.

2 The approach of open access electronic publishing is largely based on how they are financed and the nature of access that they provide. The approach (synonyms flavours) of open access electronic publishing, put restrictions on access as per the well-workedout definitions of open access where it increases access to journal literature over traditional way of scholarly publishing. According to the Willinsky J [5] of University of British Columbia, Canada, open access has nine flavours. Five models are more used in various part of the world, those are: a. Open Access Journals where the reader of a journal or the library at their institution does not need to pay a subscription or pay per view charge to read the articles published in that journal. Hybrid Open Access: According to the Peter Suber, Hybrid Open Access means one that publishes some free-access research articles and some toll-access research articles, when the decision between the two kinds of access is the authors rather than the editors. Authors who choose the free option must usually either pay a fee or find a sponsor to cover the journal's expenses. In return the publisher provides immediate free online access to the article. Delayed Open Access journals are journals in which the free availability of the content and abstract are available and immediate fulltext access to the subscribers of the journals, and open access provided to the full-text after period of time. Fee-less-free Access model of open access publishing provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals without charging the author or the author s institution for submission, processing or publication of the article including free non commercial reuse, re-distribution and archiving. Per Capita Open Access is offered to scholars and students in developing countries as a charitable contribution, with expense limited to registering institutions in an access management system. And fee based subscription is needed for the developed countries. Out of those described above, open access and fee-less-free access mode are common flavours of open access in Indian publishing industry. Indian Initiatives A number of scholarly journals are being published from India covering wide spectrum of subjects, where many of these journals are peer reviewed and covered by premier indexing & abstracting periodicals. But, the coverage of these journals outside India is very limited due to absence of strong distribution channels and many of the journals are in the Indian languages. Sahu, DK and Parmar, Ramesh C [6] write that Scientific publishing in India is also not in the top position in the list of the 25 publishing countries, although, India has got a unique position, almost middle in the ladder. As far as the online access of the scientific journals is concerned, it again falls down from the middle of the ladder to little lower to 18 th position. But, interestingly India has fifth position in the list of open access journals and it is well ahead from the developed countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. India is also front runner in the developing countries and in the south Asian region not only in the open access but also in the economic growth and overall scholarly publications. Among the non-high income countries, India s position is second and is next to the Brazil as far as open access is concerned. Availability of journals in Indian languages and its visibility on web are two major hurdles for the Indian scholarly contents. However, some society and institutional journals started overcoming from these problems with the help of the aggregators and open sources software like OJS (Online Journals System of Public Knowledge Project based at Canada).[7] The aggregators like Medknow Publication [8] is helping in the area of Medical science journals and Indian Medlars Centre, NIC, New Delhi [9] [10]is serving for Biomedical Journals. Informatics (India) Bangalore and IndianJournals.com [11] are commercial aggregators, helping to any one wish to pay the expenses of making the journals online. However, the IndianJournals.com has also put few journals and newsletters on open access of some societies and institutions. The helping hand to the publishers by the aggregators seems to be for the English language journals only, although the technology like Unicode is available for the encoding of Indian languages. The print journals due to non availability in electronic mode, inspite of being reputed and well known journals in nature, it faces visibility problem as reaches late to the end users making the content absolute in this technology era, where the contents are available to the users on minute to minute basis. The journals published in the Indian languages are worst affected journals, whose access is very limited; for some of the 419

3 journals, the domain of the circulation is limited to the particular state where the language is being spoken. The affected journals could be more than hundred in numbers. The technology like Google translator can help making it visible to the wider number of end users in case the journals are available in electronic format. More than hundred and fifty research journals of India (see table below) are available on open access. Some of the Publishers of these journals do publish in both formats: print and online and provide dual-mode access of the contents. Some of the journals have browsing facilities without user registration (MedKnow Publications and others), whereas some insist on free user registration (Indianjournals.com). Very few publishers in India started only on digital mode. Following organizations initiated open access of the journals in India: Name of the Publisher URL Address of the Journals No. of Journals hosted Subject Coverage of the Journals Indian National Science 4 Science & Technology Academy (INSA) Indian Academy of Sciences 11 Science & Technology (IAS) Indian Medlars Centre, NIC, 40 Biomedical Sciences New Delhi MedKnow Publications 81 Medical Science Indian Journals dot com 7 Journals 1 Bulletin Miscellaneous Subject 2 Newsletter 1 Book Title Kamla-Raj Enterprises 11 Social Sciences and Humanities Table 1: List of the Indian scholarly content on open access mode But, none of the above publishers and aggregators follows the state-of-the-art features of the electronic publishing such as assigning of DOI (Digital Object Identifier), Cross Reference linking, COUNTER, SHUSHI, etc. Another way of making scholarly contents on open access is setting up of Institutional Repository (IR). Most of the libraries have established IR either on intranet access mode or on open access mode. Compare to the publishing of journals in electronic format universities / institutions have gone far ahead in establishing IRs in their libraries. The number of open source software such as Greenstone Digital Library, DSpace, and Eprints are being used for the same. Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technologies, Business / Management Schools, R&D labs and Central Universities are ahead in establishing this. Some of the IRs established on DSpace software and available on Internet IPs has implemented digital identifier called handle for full-text content. The INFLIBNET Centre is one of them providing each digital object a handle hosted on the DSpace server.[12] DRTC, Bangalore s IR also provides handle to the digital content. INFLIBNET s Initiative Since the INFLIBNET Centre ( being a nodal agency of the University Grants Commission (UGC) - an apex body of Govt. of India for Higher Education, mandated for providing free access of electronic resources under UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. Where, the consortium provides more than 5000 electronic journals and full-text databases to the 147 universities across the country free of charges subscribed from 23 International publishers.[14] Apart from that the Centre also helps academic users of member libraries in providing ILL (Inter-library loan) services through JCCC@INFLIBNET, a content level access to all e- resources of consortium including the journals being subscribed either in print or in electronic format at 20 ILL-designated university libraries. The content level access of journals covering 3100 open access journals and consortium subscribed journals are available under this content gateway.[15] Following are the ILL-designated university libraries: 420

4 Sr. No. Name of the University 1. Annamalai University, Annamalai, Tamilnadu 2. Assam University, Silchar, Assam 3. Benaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP 4. Banasthali Vidyapith, Banasthali, Rajsthan 5. Bangalore University, Bengaluru, Karnataka 6. Jadavpur University, Kolkatta, West Bengal 7. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi 8. Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, Haryana 9. North-Eastern Hill University, Shilong 10. Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur, Chhattisgarh 11. Panjab University, Chandigarh, Punjab 12. Pondicherry University, Puducherry 13. Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab 14. Rashrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University, Nagpur, Maharashtra 15. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai 16. The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, Gujarat 17. University of Calcutta, Kolkata 18. University of Delhi, Delhi 19. University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, AP 20. University of Madras, Chennai, Tamilnadu 21. University of Pune, Pune, Maharashtra 22. University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, Rajasthan Table 2: List of the ILL-designated Universities About 6,000 colleges will be getting access of the consortium subscribed scholarly journals with 30 additional sets of journals on open access through joint project of the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium and the INDEST-AICTE Consortium funded by the MHRD, Govt. of India to the tune of Rs. 16 crores.[16] With the help of the Open Source R&D Group, the Centre is implementing various open source software available on the net for the benefit of the INFLIBNET Centre and its member libraries. The Online Journal System (OJS) is one of the open source software for journal management system developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Canada. The OJS has been implemented by the Centre and for helping the UGC funded universities in the area of electronic publishing of their scholarly journals. The centre has decided to host the print journals of the universities in the INFLIBNET s server free of charge where as leaving the print publication of the journals to the host university. According to the decision of the Centre hosted journals will be available on open access mode. As part of the open access initiatives, the Centre has established Institutional Repository [12] which contains full-text of the papers presented and published in the proceedings of its national conventions called PLANNERs (annual convention organized in collaboration with the universities in North-Eastern States) and CALIBERs (annual convention organized in collaboration with the universities across the country). From this year onward, these conventions will be organized, alternatively, every year preferably in February.[17] This repository also includes articles and course materials of the training programmes, newspaper clippings, and newsletters of the INFLIBNET Centre. However, the newsletters and annual reports of the Centre are also available separately on the publication area of the INFLIBNET website [18] since the beginning. The Centre maintains bibliographic databases of the library resources (books, serials and Ph.D. theses) [19] contributed by the member universities and colleges. Apart from that the Centre also has databases of research projects funded by the UGC, DST, ICAR, CSIR etc. and subject experts serving in the academic domain of the country especially UGC funded. All these databases [20] are available on open access mode on 24x7 hrs to everyone. Recently, UGC has mandated INFLIBNET Centre through its regulation 421

5 named Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M.Phil/Ph.D. Degree dated 1 st June 2009 (to be published in the Gazette of India Part III, Section 4).[21] According to the Regulation, the softcopy of the awarded Ph.D.s in the country will be available in the INFLIBNET repository of theses. The regulation says, after successful completion of the evaluation process and announcements of the award of the Ph.D. the University shall submit a soft copy of the Ph.D. thesis to the UGC within a thirty days for hosting the same in INFLIBNET accessible to all institutions/universities. Apart from hosting the full-text of the Ph.D. theses into the INFLIBNET server while making accessible to all the universities, colleges and institutions of the Country, the Centre will also help to universities, colleges and institutions in setting-up the IRs at their places. Following are the current status of the INFLIBNET databases [22]: Name of the Database No. of Records No. of Institutions Books 11,067, Theses 220, Current Serials 22, Serials Holdings 50, Subject Experts 15, Subject Experts (NISSAT) 24, Table 3: Status of the databases of the INFLIBNET Centre Conclusion The open access has emerged as a most promising alternative model of electronic publishing that utilise new web technologies. Academic institutions throughout the world have realised the hurdles of scholarly communication whereas the benefits of open access have widely been recognized. The articles made available electronically on an open access have shown to be cited on an average of 50% more often than non-open access articles from the same journal, thus ensuring the greatest possible benefit both to the authors, to the investment of funding agencies and to the scientific progress. As explained in the article open access is gearing up in the academic sector and grooming slowly. Especially the IR is quite popular in India and almost most of the major libraries in India have its own IRs making access either through Intranet or Internet mode. Open access of Indian journals gradually getting momentum and publishers of the print journals are reaching to the aggregators such as MedKnow, IndianJournals.com, Informatics, etc for making their journals online. We see INFLIBNET Centre as a potential aggregator for electronic publishing of print journals of academic sector. We are also sure that the earnest efforts of the Centre in this regard will help academic community at large and will be seen as one of the jewels of the INFLIBNET initiatives making value added service to the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. References Serial Crisis. (Accessed on ) Budapest Open Access Initiative. (Accessed on ) Peter Suber. Open Access Overview (Definition and Introduction). (Accessed on ) Peter Suber s Hybrid OA website. 422

6 Wilinsky J. The Nine Flavors of Open Access Scholarly Publishing. Shahu, D K and Parmar, Ramesh C. Chapter 19: Open Access in India. (accessed on ) Online Journal System. Public Knowledge Project. (Accessed on ) MedKnow Publications. (Accessed on ) indmed@nic. Indian MEDLARS Centre. (Accessed on ) medind@nic. Indian MEDLARS Centre. (Accessed on ) IndianJournals.com (Accessed on ) Dspace INFLIBNET Institutional Repository. (accessed on ) INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad. (accessed on ) UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. (accessed on ) Resource sharing through JCCC. July-September INFLIBNET Newsletter, 15(3): 3 N-LIST. (accessed on ) PLANNER 2010 to be held at Tezpur University. INFLIBNET Blog. (accessed on ) Publication. INFLIBNET Centre. (accessed on ) IndCat: online catalogue of Indian academic libraries. (accessed on ) Bibliographic databases. (accessed on ) Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M.Phil./Ph.D. Degree. (accessed on ) Status of Database. January-March INFLIBNET Newsletter, 16(1):