Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

Open access's value to the developing countries is likely to increase manifold as the
penetration of the relatively cheaper mobile telephones in the poorer countries of the
world increases at a much faster pace than the more expensive personal computers and
laptops. And the mobile phones are becoming smarter. More researchers will have access
to Internet and hence open access material.
Open access can benefit the lay public as well. Why the public should care for what is
published in the rarefied areas of scientific knowledge, one may ask. To anyone who is
following the debates on climate change, genetically modified crops and generic drugs it
would be clear that these debates are as much cultural, social and political as they are scientific.
In particular, as Prof. Andrew Hoffmann of MIT points out in a recent interview
to the New York Times, the position people take on these issues is largely political and
based on the values and beliefs they hold. That is why it is all the more important in a
world which is getting more and more complex to promote the public understanding of
science, and what better way than making all science open and freely accessible to all.
Added to that, there are initiatives now which take the common citizens as partners in
performing science. For example, the Einstein@Home project 37 discovered a radio-pulsar
and the LHC@Home project 38 enables volunteers to contribute idle time on their computer
to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN's Large
Hadron Collider. A number of amateur astronomers now use sophisticated telescopes attached
with smart phones to look at the night sky and identify new planets.
“I think that the whole arena of medical research publication and reporting needs a
shake up and needs to be handled in a different way. I think that we could be eons ahead
of where we are today if we had a very different system for sharing results,” says Sharon
Terry of Genetic Alliance, a patient advocacy group. 39
Serials crisis
It is not only institutions in developing countries which find it hard to access research
information. Librarians in affluent universities in North America are facing a crisis too.
As publishers are accountable to their shareholders more than to scientists who publish in
and read their journals and librarians who subscribe to them, their main motive is profit
rather than providing scientists affordable access to information. Publishers' greed led to
a spiralling rise in the subscription price of journals, especially in the past three decades,
with journal subscription costs rising at many times the general inflation. According to
the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the median subscription cost of a journal
rose from $87 in 1986 to $267 in 1999 at an alarming 9 per cent annual growth rate. In
1986, research libraries in North America purchased on average 16,312 serial titles and
37 Einstein@Home.org
38 http://lhcathome.cern.ch/.
39 http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=21.
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