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

The INDEST consortium helps IISc and Indian Institutes of Technology (level 1 Institutions),
National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and Indian
Institutes of Science, Education and Research (level 2) and private engineering colleges
(level 3) in negotiating with overseas publishers for group subscriptions to journals.
There are other consortia which cover laboratories and universities institutions under
ICAR, laboratories under CSIR, laboratories under DAE, etc. The INFLIBNET consortium
of UGC works with universities.
While the number of journals Indian institutions can access has increased considerably,
one wonders whether our scientists, professors and students have taken full advantage
of this development. There are people who believe that the transaction has benefited
the publishers, whose representatives in India are marketing their journals and databases
aggressively, more than the Indian researchers. A study carried out at a premier institution
revealed that many journals have not been used at all by faculty and students in several
years. In another instance, the senior librarian of a national laboratory under a research
council told us that they were paying more than Rs 20 million for a consortium
subscription of a multidisciplinary database, but not many people are using the
database. We are not arguing that information published in those journals or the database
is useless. There is a case for increasing awareness among Indian researchers of the importance
of information and there is a need for focused short-term training programmes
in scholarly communication.
Some consortia administrators attribute the increase in the number of papers published
by Indian researchers in recent years to the large number of journals researchers
can access online. This conclusion is farfetched. Writing a research paper and getting it
published is at the end of a long process, starting from thinking up an idea, obtaining
funds, performing experiments, and so on. The increase in the published output is probably
due to the increase in funds allocated for R&D by the government.
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