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

vantages of going open access admirably. Mr. Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet
and Society spoke at the Bangalore meeting on copyright, the rights of authors, and the
tremendous weaknesses of a Bill before the Parliament of India.
The Wellcome Trust and DBT formed an Alliance 104 in the first week of November
2009. The aim of the £80 million initiative is to support outstanding Indian biomedical
scientists with fellowships at three levels: early career, mid-career and senior. All fellows
of the Wellcome Trust – DBT India Alliance are required to make their research publications
open access, a practice followed by the Wellcome Trust whenever and wherever it
funds research. But DBT itself is unwilling to have a similar mandate for research
funded by them, despite the fact that the coordinators of more than 60 DBT-funded Bioinformatics
Centres had agreed to adopt open access in principle at their Annual Meeting
held at the University of Poona in February 2002.
Open Access Journals
India had to wait for the arrival of the Europeans and then the printing press before
having an indigenous scientific journal. It took 123 years after the first two journals
appeared in Europe in 1665 [Fig. 6 and Fig. 7] for a group of Englishmen living in and
around Calcutta to bring out Asiatick Researches in 1788 [Fig. 8]. This was followed by
Tables Containing Results of Meterological Observations (Madras, 1796). 105 These were
the only two journals that were published in India before 1800. Today India can boast of
hundreds of STM journals published by government agencies, academies, professional
societies and private companies. They cater to different fields and subfields. It is difficult
to have an exact number. Many of them are indexed in international indexing and abstracting
services, but most have a poor subscription base. Surely making them open access
will help improve the visibility and impact of the papers published in them.
As of 17 December 2010, there were 5,897 open access journals listed in the Directory
of Open Access Journals or DOAJ [www.doaj.org] (data accessed on 17 December
2010), and of these 276 are from India. Another database, Open J-Gate 106 , developed by
the Bangalore-based Informatics India Ltd, lists 7,967 open access periodicals worldwide
which include 4,773 peer-reviewed journals including 339 peer-reviewed Indian Journals
(Fig. 9).
There are a few other Indian open access journals which are yet to be listed in DOAJ
and indexed in Open J-Gate. For example, two journals published by the Indian National
Science Academy (Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Proceedings of
the Indian National Science Academy) and two journals published by Indian Council of
104 http://www.wellcomedbt.org.
105
Sen, B K (2002), Growth of Scientific Periodicals in India (1788 – 1900), 2002. Indian Journal of History
of Science. s112-s207; http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/7190.
106 http://www.openj-gate.com.
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