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

Chapter 7: Recommendations
I
We recommend that all publicly funded research in India should be made open
access. This could be achieved by:
1. Each research performing institution setting up an interoperable institutional
repository, where all authors will be required to deposit the full text of each one of their
papers in its final accepted form immediately on acceptance; if there is a publisher
embargo, one could still deposit the post-print immediately using the Immediate
Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) model.
2. The heads (or the board of management) of each research performing institution
(such as individual universities and laboratories) mandating open access to all research
publications originating in the institution [these mandates can come from the faculty, e.g.
Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Science, Stanford University School of Education,
or from the office of the Vice Chancellor or Dean, Research]. The reality is only a
few Indian institutions have an open access mandate in place so far.
3. Heads of Research Councils/ Apex bodies (such as CSIR, ISAR, ICMR, DRDO,
UGC) mandating open access in all institutions coming under their purview. There was
an effort of this kind at CSIR in 2009, but not many laboratories complied with the
request from the headquarters.
3. The funding agencies [such as DST, DBT, DAE] mandating open access to all
research papers resulting from projects funded by them, e.g. NIH and Howard Hughes
Medical Institute in the USA, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK in the
United Kingdom and the European Research Council
4. Science Academies (including Academies of Agriculture, Engineering and
Medicine) should play an active role in bringing about a culture of open access. After all
they are the custodians of standards. It is not enough if they make their journals open access.
They should advise the government to mandate open access. So far they have not,
whereas the National Knowledge Commission, which had a very short lifespan, did make
a clear recommendation to the Prime Minister.
5. The Ministers in charge of Ministry of Human Resources Development and the
Ministry of Science and Technology may together pilot an Open Access to Publicly
Funded Research bill in the Parliament (similar to the FRPAA bill in the USA) and give
open access legal status. Most research in the country is performed by institutions under
these two Ministries. The current Minister in charge of Higher Education agreed to man-
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