Open Access: Why India Should Brace it?

Abstract

Communication is the first step in the process of transformation of information (a collectionof facts or data) to knowledge (the state or fact of knowing). The conventional model ofscholarly communication, based on journal publication, has failed to make informationaccessible and usable especially for the developing world owing to toll-based access. Only therichest institutions have been able to afford a small proportion of all the expensivesubscription-based journals. In fact, the researcher, the author of the paper, has to pay to accesshis own paper.Electronic tools facilitate and speed up the process of dissemination of knowledge beyond thelimits of printed volumes of a journal. Electronic publishing also helps to propagate theknowledge across the world, which becomes especially relevant today with increasing spread ofdiseases across the globe. A toll-free access increases the visibility, accessibility, and impact ofresearch. This tool-free access, open access, is a worldwide movement to disseminate scientificand scholarly research literature online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary licensingrestrictions.Many journals in India, especially in the medical-sciences area, are now available free of cost inelectronic form. Unlike the western counterparts, the Indian journals which have adoptedopen-access policy do not charge the author or author institution for submission or publicationof their work. Wider accessibility of our journals has helped in increasing the citations of ourresearch papers. Unfortunately, the best scientific researches in India are usually not publishedin the Indian journals. Hence, even if all the journals from India adopt open access, Indianscientists will not have access to the work of colleagues unless the rest of the world alsofollows full open-access publishing. The only way out is to archive our work in ourinstitutional repositories (open-access archives), enabling long-term preservation and wideraccessibility of our research.Open-access publishing could help the journals from developing countries to reach theinternational level. At the same time, open-access archiving is necessary for the scientists inthese countries to have access to research published in toll-based journals.