Overview
All scientists need to publish their findings. Indeed, research is incomplete
as long as it remains unpublished. The last few years have witnessed the
unprecedented rise in the subscription costs of journals and even well-endowed
institutions in rich countries find it difficult to retain journal subscriptions.
The situation in developing countries like India is even worse. Besides,
others do not really read much of the work that we do in India in the
rest of the world. What is more, if our scientists publish their work
in expensive journals, then even other Indian scientists do not read them,
as not many Indian institutions may subscribe to those journals. It is
for this reason that the open access (OA) movement is gaining ground around
the world - both in the advanced countries and in the developing countries.
Indeed, OA will be of much greater advantage to India than to the western
countries.
Physicists have been placing their preprints and postprints for well over
13 years in a centralized archive called arxiv, which has more than 15
mirror sites including one located in India (Matscience, Chennai). There
are several other centralized archives such as Cogprints (for cognitive
sciences) and Bioline (for biomedical journals from developing countries).
Currently, distributed institutional archives are favoured, as they work
to satisfy the felt needs of both individual scientists and their institutions.
There are several sets of software available, all of them free, to set
up such interoperable institutional archives. This workshop aims to help
Indian scientists (representing general and agricultural universities
and government laboratories under the various councils and departments)
to acquire the skills necessary to be able to set up and maintain institutional
(or distributed) open archives. This workshop will provide training in
Eprints software developed at the University of Southampton and the Open
Archives Initiative Interoperability protocol.
There is great interest in open access around the world. In the USA, Congressman
Martin Sabo has introduced a bill suggesting that findings of all publicly
funded research must be made freely available to all. In the UK, the Parliament
has appointed a committee to inquire current and potentially useful practices
in science publishing. Several discussion lists are actively promoting
exchange of views on open access. The Budapest Open Access Initiative
is providing funds to promote open access initiatives.
In India, INSA devoted a whole day for a seminar on open access at its
annual meeting held at NCL, Pune, in late December 2003. Indian Academy
of Sciences, Bangalore, held two workshops on open access journals in
March 2002.
The Workshop
On a suggestion from Prof. M S Valiathan, President of the Indian National
Science Academy, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation will be holding two
identical three-day workshops (at MSSRF, Chennai) with a view to developing
a cadre of open access experts in Indian higher educational institutions
and government laboratories. We expect that before the end of the year
at least a dozen institutions will have their own institutional archives
up and running. There will be 20-24 participants in each workshop. Each
participant and the faculty will have an Internet-connected computer on
his/her desk.
Dates: 2-4 May 2004 and 6-8 May 2004
Venue: M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Sambasivan
Auditorium
The Faculty:
The workshop will be conducted by the following four experts, known for
their commitment to promoting this technology worldwide: Prof. Leslie
Chan of the University of Toronto and Bioline International, Dr Leslie
Carr of the University of Southampton, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications,
Mumbai, and Dr T B Rajashekar of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
All of them have considerable hands-on experience in open access.
Participants: Higher educational institutions and government
research laboratories (under the different Councils and Departments) may
nominate candidates in the prescribed form. [Heads of these institutions
may kindly ensure that an institutional archive is set up within three
months after the conclusion of the workshop.] 40–48 candidates will
be selected. Participants will either be scientists or be librarians/information
scientists. The important thing is they should be computer savvy and committed
to the cause of open access and be able to persuade scientists (faculty
and students) in their respective institutions to place their research
papers in the archives.
Workshop One, May 2-5 2004
Workshop
Two, May 6-8 2004
Guest lectures: We are inviting Prof. M S Swaminathan,
Prof. M S Valiathan, Dr R A Mashelkar and Prof. P Balaram to give guest
lectures (on how they, as working scientists, view open access). Two of
them will address the participants of the first workshop and the other
two the second workshop.
Workshop Coordinator: Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished
Fellow, MSSRF, Chennai. His email address is <arun@mssrf.res.in>.
Mr S Senthilkumaran and colleagues from the Informatics Division and Ms
R V Bhavani of MSSRF will provide technical and managerial support for
the event.