M S SWAMINATHAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Third Cross Street, Taramani Instituional Area, Chennai 600 113
Tel: 044 2254 1229, 2254 2791 Fax: 044 2254 1319
Workshop on Open Access
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incomplete as long as it remains unpublished.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 in the rest of the world do not really
read much of the work that we do in India. What is more, if our scientists
publish their papers 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), CiteSeer (for computer science) and RePEc (for economics).
Currently, institutional archives are favoured, as they work to satisfy the
felt needs of both individual scientists and their institutions. There are
at least three 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 open archives. This workshop will provide training in Eprints
software developed at the University of Southampton and the Open Archives
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, the Bioinformatics Centre of the M S Swaminathan Research
Foundation will be holding two identical three-day workshops 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]. 4048 candidates will be selected.
Participants will either be scientists or be librarians. 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.
Guest speakers: 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_at_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.
Nominations of participants may please be sent to Mr S Senthilkumaran,
Associate Director, Informatics, MSSRF, Chennai 600 113, India. His email
address is <senthil_at_mssrf.res.in>.
All participants will be provided guesthouse accommodation and all meals. A
few travel grants (First class or Second A/C class by Express train) will
be made available, depending on funds available.
Some Relevant Documents
The Bethesda Statement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
Wellcome Trust, "Scientific Publishing: A Position Statement by the
Wellcome Trust in Support of Open Access Publishing,"
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtvispolpub.html
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
Subbiah Arunachalam: India's march towards open access
http://www.scidev.net/Opinions/index.cfm?fuseaction=readOpinions&itemid=243&language=1
M S SWAMINATHAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION
Third Cross Street, Taramani Instituional Area, Chennai 600 113
Tel: 044 2254 1229, 2254 2791 Fax: 044 2254 1319
Workshop on Open Access
Nomination
Institution Name and Address:
No. of papers from the Institution annually:
Name of the candidate:
Designation
Date of birth:
Qualification:
Familiarity with Computers and Internet:
Membership in Discussion Groups:
Past experience in Electronic Publishing:
Familiarity with Open Access:
Preferred dates: 2-4 May (Workshop 1) / 6-8 May (Workshop 2)
Travel grant: Needed / Not needed
Date:
Signature of the recommending authority:
Signature of the candidate:
Received on Sun Mar 21 2004 - 17:13:06 GMT