Open Access-9: "Benefits of OA"

The following mail I received from Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, MS Swaminathan Fellow, which I am sure all those who are interested in OA will find useful:

2009/4/30 Subbiah Arunachalam

Friends:

Evidence is mounting that opening up science can bring in tremendous benefits. But convincing the bosses of Indian science about the advantages of open access continues to be a pretty difficult task. Now James Boyle has written about the stellar multiplier effect that open access can bring to the economic returns of scientific research.


Stimulus for cyberinfrastructure

James Boyle, What the information superhighways aren’t built of..., Financial Times, April 17, 2009. (Thanks to Lawrence Lessig.)

... We know that the United States’ experiments with freely providing publicly generated data -- on everything from weather to roads to navigation -- yield an incredible economic return. More than 30-fold by some estimates. We know that investment in basic science can provide stellar multipliers.

Some scholars have been arguing that the architecture of the internet, its embrace of openness as a design principle, might revolutionize science if we could apply the same principles there -- if we could break down the legal and technical barriers that prevent the efficient networking of state funded research and data. Imagine a scientific research process that worked as efficiently as the web does for buying shoes. Then imagine what economic growth a faster, leaner, and more open scientific research environment might generate.

Streamlining science, learning from the success of the internet, more open access to state funded basic research: these kinds of initiatives are the ones that might provide the ”superhighways of the mind,” the ”freeways of the information age” -- but they are too abstract, more likely to involve open data protocols than bundles of wires, and thus they garner little attention. Now would be an ideal time to invest in the architecture of openness, but this kind of architecture doesn’t get built with cement. ...

Permanent link to this post Posted by Gavin Baker at 4/29/2009 12:45:00 PM.


Most funding agencies in India have clearly failed to see the tremendous advantages of open access to peer-reviewed scientific literature and should be held responsible. [The Science Academies have done better.]

There is one more dimension to it.

Government invests heavily on research - on salaries of scientists and professors, on buildings and other infrastructure, equipments, chemicals, research grants, libraries, travel to conferences, and so on. And yet when Indian scientists write research papers and want to publish them they merrily give away the copyright to government-funded research to journal publishers, often commercial publishers operating from the Western world. So far no one seems to be bothered about it. Neither the politicians, be they communists or Congressmen or followers of other parties, nor students (belonging to politically affiliated student unions or unattached) have raised their voice against this unethical practice. And our scientists continue to sign on the dotted line when they receive the copyright agreement form from journal publishers.

They need not do that. They can always attach an addendum which can clearly state that they (or their institution) would retain the copyright, the right to reproduce portions of the articles in their future work, the right to self-archive their work either in an institutional archive or in a central archive (such as PubMed Central), and the right to make multiple copies for non-commercial purposes (such as distributing to students they teach). Funding agencies should insist, as such agencies in the UK have done, that researchers should make their peer-reviewed research publications openly accessible.

Subbiah Arunachalam

Grateful thanks to Professor Subbiah Arunachalam and Mr James Boyle.