My presentation on communities of practices for Open Access in South Asia for UNESCO NDL Workshop 27 Oct 2017, UNESCO Office India.

1. Initiatives by Communities of Practice
Sridhar Gutam
Convenor, Open Access India
<sridhar@openaccessindia.org>
Open Access in South Asia
CC-BY

2. http://openaccessweek.org/
Open Access Week

3. Open Access?
Open Access literature is digital, online,
free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions
(Peter Suber, 2004)

4. @Aanuuppk

5. Why Open Access?
Open Access seeks to return scholarly
publishing to its original purpose: to
spread knowledge and allow that
knowledge to be built upon
(righttoresearch.org).
It ensures that the community has free
and immediate access to the literature
before and after it has been reviewed and
published (jneurosci.org).

6. @simosacchi | @seis_matters

7. “We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$ 2.4
million annually on APCs paid to OA journals and the amount would
be much more if we add APCs paid to make papers published in
hybrid journals open access “ - Muthu et al. 2017
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf

9. • Open access: The sorry state of
Indian repositories
–R Prasad, The Hindu
• “Open access institutional repositories are
clearly lagging behind despite the mandate”
– G. Mahesh, NISCAIR, New Delhi
Status of Open Access Repositories
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Open-access-The-sorry-state-of-Indian-
repositories/article17108642.ece

10. Status of Open Access Repositories
Kumar and Mahesh, 2017. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/02/0210.pdf

11. DOAJ – Indian Journals

12. Open Access India
• Advocating Open
Access, Open Data and
Open Education
• Launched as online
advocacy facebook
group on July 8th, 2011
– Facebook group
membership: 10864
• Grown into community
of practice

13. Aim and objectives
• Advocacy – sensitizing the students,
researchers, policy makers and general public
about Open Access, Open Data and Open
Education.
• Development of community e-infrastructure,
capacity building and framework for policies
related to Open Access, Open Data and Open
Education.

14. Proud Ambassadors
Sailesh
Patnaik
Samreen
Fathima
Gurleen
Kaur Kahlon
Sandeep
Rawal
Sri Amudha
Sajid Khan

15. Memberships & Partnerships
• GODAN - Global Open Data for Agriculture
and Nutrition
• ICORE – The International Community for
Open Research and Education
• OA2020 – initiative for large-scale transition
for open access
• Open Policy Network
• CLACSO Working Group - Bienes Comunes y
Acceso Abierto (Common Goods and Open
Access) for the period 2016 – 2019

16. Works & Initiatives
• Actively participated in discussions/deliberations for ICAR
Open Access Policy
• Developing Indian Journals' copyright policies to be
integrated with the databases like Sherpa/RoMEO.
• Working with DOAJ in building whitelist of Indian Journals
• National Open Access Policy of India (Draft) Ver. 3
– A draft ‘National Open Access Policy’ for India was
prepared and submitted to: Ministries - Human
Resource Development and Science & Technology,
Government of India on 14th February, 2017, the 15th
anniversary of the BOAI (Budapest open access
Initiative). <https://zenodo.org/record/1002618>

17. “everything else can wait, but not agriculture.” -Jawaharlal Nehru.
Preprints for Agriculture

18. OA Communities in South Asia

19. Forum for
Open
Access in
SAARC

20. • We collectively coordinate and develop a framework for Open Access in South Asia/SAARC.
• We agree with the Joint COAR-UNESCO Statement on Open Access and will work for the
alternative system in which both the author and the reader need not pay any charges.
• We advocate for the practice of Open Science (sharing tools, methods and results (data)).
• We adopt the Free and Open Source tools and innovative technologies for the development
of models for sharing scholarship.
• We will garner support of the relevant stakeholders (students/scholars, journal editorial
teams, university libraries, state libraries, public authorities in charge of dissemination of
scholarship in higher education and other stakeholders) for spearheading the Open Access
movement.
• We will take forward the concept of Open Access to further bring all the publicly funded
research outputs (not limited to journal literature alone) to be freely available to the public
to use and re-use for the public good.
• We will draft National Policies for Open Access and formulate country-specific action plans
for making Open Access as default by 2030/250 thus making all the publicly funded research
in South Asia (SAARC Countries) publicly/freely available to the public through the Internet.
• We will practice and encourage the researchers and the scientists to adopt openness in peer-
reviewing and other editorial services.
• We will work for an alternate reward system in recognition and promotion not in terms of
the ‘Impact Factor’ of the journals, but the ‘Impact’ of the articles/scholarship in the science
and the society.

22. Thank you
gutam2000@gmail.com