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Subbiah Arunachalam (born 1941) is a Chennai, India-based information consultant known for his campaigns in favour of open access for academic journals in developing countries. He has been associated with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation.
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Subbiah Arunachalam (born 1941) is a Chennai, India-based information consultant known for his campaigns in favour of open access for academic journals in developing countries. He has been associated with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation.
Linked with the Indian academic and scholarly communities for over three decades, Arunachalam has held posts of editor of scientific journals such as the Indian Journal of Technology, Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research, Indian Journal of Chemistry, Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and Pramana.
In an interview, [1] Arunachalam described his career: "I started out as a student of chemistry, and after obtaining a Masters in Chemistry at Annamalai University in 1963, I took a research assistant’s job at the Central Electro Chemical Research Institute, Karaikudi. I worked there for 21 months, doing research in electroplating."
"In May 1965, I moved to New Delhi, to work as an editorial assistant in the Publications & Information Directorate of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). Then in 1969, I took three years' leave to pursue research in physical chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore."
Arunachalam has said he has never taken a course in information science, but "simply developed a natural flair for some aspects of information science, largely focused on the needs of students of science seeking information for research, and those wanting to look at and 'evaluate' performance in scientific research."
Since the 1970s, he has been on the editorial boards of journals like Current Contents, Journal of Information Science (since its launch in 1979), Scientometrics, Public Understanding of Science, and Current Science.
He has also been involved in various other roles—science writer, researcher in chemistry, teacher of information science, librarian, executive secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and member of the editorial boards of scientific journals. In recent years, he has been Distinguished Fellow at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation and at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore).
In mid-2006, Arunachalam described his role thus: "Currently, I am active in two areas, in both of which my flair for information work comes in handy. For more than ten years I have been a full-time volunteer at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), in Chennai. There I am part of the Information Village Research Project, which uses new ICTs to empower rural communities, and an adviser to the National Virtual Academy."
He is also on the executive committee of the Global Knowledge Partnership, and the international advisory board of the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD). Arunachalam is one of three secretaries of Mission 2007, a Government of India-initiated project which aims at taking the "knowledge revolution" to India's villages. Besides, he is a member of the Working Group on Libraries set up by India's National Knowledge Commission.
In a post made in 2003, Stevan Harnad, another Open Access (OA) advocate, called Arunachalam "India's and the Developing World's great advocate for open access". [2] Arunachalam had then been named as Co-Director of the CogPrints Archive.
Arunachalam has said that his "interest in promoting Open Access specifically started around 1996, when I began working as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai".
He has argued that research performed in India, and funded by Indian taxpayers, is reported in a few thousand journals, both Indian and foreign. But since some of these journals are very expensive, "many Indian libraries -- including sometimes the author's own institutional library -- are not able to subscribe to them. As consequence, other Indian scientists working in the same, or related, areas are unable to read these papers. This is a problem common to all developing countries."
Arunachalam's view is that "if all these papers were published in OA journals, or if the authors made them freely available on the Web by self-archiving them — either in institutional OA archives or in central archives like arXiv and CiteSeer — then the problem would vanish." He is known to favour the self-archiving route for Indian researchers. This is because, he says, "it would allow us to achieve 100% OA (open access) more quickly."
Indian research is believed to be published in equal proportions in both Indian and foreign journals, but most Indian ones have a very poor circulation. Resultantly, Indian research work does not reach a wide audience, "affecting both its visibility and its impact". Hence, Arunachalam has argued that Open Access archives are "very important" for the Indian researcher, whom it could offer greater visibility.
Stevan Robert Harnad is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal, Canada.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
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Psycoloquy was a refereed interdisciplinary open access journal that was published from 1990 to 2002 and was sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) and indexed by APA's PsycINFO and the Institute for Scientific Information. The editor-in-chief was Stevan Harnad. A 1995 book on electronic publishing resulted from a listserv discussion about an article published in Psycoloquy.
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Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date.
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.
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An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
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Usha Ranjan Ghatak (1931–2005) was an Indian synthetic organic chemist, stereochemist and the director of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). He was known for his contributions in developing novel protocols of stereoselective synthesis of diterpenoids. He was an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1974, for his contributions to chemical sciences.
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
Open access in India was begun in May 2004, when two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. This laid the foundation for the Open Access movement in India. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2009, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research. In 2011, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
In Canada the Institutes of Health Research effected a policy of open access in 2008, which in 2015 expanded to include the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Public Knowledge Project began in 1998 at University of British Columbia. Notable Canadian advocates for open access include Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude Guédon, Stevan Harnad, Heather Morrison, and John Willinsky.
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
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