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Raja Simhan T.E.

Information is precious. Especially if you are a student of science and don't want to re-invent the wheel. A new initiative to free up access to loads of research letting academics breathe easy.

RAMPRASATH, a Ph.D student in the US, spends half his stipend on buying scientific magazines for reference to work on his thesis in statistics. He is not alone. Thousands of students and researchers in the US and all over the world depend on costly magazines - subscription prices are between $500 and $1500 a year — for reference. Scientists need to publish their findings, and indeed, research is incomplete as long as it remains unpublished.

The subscription costs of scientific journal have risen about 10 times in a decade. While even well endowed institutions in developed countries find it difficult to retain journal subscriptions, the situation in developing countries, including India, is worse. Besides, researchers in the rest of the world do not really read much of the work that Indians do. Further, if Indian scientists publish their papers in expensive journals, even their Indian colleagues do not read them, as not many institutions in the country subscribe to these costly journals, says a scientist.

It is for these reasons that an international movement to provide research for free on the World Wide Web is fast gaining popularity. Called OAIster (Open Archives Initiative), scientists across the world are placing their work on the Web, enabling people to view them for free. A project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services, the OAI's mission is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access and academically-oriented digital resources that can be searched easily by anyone.

The research can be accessed at www.oaister.org. "The site is a treasure for researchers," says Ramprasath. Started about five years ago with a few research papers and participation by a few academic institutions in the US, the project now has over 30 lakh records from more than 300 institutions across the world, says Leslie K.W. Chan, Associate Director, University of Toronto at Scarborough, who is associated with OAI.

The Web may be a decade old, but it has had a profound impact on scientific publishing. Open standards and low cost networking tools are opening up many possibilities to reduce and even eliminate entirely the cost barriers to scientific publications, he says.

Publishing scientific journals is a multi-billion dollar industry. There are over 25,000 scientific, technical and medical journals publishing about 2.5 million articles a year. However, these are mostly published in the US and some in Europe. In India, all the libraries put together can subscribe to only about 1,500 of these journals, he says. Open archiving is nothing but deposition of scholarly research papers onto networked servers accessible over the Net. It allows scientists to retrieve research through an online interoperable mechanism, and also contribute to global knowledge database by archiving their own research. This would reduce the knowledge gap that exists between the north and south. Scientists in the US do not have access to research work of their Indian counterparts, and vice versa. Duplication of research can be avoided by open archiving the research, he says.

Since 1991, researchers in high-energy physics around the world have been connected through an eprint archive set up by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Research Laboratory in New Mexico, US. Since its inception, the scope of archive (now called arXiv) has expanded to include areas of physics, mathematics and computer science. Archived papers can now be accessed free of charge from over a dozen worldwide mirror sites, he says.

According to Chan, the eprint archive receives about two-thirds of its two million weekly hits from institutions outside the US, and a large number from developing countries like India. A key benefit for developing countries is that academic institutions can take advantage of servers anywhere in the world offering OAI services, without investing on independent servers or maintain them. According to Dr Leslie Carr of the University of Southampton, there are various types of open archiving. In self-archiving, an individual submits his own papers to a server or archive of his choice. There are institutional archives, where authors submit eprints to a server administered by an organisation or scholarly society — commonly their university or research institute. Institutions are provided with software for archiving research work, he adds.

An example of speciality archives is the Electronic Research Archive in International Health, which was set up by the International medical journal, The Lancet. This allows medical researchers to deposit papers of special reference to health issues met in many developing countries. Papers submitted are reviewed before acceptance and are then archived, says Dr Carr, who is associated with OAI and provides training to scientists on the archive software that can be downloaded for free from eprints.org.

On concerns of security as someone could copy the research, Dr Carr says it is a major issue. However, the software can track and monitor who is copying the research work. There is also concern that open archiving could lead to depositing poor research work on the Web. To this, Dr Carr says that experience of researchers using open archiving has been that open archiving has not jeopardised the quality of research, since researchers are concerned with the quality of their work. Further, people can review the research work across the world. This would, in turn, put pressure on scientists to provide only quality work, he adds.

Copyright is also seen as a major concern. In the paper era, researchers gave away the entire copyright to publishers in exchange for publishing their work in the magazine. Publishers made a lot of money in the bargain. However, in the electronics era, a number of authors archive the pre-print before submission to their chosen journal, says Leslie K.W. Chan. Increasingly, some of the major journals are relaxing their restrictions on author self-archiving or institutional-archiving, he adds.

The OAI is consulting with institutions across the world and library communities in refining standards and protocols that serve the researchers needs. New open archives are being established in many universities and libraries that will ultimately become part of the network of archives accessible to all. Open source and free software have been developed and being improved for use by institutions wishing to set up their own archives in an interoperable way, says Chan.

In India, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has an archive server. However, it is not filing it (researches) quickly due to lack of awareness. In the last couple of months, the OAI has been conducting workshops across Indian cities to create awareness among researches and research organisations on open archiving, he says.

Subbiah Arunachalam at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, says that Indian scientists by and large access information through libraries, which are essentially printed journals. Unfortunately, these libraries receive only a small portion of journals published around the world. Now, a few larger institutions have formed consortia and are receiving a few thousand journals and a few secondary services electronically. But, the vast majority of universities do not belong to this category. Nor do they have good Internet connections.

Physicists in some leading Indian labs are far better placed. They deposit their preprints and post prints in a centralised archive called arXiv, which is located in Cornell University, but has about 20 mirror sites around the world (including one at Matscience, Chennai). They also get to read the work of others almost immediately after they are deposited in the arXiv.

Open Archiving will help developing country scientists by making their work instantly available to the rest of the world's scientists. Easy availability will lead to greater use, and more citations, visibility and prestige. The idea of open access is yet to pick up in India, and a few more institutions are now trying to set up open access servers. The ICMR-NIC Medlars Centre in New Delhi, NCL in Pune and IIM in Kozhikode are among them. The Indian National Science Academy at New Delhi may also set up a server soon.

Says Arunachalam, it will take a while before the idea picks up in India. Scientists in India are not really very scientific when it comes to disseminating their work! Among the champions of open access are Prof. M S Valiathan, President of INSA, Dr R A Mashelkar of CSIR and Prof. P Balaram of IISc.

Picture by Ritu Raj Konwar

mail to:raja@thehindu.co.in

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