Open access: The sorry state of Indian repositories
India
may not have a national open access policy in place, but the Council of
Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), The Indian Council of Agricultural
Research (ICAR), The Department of Science & Technology (DST), the
Department of Biotechnology (DBT), The University Grants Commission (UGC) have
open access policies that clearly mandate researchers to deposit their papers
in institutional repositories. National institutes such as the IITs and IISc,
too, have repositories and similar mandates.
Yet,
of the 69 Indian repositories listed in the Directory of Open Access
Repositories (DOAR) and Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), only 12
added “at least one item during a month” during the period July 2016 to June
2016. Seventeen repositories did not add even a single item during the course
of the year of study, while 40 were “irregular” in adding items to the
repositories, says a correspondence published in Current Science.
Worse,
some of them are not repositories in the strict sense — they do not host
research papers, pre-prints or post-prints. Instead, they have theses,
dissertations, book chapters, patents, annual reports, technical reports and
research proposals to name a few.
Lagging behind
“Open
access institutional repositories are clearly lagging behind despite the
mandate,” says Dr. G. Mahesh from the National Institute of Science
Communication and Information Resources, New Delhi, and one of the authors of
the article. “Individual researchers are required to deposit their papers in
the repository but they don’t. It is very difficult to motivate them to do it.”
One of the reasons why researchers do not deposit their papers in a repository
is because they no longer hold the copyrights. “In over 95 per cent of cases,
the researchers have already transferred their copyrights to the respective
journals,” he says. “Ideally, pre-prints of papers should be deposited in a
repository. A large majority of publishers of subscription journals have no problem
in researchers depositing preprints in a repository.”
Since
researchers transfer their copyrights to publishers when a paper is accepted,
it is not possible to deposit the papers in a repository.
“Researchers
get greater visibility when they deposit their pre-prints in a repository as
anyone can read them. The institutions too gain. So it difficult to say why
researchers don’t do it,” he says.
It
is another matter that except in the case of the IISERs, individual researchers
in most of the national institutes and government labs under CSIR, ICAR and
ICMR do not even regularly update their publication list. It is not uncommon to
find the publication list of many researchers, including those at IISc, not
updated since 2013 and 2014!
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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