Note: This was written as a post for the Chat Literacy blog.
Over the last decade, the Open Access (to academic literature) landscape in India has experienced consistent, though uneven, support from the government. From the report of the National Knowledge Commission on Open Access and Open Educational Resources, to setting up of national knowledge portals on the topics of energy, environment, urban development and water, to explicit OA mandates by national bodies (University Grants Commission, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Indian Council of Agricultural Research) responsible for funding universities and public laboratories, to establishment of national-scale digital repository of PhD theses), the official support for OA practices does seem to be in place.* The challenge, of course, remains in the arena of implementation and especially in identifying and empowering the institutional/disciplinary champions. Moreover, the pushes towards OA as conceptualised and enacted by these governmental agencies most often take the form of introduction of new technological platforms and/or of policy regulations regarding publication of academic works. While such a path to OA will surely create a greater availability of OA academic literature, it does not locate OA as an essential part of academic practice -- both for developing a culture of peer-reviews and critical exchanges, and for connecting academic research to the world of researchers and practitioners beyond academia.
In the insightful discussion about the 'complexities of open access' that took place in the Chat Literacy platform in late March, we heard a range of experiences about promoting OA across the world. The most unfortunate issue of the attraction (and sometimes compulsion) to publish in 'prestigious' or 'high impact' journals were mentioned by several discussants. This has been a core challenge to the OA agenda since its very inception. We have talked about various potential solutions to such pressures, including institutional and governmental recognition (and promotion) of publications in open access journals, greater awareness regarding copyright contracts, establishment of '�green OA'� repositories for pre-print versions, and discplinary/sub-disciplinary organisation of efforts by academic researchers to introduce new open access journals.
In this final notes towards the above mentioned discussions, let me however focus not on this complex problem of institutional, academic and techno-legal challenges to expanding the practice of OA publication of academic works. Instead, I would like to briefly share two provocations to foreground some of the issues that often get left out of OA discussions: (1) the need to locate OA within the wider sphere of academic practices, and (2) the need to locate access to final academic paper within the wider demand for access to knowledge.
The first topic refers to the reality that both production of academic papers and their publication and distribution is critically shaped by the larger set of professional expectations and responsibilities within which the academic researchers live. It also draws attention to the hierarchy of educational institutes within a country and how different types of incentive structure operate across them. While greater access to one'�s academic publications can be a positive factor for researchers within certain institutes, since they are expected to produce academic works that create public impact, researchers in other institutes might be rather comfortable publishing in closed journals that are read only by peers (and often more international than national peers) as such institutes are expected to produce specialist knowledge meant for consumption by specialists only. Then again, researchers in certain other institutes may only be interested in publication of their works without caring much for its consumption because their academic performance is measured solely in terms of number of publications. The overall national academic culture and political economy, and the unevenness within, is a key factor in determining what the researchers produce and how to they circulate them. Further, a significant part of the necessary reading list across higher education courses in a developing country like India remains populated by papers published in 'closed' international journals. This creates a great division of access and hence of the level academic discussion across educational institutes, since only the more renowned ones are able to legally access such reading material.
The second topic becomes especially vital with the apparent fragmentation of the access to knowledge movement into open access, open data, open educational resources, open science and other similar agendas. On one hand, this situation makes it urgent for the OA agenda to understand and articulate its common and specific interests vis-a-vis all these other agendas (of the same family). On the other hand, this situation highlights the fact that the final academic paper is only one of the various material produced through the research cycle at academic institutes. Moreover, various kinds of research outputs, such as literature reviews, primary and secondary (compiled) data, policy brief, popular essays (for newspapers and magazines), technical specifications, etc. are consumed and responded to by various groups of people, who have much to gain from open access to the materials concerned. This necessitates a holistic conceptualisation of the research cycle, its various outcomes and the different groups of people who may benefit from access to those outcomes, and in return can enrich the research process itself. Such an approach to academic research, however, opens it up for public scrutiny and inputs much more radically than as imagined by the previous form of OA, which has traditionally focussed on sharing of final outputs of research. Making academic research a more open process, throughout its life cycle, will surely raise several questions regarding potentials for mis-interpretation, mis-representation and abuse of incomplete research. Hence, this kind of widening of open access to research must be approached with care and will of course involve an intensive re-configuration of academic practices at large. But many of such shifts are already happening -- from greater availability of data to research collaboration and sharing of yet-to-be-final findings through publicly-accessible websites. It is thus crucial for OA agenda to respond to and organise these shifts within the overall framework of greater and systematic access to open knowledge.
- For an extensive, though slightly dated, overview of the status of Open Access practices in India, please read the report by Prof. Subbaiah Arunachalam and Mr. Madhan Muthu.