Earlier in July, a group of people working with the Departments of Biotechnology and Science & Technology (DBT/DST) of the Government of India had drafted an open access policy covering research funded by federal grants, and mandating their availability in a national repository.
The move was lauded because it meant Indian academia was finally making an attempt to embrace open access publishing, as well as making research labs more tractable and accountable about how they spent the people’s money. However, there was some ambiguity about whether the policy would address the issue of scientists typically preferring to publish their work in high impact factor journals, and the tendency to evaluate them on the basis of that number.
There were also questions about who would pay for maintaining the national OA repository as well as the institutional repositories, how it would address institutional reluctance, and if “glamorous” journals like Nature, Cell and Science – which prohibit self-archiving of published papers – would support DBT/DST.
Last week, I met Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, one of the people on the committee that drafted the policy, and asked him about the policy’s exact goals. He then spoke at length about the its origins and what it would and wouldn’t do.
For starters, he said that the policy will negate institutional reluctance by requiring all scientists applying for federal grants to submit the ID of their previous papers in the OA repository. It will also allow only the Government of India to keep track of and evaluate the research and the scientists it funds.
On the other hand, it won’t address scientists’ preference for high impact factor journals (such as Nature, Cell and Science), and it definitely won’t interfere with how institutions choose to evaluate their scientists – at least for now. In effect, the policy is a purely people-facing gesture and not a solution to any of the other problems facing the Indian research community, and it’s doubtful what it will do to check institutional nepotism.
The drafting committee is now looking for comments, suggestions and other feedback on the document, while waiting for a go-ahead from a government that is likely to take its time.
The policy draft does mention that the DBT/DST will maintain the repository, but Prof. Arunachalam couldn’t speak about the institutional repositories. In fact, he said that concern was farther in the future than getting those journals prohibiting self-archiving to make an exception for India’s scientists, and if they don’t, to allow pre-prints of the respective papers.
The eventual goal would be to set up a queriable database of citations, along the lines of PubMed but encompassing not just medical or biological literature but also for physics, he added.