Open Access in India: Q&A with Subbiah Arunachalam

Today the world is awash with OA advocates, and the number of them grows year by year. But it was not always thus. 

Subbiah Arunachalam

When Chennai-based information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam began calling for OA, for instance, there were hardly any other OA advocates in India, and not a great many more in the rest of the world either.

Yet like all developing countries, India faced (and continues to face) a serious access problem with regard to the scholarly literature — a function of the fact that the costs of subscribing to scholarly journals are very high, and these costs consistently rise at a faster rate than overall inflation. As a result, Indian scientists do not have access to all the journals they need to do their job properly.

Arunachalam had long been puzzling over how India’s access problem could be solved, and he had (unsuccessfully) tried a number of ways to resolve it himself. Then in 1996 his attention was drawn to Stevan Harnad’s 1994 Subversive Proposal — which called on all researchers to self-archive their papers on the Internet so that they were free for anyone to read.

Immediately seeing the potential of self-archiving, or what later became known as Green OA, Arunachalam decided to organise a two-day workshop at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, to which he invited Harnad. This was in 2000.

Since then Arunachalam has devoted a great deal of time and energy advocating for OA in India, an activity that must at times have been a somewhat lonely experience. As the manager of Library and Information Services at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) Muthu Madhan put it recently, “OA advocacy in India can be characterised as mostly a one-man effort by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam.”

But Arunachalam's commitment to the OA cause has gradually borne fruit. “His advocacy was largely responsible for OA developments at IASc, INSA, CSIR and ICAR”, says Madhan. “He organised many workshops and conferences (on OA-related topics) and mobilised funds to bring overseas experts (such as Alan Gilchrist, Stevan Harnad, Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan, Leslie Carr, Alma Swan, John Willinsky, and Abel Packer) and Indian experts and participants.”

What drives Arunachalam is a firm belief that open access holds out the promise of a faster and more effective system for creating and sharing new knowledge, one, moreover, that will not discriminate against the developing world in the way the current subscription system does. And this belief is rooted in a lifetime's experience as an editor of scientific journals, a student of science (electrochemistry), and a period working as secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Arunachalam has also been on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, Current Science, and Public Understanding of Science, and he worked for twelve years as a volunteer with MSSRF, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to rural development.

Currently Arunachalam is a distinguished fellow with the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), and an Honorary Fellow of the UK’s CILIP. He also teaches science writing to students of journalism.

(More on Arunachalam’s background and career is available in three earlier interviews undertaken in 2006 and 2010 — here, here and here).

Looking back, what does Arunachalam feel has been achieved since he began his OA advocacy 14 years ago, and how would he characterise the current state of OA in India? To find out, I put to him recently the ten questions below.

Reading his answers, a couple of things immediately stood out for me. First, I was struck by Arunachalam’s insistence that Green OA is all that is required. Second, I was struck that, while he recognises that Gold OA is nevertheless an inevitable development of the open access movement (and very much a reality now), he does not believe that it is necessary for OA journals to levy article-processing charges (APCs).

To support the latter claim, Arunachalam refers to the situation in Latin America, where the operating costs of running OA journals are invariably underwritten by research institutions. As such, there is no need to charge authors (or their funders) to publish their papers.

He adds that (leaving aside the plague of predatory publishers that have been setting up shop in the country over the past few years) it is not the norm in India for OA journals to charge APCs either.

So, for instance, none of the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) or the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) charge APCs. “The cost of running the journals is not much and it is often covered by the funding agency,” explains Arunachalam.

He adds, “Of late Current Science, which has a large following, has become self-sustaining (through institutional membership and advertisements).”

This is a point that Madhan has made too. The only program where an Indian funding agency explicitly permits APCs for scientists, he explains, is the alliance between the UK’s Wellcome Trust and the Indian Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

Not for the first time, I found myself concluding that OA looks set to grow into something rather different in the developing world to what it is becoming in the Global North.

The interview begins

RP: When and why did you become an OA advocate?   

SA: My interest in the problems we face in India in getting access to research papers predates the open access movement, and was initially focused on trying to get copies of used journals sent over from the US.

In 1982, for instance, Eugene Garfield invited me to a four-day workshop entitled Advances in Information Access he held at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. After the workshop I spent more than a month in the US and met many Indian academics in different cities there. On meeting them I asked them all if they would send me the journals they subscribed to after they had used them so that I could distribute them to academic libraries in India. Remember those were days when getting foreign exchange was next to impossible in India and most academic libraries had only a few journals on their shelves.

I visited about 20 cities while I was in the US, travelling coast to coast on an Eastern Airways ticket (a travel as you please ticket sold at $400). I met many people whom I had never seen or known before and all of them were very kind — they came to the airport, took me home, provided hospitality for a night or two, organised small gatherings of Indian academics to meet and hear me. But while almost all those whom I met were appreciative of my idea of sending used journals to India, nothing ever materialised. 

Subsequently Dr Garfield and I discussed the possibility of shipping journal issues indexed in Current Contents to India, organising them into proper collections at a central location and then distributing them to selected academic libraries.

I and a friend, Prof. Balasubramanian Viswanathan of the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, worked hard on this idea, but for obvious reasons it too did not take off. Years later Prof. Viswanathan set up a repository for the Catalysis Society of India and populated the repository all by himself.

My interest in promoting open access began around 1996, when I started working as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, and at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, where I was a volunteer for 12 years (1996-2008).

In 1994 Stevan Harnad had posted his iconic Subversive Proposal online. While at the time I missed the discussion that followed, Dr Garfield reprinted and commented on Stevan’s proposal in Current Contents. This inspired me in 2000 to invite Stevan to speak at a two-day workshop I organised at the MSSRF, thanks to financial support from the engineering company Larson & Toubro.

After the workshop, I travelled with Stevan for about a week. All my efforts until then had been on trying to make information available to researchers in the way I described, but after spending some quality time with Stevan I was inspired to start promoting open access and to try to improve access to Indian research by means of OA.

So in 2002 I invited Leslie Chan of Toronto University and Barbara Kirsop to organise two three-day workshops on electronic publishing, with financial support from several international organisations. And I persuaded two of India’s most prestigious scientific institutions — the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science — to co-sponsor the workshops with MSSRF. Fifty participants from all parts of India were trained in two batches.

Then in 2004, I invited Leslie Carr of Southampton University and Leslie Chan to conduct two three-day workshops on the EPrints repository software and open access, again at MSSRF and with financial support from a number of international institutions. There were about fifty participants from all parts of India, including ten from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

It took a while for the impact of this workshop to materialise. Indeed, to this day two thirds of those who attended the workshop have done hardly anything to promote OA. I was particularly unhappy about ICAR and some of the large universities for their inaction.

On the other hand some of those who attended — notably Mr Sukhdev Singh and Mr Muthu Madhan — have become real champions of OA in India.

I began to campaign actively for open access in other ways too — talking about the need to embrace OA, especially in developing countries, wherever I went, and sending out advocacy emails to a large number of researchers in both academic and (publicly-funded) research institutions, as well as funding agencies. It was at this point that some people in India began to refer to me as Mr Open Access!

Achievements and disappointments

RP: What would you say have been the biggest achievements since you became an OA advocate, and what have been the biggest disappointments?

SA: In terms of achievements, I would point to the activities of the Indian Academy of Sciences and of Dr Dev K Sahu,  a paediatrician-turned journal publisher.

The Academy started experimenting with OA as far back as 1998-99. Initially it made Current Science (co-published with Current Science Association) and Pramana (its physics journal) OA. Later all 10 of its journals went OA, and today its repository (which contains papers published by its Fellows, both living and deceased) has more than 90,000 items in it, although a substantial number of them provide only the abstract and not the full paper.

With regard to the contribution of Dr Sahu, when he attended the first workshop I organised in 2000 he was already publishing many journals under the banner Medknow in Bombay, and he had experimented with both electronic journals and OA. [RP: Medknow was acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2011].

As to my personal successes, they began when the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) adopted open access (with OAI-PMH compliance). True, it took a few years, but the results are very satisfying to me.

Today more than 25 of the 37 laboratories under CSIR have their own repositories (although some of them are far from comprehensive) and they have their own central repository and harvester managed from Pune. CSIR has also made all 16 of its journals (published by its publishing arm the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Research) open access.

More recently, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has announced a comprehensive open access policy. And both the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and ICAR made their journals open access a few years ago. I have to thank my friends John Willinsky of Stanford and Leslie Chan for helping me to convince ICAR to make its journals OA (I took both of them to see the chief editor and deputy director general of ICAR). However, I played no role in the ICMR journals going OA, so can claim no credit there.

Likewise, I cannot claim to have influenced ICMR — in fact my efforts to persuade it to set up institutional repositories in its laboratories have to this day failed to bear fruit.

Another success to highlight (and for which again I can claim no credit) is that by the time I began advocating for OA many Indian high energy and condensed matter physicists had been placing their preprints in arXiv for well over a decade, and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madras had created a mirror server of arXiv.

In addition, ICRISAT (a CGIAR centre located in India) is the first CGIAR centre to have a near-complete OA repository. This was the work of my friend and former MSSRF colleague Dr Venkataraman Balaji, who is currently promoting open education and MOOCs at Commonwealth of Learning.

I mentioned earlier that Mr Muthu Madhan attended the workshop on EPrints and open access that I organised in 2004. Mr Madhan is now with ICRISAT (having previously worked at the MSSRF) and has helped half a dozen institutions set up their own institutional repositories. The first of these was at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, which institution has the distinction of having adopted the first comprehensive OA mandate in India, one that covers journal articles, conference papers, theses, etc.

More recently, ICRISAT became the second research centre located in India to adopt an OA mandate.

Overall today, India has around 100 OA repositories, although not all of them are active. And the information and library network INFLIBNET now hosts more than 9,000 full text records from more than 140 institutions. There has also been a concerted effort to make scientists and librarians in India aware of the nuances of copyright and Creative Commons licenses, but the fruits of these efforts are yet to be seen or felt. 

Among my disappointments are the fact that both the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India and the then Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology — who could have easily issued an OA mandate for publicly-funded research in India similar to the one issued last year in the US by John Holdren of the Office of Science Technology Policy (OSTP) — have remained unmoved by all the reasoned arguments of OA advocates. Let us hope their successors are OA friendly.  

Another minor concern I have is that the former editor of Current Science, one of India’s most respected scientists and commentators on science policy, and a member of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is unwilling to extend his firm support for OA to calling for it to be mandated.

I would also note that some years ago the former Director General of CSIR said he was ready to convert all the organisation's journals to OA, to request that all CSIR laboratories set up IRs, and to mandate OA. However, although he did make CSIR's journals OA, and he did request all CSIR labs to set up repositories, he did not mandate OA before he left office. As a result, less than 30 of the 40 CSIR institutions have yet set up OA IRs, and many of those created are failing to attract deposits.

So while CSIR’s journals are OA today, and while over half of its labs now have repositories, there is only an OA policy in place, not a mandate. As a consequence, the repositories have only proved partially successful, with many laboratories and scientists not complying with the policy.

Beyond India, a letter to the top management of CGIAR that I organised in 2010 (along with fifteen other OA advocates) suggesting that CGIAR introduce a system-wide OA policy and mandate finally led to a policy in 2013. 

Gold, Green, and Hybrid

RP:  There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should play. What would you say should be the respective roles of Green and Gold OA in the context of the developing world today?

SA: I have absolutely no reservations about Green. It makes a lot of sense, as was demonstrated as early as 1991 when Paul Ginsparg, then at LANL, set up arXiv. The CERN and SLAC preprint services existed even before that.

The way I see it is that researchers do the research, they write the papers to report their findings, and they read and use each other’s papers as part of the process of advancing knowledge. Today the Internet and related technologies facilitates the better sharing of those papers. So a fully Green future is eminently possible and should be our goal.

If that is only possible by introducing a mandate then I am all for such a mandate, notwithstanding the fact that I am a champion of freedom of the individual. If a chancellor of a university can insist that a teaching professor should teach a certain number of hours, conduct examinations in the subjects he teaches and evaluate and grade the answer papers, what is wrong if he insists (or mandates) that any research done from within the university should be deposited in the university’s repository? 

I am not enthusiastic about Gold OA however, especially if it requires paying an article processing charge (APC). Nevertheless, I can see that in regions like Latin America Gold OA without APCs seems to be doing well, as witnessed by the thousands of journals in SciELO, Redalyc and Latindex.

Even in this region, however, Green OA is picking up — as witnessed by the OA legislation adopted both by Argentina and Mexico. And many countries and regions including the European Union, the US and Australia have come up with OA policies that predominantly support OA by means of Green channels.

What is clear is that both Green and Gold OA are a reality today, and they will surely continue to coexist, if for no other reason than that not all researchers in countries like India can be persuaded to deposit their papers in OA repositories immediately. 

We could also note that the OJS software developed in Vancouver — which is freely available and allows anyone to set up a journal — has been adopted by more than 10,000 journals around the world.

So pragmatism demands that, while I may want to see the world move to an entirely Green future, I need to accommodate Gold — so long as it does not incur an APC. In fact none of the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, CSIR, ICMR and ICAR in India do charge an APC.

It is also worth noting that journals that charge huge subscriptions, and most Gold OA journals that charge high APCs, claim that these charges are necessary to meet the costs of the high standard of services provided. And this argument appears to have been accepted by funding agencies like the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK, who are ready to provide grants to meet these high APCs.

Yet I wonder if many in the developed world know that those scholarly publishers who publish hundreds of journals actually employ low-paid staff in cities like Madras and the suburbs of Delhi to carry out these services, including copyediting, manuscript flow, and production. Every major STM publisher gets such work done in India (and some other developing countries) at a very low cost. So in reality high APCs and subscription charges are simply fuelling the excessive profits that publishers based in the Global North are making, and support the high pay and perks of the executives who run these companies.

The question is: should scientists be underwriting a process that has made the STM journal publishing industry one of the most profitable industries in the world?  Especially when better alternatives are available?

RP: What about Hybrid OA? What role, if any, do you see for that?

SA: Including a few OA papers in an otherwise non-OA journal is not a very attractive proposition, especially, if the publisher charges a huge APC for making the articles OA and is simultaneously charging a huge subscription for the journal.

Unsurprisingly, authors do not seem to like the idea. The number of OA papers in non-OA journals is pretty low. Publishers may wish to offer Hybrid OA in order to show that they are friendly to the concept of OA, but I do not think the research community has anything to gain from the arrangement.

RP: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in India and internationally?

SA: I would say that lot more could have been achieved since the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) if we had not wasted a considerable amount of energy arguing amongst ourselves, sometimes acrimoniously.

That said, in the past two years the OA movement has gained considerable momentum. Although the Finch Committee recommendation turned out to be a bit of a disaster, developments in the US, Europe and elsewhere have proved to be big gains for the international OA movement.

So far as India is concerned, there is still a lack of clarity about the benefit of and need for open access, amongst researchers and officials in policymaking bodies, and amongst funding agencies. This is largely because many of them have not taken the trouble to read the basic OA texts and follow developments, even when the details are sent to their mailbox.  

To incentivise those in the developing world, the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) has introduced an annual award for individuals who have advanced the cause of open access in any developing or transition country.

In the inaugural year this award was won by the unassuming Francis Jayakanth, of India, and by Iryna Kuchma of EIFL in 2012. A quick review of the nominations for the award demonstrates the enthusiasm and efforts made in a range of areas in a number of countries. In 2013 the award was shared by Mr Muthu Madhan of India and Ms Rosemary Otando of Kenya.

So overall I would say the movement is gaining momentum, but rather slowly. For-profit publishers continue to do all they can to stall the progress of OA. To this day they object to authors placing their research papers in a central repository (except in a few cases like PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central); in countries like India funders often prefer a central repository.

One major concern is the mushrooming of predatory OA journals, and Jeffrey Beall’s list makes it clear that India is home to many such journals. Agencies supervising higher and technical education evaluate individuals (when granting research fellowships and assessing promotions) by the number of papers published, and these predatory journals are using that to their advantage. 

Priorities

RP: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

SA: I will restrict my reply to India.

The heads of funding agencies — almost all of them agencies of the Government of India — should mandate OA and insist that research institutions set up institutional repositories. Currently, I am in conversation with two of these agencies with regard to developing an OA policy for them, and I sense a positive outcome.

The Indian parliament should enact a law requiring that research papers (and the associated data) resulting from public funding are made open. As I noted, Argentina already has such a law. India should introduce one too.

Fellows of all academies should send memoranda supporting open access to the Ministers of Science and Technology, Human Resource Development, Health and Agriculture. I am in touch with the President of one of the academies to this effect.

Citizens in India should form a Taxpayers Alliance for Open Access, and university students should form a nationwide “Students for open access” forum.  

For OA advocates specifically the priorities should be to:

(1)           convince the large number of researchers of the need to adopt OA, and of the need to retain certain rights in their work, rather than surrender them all by signing the copyright agreements that publishers put in front of them,

(2)           convince the directors of research laboratories and vice chancellors of universities to set up interoperable institutional repositories,

(3)           lobby parliamentarians to enact legislation requiring that all publicly funded research is made openly accessible, and of course,

(4)           join forces with like-minded people, and those who can bring knowledge and skills that we do not have. I am thinking, for instance, of experts in copyright law and Creative Commons — scholars like Lawrence Liang and activists like Sunil Abraham. We in India should be part of the international OA movement and learn from the experience of others.  

RP: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

SA: To march towards 100% OA for all of science and scholarship, preferably through the institutional repository route. And where currently the emphasis is largely on STM, we should work to make all of social sciences and humanities research OA as well.

RP: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

SA: A great deal. In a world without OA — where all of us have to pay to gain access — most developing country researchers, teachers and students have access to just a tiny little part of the research that would be useful to them. With OA, the universe of available knowledge expands hugely. In addition, OA allows researchers in the developing world to have their own work seen and used by scientists all around the world.

OA can improve access to scholarly information — and thus the visibility and use that is made of it — at one stroke. As such, it promises to benefit the whole world and help speed up the creation of new knowledge.

It would also facilitate the participation of citizens in science — Galaxy Zoo; the many amateur astronomers in Japan and elsewhere; and the award-winning work of the American school student Jack Andraka are good examples of this.

OA would also better facilitate crowd sourcing in science. Much of molecular biology today depends on sharing data through databases like GenBank. Consider also that when Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers published an unsolved problem on his blog it was solved in 32 days by the collective inputs of 27 mathematicians from around the world, who made 800 substantive contributions. In each one of these examples, one can imagine people from the developing world participating and making valuable contributions.

One absurd consequence of toll-access publishing is that in many developing countries work done in one laboratory may not be noticed by researchers in other laboratories in the same country, because their libraries are not able to afford to subscribe to the journal in which the paper is published. All that would change with open access.

In addition, if developing country institutions have IRs of their own and if their researchers deposit all their papers in them, then it is easy to monitor the progress made by each one of these researchers, and to develop different kinds of analytics for evaluating their contributions. 

Of course, we need also to ensure that scientists everywhere, even in the poorest countries, have access to computers and high bandwidth Internet connectivity at affordable costs.

Expectations

RP:  What are your expectations for OA in the next 12 months?

SA: We already have many funder OA policies and many national policies around the world. Thanks to the decision by OSTP to expand public access, many funding agencies in the US will soon have their own OA policy too (similar to the NIH policy) and that will see a large number of papers by US authors deposited in open access repositories.

And as I noted, OA laws are being introduced around the world, including Argentina and more recently in Mexico. We can hope to see similar laws passed in other countries in the next 12 months.

In the meantime, the share of research content that is made available OA continues to rise. Last year a Canadian group suggested that OA had reached a tipping point, with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free. By contrast, a study published in PLOS ONE last month Madian Khabsa and Lee Giles report that only 24% of English language papers indexed in Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research are OA. But whatever the precise numbers, the percentage of papers made OA can only be expected to increase going forward.

Alas, in India we seem to be a bit slow! But the indications are that some important announcements will be made here too soon. The Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (who is also currently heading the department of Science and Technology) is very keen to develop an OA policy for these two departments. And we can expect the Indian Academy of Sciences to start discussing the role it can play in advancing OA in the country soon too.      

      

So in general things are looking up, but we should remember that OA advocates are not the policy makers or implementers!

This means that while the international OA community is now more cohesive, and anyone seeking help can easily get it, the publishing fraternity is looking for ways to protect the benefits they have long enjoyed, and if that requires stalling the growth of OA, by fair means or foul, they are ready to do that.

This suggests that we can expect to see both new successes and new setbacks over the next 12 months.

RP: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing?

SA: Undoubtedly it can be. As I said, the subscription prices of many commercial journals are set at very high levels, and this is largely to generate huge profits for publishers — who enjoy 35-40% profit margins year after year (and continued to do so even when the economy was in a downturn).

Since these prices carry on growing every year it is extremely difficult for even the most well-endowed libraries to retain all the journals that they subscribe to. The situation is that research funders pay for carrying out research and publishers then expect them to pay again to buy back the findings of the research! So the research community ends up paying twice, and at ever increasing prices. All this double dipping is unnecessary in the era of the Internet.

The problem is that when these publishers offer OA they offer it at an equally high price, which is one reason why I am not in favour of paying APCs. From the perspective of India, Indian researchers publish about half of their papers in overseas journals, some of which charge a fee to make a paper OA. In a country where there are far more important priorities for the limited resources available, it is unacceptable, and even immoral, to divert funds for this purpose.

The point is that it need not be like this. In India, most of the better-known journals are published either by an Academy of Sciences or by a government research agency. None of these journals charge either to read or to publish. The cost of running the journals is not much and it is often covered by the funding agency.

I would also point out that of late Current Science, which has a large following, has become self-sustaining (through institutional membership and advertisements). In the West this may not be the norm and subscription journals will continue, but here is a model that the developed world might like to consider.

So in answer to your question as to whether OA will be an less expensive than subscription publishing: There answer is that it can be, so long as we do not simply swap high subscription prices for high APC prices.

If we can avoid that then as more and more papers around the world become available through OA repositories (and OA journals) researchers will have free access to them and the amount libraries need to spend on non-OA content will be less and less. Research will have greater value for money invested. The money saved can be used to buy monographs or laboratory equipment or to support research students. This is especially true for developing countries where costs do matter.