Like members of all movements, OA advocates come in all shapes and sizes, and they are driven by a variety of different motives. Some have embraced OA, for instance, because they see it as a good business opportunity, some because they want their research to be more accessible, and so have greater impact, some because they expect it will save their institution large sums of money, and some simply because they believe that OA holds out the promise of providing considerable common good.
What is distinctive about the Open Access (OA) movement, however, is that it is a leaderless revolution. There is no formal organisation or foundation to represent it, and there is no official leader. For all that, OA is generally associated with a small group of high-profile Western-based individuals and organisations that are extremely vocal in their support of OA, and who have shown themselves to be very successful at attracting attention.
Since all movements have to promote themselves effectively this is clearly a good thing. However, it does mean that the contribution of the many “foot soldiers” of the movement can too easily be overlooked. These are people who do not shout about their activities, but simply go about the business of facilitating OA quietly and modestly.
And it is the foot soldiers based in the developing world that tend to be least visible — people like Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore.
Ah-ha
Jayakanth’s ah-ha moment came in 2001, when he first saw arXiv, the physics preprint repository. “I was very impressed with the concept of electronic pre-print servers, and I wanted to do something similar for IISc publications,” he explains, adding, “[M]ost of the research publications produced by IISc are locked up in high-impact, commercial journals. For those who cannot afford a subscription to the journals, the visibility and the potential impact of research produced by IISc and published in these journals is lost.”
 |
| Francis Jayakanth |
The appeal of OA for Jayakanth, therefore, is that it is “the best way of ensuring that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility.”
Keen to help Indian researchers achieve this wider visibility, Jayakanth became a dedicated and highly effective advocate for OA. More importantly, he determined to do whatever he could in a practical way to advance the cause of Open Access in his native country.
In 2002, Jayakanth was instrumental in the creation of India’s first institutional repository ePrints@IISc. Today this repository contains over 32,000 publications — around 80% of all the publications produced by researchers at IISc. Strikingly, this has been achieved despite the absence of an open-access mandate at IISc requiring researchers to deposit their papers.
Jayakanth also threw himself headlong into the task of helping colleagues at other Indian institutions play their part in the OA revolution. He began organising and running workshops and conferences on OA, helping others to set up their own repositories, and assisting in the creation of new OA journals, and the conversion of print-only journals to OA.
