CSIR plans open access repositories to break the monopoly of publishers

Rs 50 crore spent every year to get access to science journals

Chennai:

In a bid to break the monopoly of publishers, who are seeking exorbitant prices to grant electronic resources for research, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is now creating open access repository of its own papers.

R R Hirwani, head of CSIR Unit for Research and Development of Information Products, said during a national conference on Reaching Out to Users through Technology (Route 2013) that with publishers trying to exploit their monopoly position and quoting unreasonable price in granting electronic access to research resources, the plan is to create an open access respository of CSIR’s own papers and helping other laboratories with copies of papers from journals subscribed by them.

“If we have to have the access to major science journals from well known publishers, we have to shell out Rs 50 crore a day. Now with publishers moving to usage based model, we are going to pay in dollars for every single download including our own research papers and cost is going to be in the range of $15-35 per download,” said Hiwarni.

He said as per the mandate of Open Access for CSIR, all research papers published from CSIR laboratories and supported by a grant from CSIR would be made open access by depositing the full text and the metadata (electronically archived data) of the paper in an institutional repository.

He said each CSIR laboratory will set up its own interoperable institutional open access repositories for research papers, electronic thesis and dissertations. The Scientific and Industrial Research Unit for Research and Development of Information Products will set up a Central Harvester which will harvest the full text and meta data of these papers which will be made open access.

Interestingly, CSIR is organizing training programme for scientists to change their perceptions towards open access besides the personnel from CSIR laboratories who would be setting up institutional repositories.

CSIR is also trying to promote the open access culture by suggesting that every year scientist of year award be given on the submissions made to institutional repositories. These awards could be given on National Science Day, said Hirwani.

How the repositories will function:

Authors will put pre-prints of papers in institutional repositories

There are currently 28 institutional repositories which will be hosted by central server located at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Unit for Research and Development of Information in Pune.

In order to help individual scientists on what to place and how to do it, a detailed manual has been compiled and circulated to laboratory coordinators.