Open Access Movement; Initiatives And Challenges

The Open Access movement aims to make scholarly literature freely accessible to all on the internet, without any expectation of payment, by author. This movement was founded and operates on the belief that knowledge is a public good and therefore, in order to facilitate further scholarship, learning, communication and discussion of ideas, the public should have unhindered access to it^[2]. It is only through such a free flow of ideas and discussions that the full potential of knowledge domain could be exploited and benefitted by public at large.

History Of Open Access Movement:

The Open access movement emerged as a response to the academic landscape of the latter half of the 20th century, which was primarily dominated and controlled by the commercial publishing industry. The commercialization of scholarly communication and knowledge, finds its beginning after the Second World War. The 1950s and 1960s saw a boom in the scientific literature, with an influx of articles, authors and other materials. The social and institutional publishing organizations were not able to cope with this unprecedented volume of materials causing the commercial publishers to step in^[3]. Slowly, the field was transformed into one of the most lucrative and revenue producing industries of the world, to the extent that it currently surpasses the revenue potential of companies like Google and IBM and even the oil industry. The alarming rise in subscription prices, skewed the circumstances in the publisher's favour as the market was an inelastic one. The rate of rise in subscription prices was such that even the elite universities in rich countries like the United States and European Union couldn't afford their charges. The inability to access materials and scholarly articles gave rise to protests and complaints in the academic community and a need was felt to ponder upon an alternative model of a distributed system of human intelligence. This gave rise to the open access movement.

Varieties Of Open Access Vehicles:

Although, individualized small scale initiatives with respect to open science had begun since the late 90s (ArXiv in the physics community), the movement was brought into the public light since 2002, through the Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002, (followed by the Bethesda Statement and Berlin Declaration in 2003). The movement will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Feb 14th 2022. Open Access is seen as a medium to "accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge." [BOAI, 2002].

In 2002, when the conversations around open access were in full swing, many possibilities of the digital revolution and the ways in which it could impact the publishing sector were as yet unknown and unexplored. The early supporters of open access focused their attention on articles and journals as the primary medium through which any strategy of open access could materialize^[4]. This belief has since then continued to manifest with the result that the dominant conversations around the mediums of open access have involved articles and journals. This belief has also led to the incorporation of two well-known strategies that have accompanied the discussion of open access- the Gold OA and the Green OA (terms coined by Stevan Harnad).

The Green OA model refers to the practice of depositing of a pre-print or post-print copy of a scholarly article by the authors in an institutional or disciplinary repository. Such a deposit makes that copy available to the target audience without any financial or legal constraints. The objective of this model is to ensure that publicly-funded research is available to the public responsible for the possibility of its realization.

The Gold OA refers to the practice of publishing scholarly work in either open access journals or in toll access journals/ subscription-based journals with an open access option. In both of these formats, the article is made freely available to the public after its publication, as per the terms and conditions specified therein. The Gold OA model moves away from the subscription-based business model. The subscription-based business model has typically been replaced by a business model wherein a publishing fees, referred to as Article Processing Charges is paid by the author of the published article.

Open Access Initiatives In India:

Green Open Access Initiatives

Open Access (OA) initiatives, although sparse, have been around in India since the early 2000s. Such efforts were first seen in the scientific community, through the development of open access repositories at the university level, to store theses, dissertations, preprints, post-prints, research articles etc. For instance, Vidyanidhi Digital Library was one of the earliest Electronic Thesis Databases to be organized in India in 2002 by the sponsorship from the then National Information System for Science and Technology (NISSAT), Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India^[6]. Since then, a national repository of doctoral theses has been established called Shodhganga managed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET). There has been a steady rise in the number of digital repositories set up by various institutions since the 2000s. Although the proliferation in the number of OA digital repositories is encouraging, they might not be representative of the entire reality on the ground. Recent studies have shown that while the number of OA digital repositories has steadily increased in India since the early 2000s, the number of items held by these repositories varies greatly, with some repositories standing completely empty^[7]. [M. Nazim, 2021]

Apart from institutional endeavours, efforts have also been made by the Government departments to ensure that scientific knowledge, data and scholarly resources be available to the Indian masses. For example, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) have formulated their own OA policies to make accessibility to scholarly literature a reality in India.

The Ministry of Education through its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) has sponsored the National Digital Library of India (NDLI), which is a "digital repository of learning resources with searching and browsing facilities, along with other services for the learner community."^[8] As of October 2021, the NDLI had 72, 962, 996 text resources.

Furthermore, the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of 2020 draft document released a list of recommendations in 2020 with the aim of promoting "open science". Notably, this policy document only focuses on STEM (Science, Technology, Energy and Mathematics) sciences and doesn't cover within its ambit social sciences and humanities. The most significant of the recommendations regarding access to scientific scholarly literature is the suggestion to adopt a 'one nation one subscription' formula for India, as per which a "centrally negotiated payment" will be made by the Government to journal publishers and all individuals in India will have access to journal articles. This has been suggested to replace the current system of individual institutional journal subscription. The policy report doesn't elaborate on the process through which such a momentous claim would be made reality. However, if this suggestion is successfully translated into practice, it would mean tremendous strides in the goal of open access to scholarly literature and knowledge in India.

Gold Open Access Initiatives

Open Access publications have seen a steady rise in India since their inception. Recent studies of the data obtained from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and OpenDoar show that India ranks at 16^th place in both OA journal publishing and OA digital repositories.^[9] Furthermore, India has been ranked at the 13^th place by Nature Index 2020 for its "high-quality scientific publications in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality scientific journals."^[10]

These initiatives show that the mission of open access has been undertaken by various actors in the Indian context, who wish to ensure that knowledge and information isn't barred behind access barriers, but is available to anyone who seeks it, in the true spirit of communication of the products of human intelligence. While, the diversity and quantity of open access initiatives in India is encouraging, there is a need to bring these conversations out of the academic sphere and into the general parlance so that all and sundry are aware of it and thus can contribute through action and intention towards its success. Furthermore, there is a need to discuss the challenges which are faced by the stakeholders in making open access a universal reality.

Challenges To Making Open Access A Universal Reality:

Although open access publishing is an admirable and much needed exercise, it is not without its challenges and setbacks. When the Open Access movement started gaining momentum, the publishing industry was confronted with the responsibility of figuring out ways to make the dream of open easy access to journal articles a reality rather than just a utopian desire.

One of the primary challenges in this endeavour was the development of a different business model, which did not rely on subscription charges paid by the consumer. Herein, it is important to note that publishers are not a homogenous mass. Although the market is dominated by large publishers with substantive revenue surplus, other smaller operations also exist. Publishers like consumers and authors vary significantly in their philosophy and corporate structure. They could range from "commercial to not-for-profit; university presses to multi-nationals; independents to corporate behemoths; august institutions with hundreds of years of history to relatively new entrants."^[11] This also means that financial impact of shifting to open access would vary for every publisher depending on their nature. The financial impact of shifting to open access model for publishers has been recognised by the Budapest Open Access Initiative document as well. It notes, "while the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce."

However, the BOAI also notes that experiments have shown that the overall costs of providing open access are "far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination."^[13] Therefore, the open access initiative provides journals the opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time. To realise this goal, it further states, "achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is reason to be confident that the goals is attainable."

In the Indian context, the financial model of publishers becomes an important question because of the relative obscurity of this issue outside of the specific publishing and academic circles. Due to the lack of awareness regarding the possibilities of open access in general public discourse, there may be a dearth of funding agencies and similar organizations willing to support and invest in open access endeavours. There is a need to increase awareness regarding this issue thus opening the doors for financial investments which may include open access charges, and the sustainable continuing development of such publishing organizations.^[15]

The Road Not Travelled-

Till now the Open Access movement has solely focused on journals and article repositories as the only ways to realize open access, but with the rapidly developing digital technologies many other ways of sharing knowledge are becoming a feasible reality. These mediums include: personal websites, blogs, wikis, databases, e-books, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds and P2P networks to name a few. It is perhaps time to start the conversation about ways open access can be made possible through these mediums as well and whether they are faced by the same financial constraints that has plagued the turning of Journals into the Gold-road and the creation of institutional digital repositories. It is only when we broaden this conversation that new solutions and strategies could be worked out.

The knowledge base of the society depends on research and development and the key indicators are Research & Development (R&D) expenditure as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and researcher per million population. Global GDP invested in R&D in 2018 was 1.73%.^[16] In India, the expenditure on R&D was 0.7% of the GDP in 2017-18, while the same for Brazil was 1.3%m Russian Federation 1.1% and China 2.1%.^[17] The countries who spent more on extending the frontiers of knowledge are the countries who have seen more returns in terms of the advancement of their economy. Similarly, the number of researchers per million population, globally has been 1235 in 2018 with 3847 researchers per million in Europe and North America and 99 in Sub Saharan Africa.^[18] In India, the same has been 253 per million population.^[19] If India wishes to see a rise in the research capabilities of its existing and prospective researchers, it should invest in making the success of open access movement a reality. The first step toward the realization of this goal is to increase awareness amongst Indian public and academics alike regarding the scholarly publishing practices and the various options available therein, including the option of open access, its potential benefits and challenges.