December 15, 2003

Open Access in the developing world

It is often claimed that Open Access offers new opportunities to bring important scientific and biomedical information to researchers and physicians in the developing world. The Internet provides a way to bridge the divide between researchers in the developing and the developed world and enhance the bi-directional sharing of scientific information. Open Access Now talked to Indian information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam about the impact of Open Access on researchers in India.

Information in India
Arunachalam is one of India's leading information scientists and one of the country's most energetic Open Access advocates. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai. Arunachalam is keen to point out that the issues affecting Indian researchers are relevant to colleagues in most of the developing world, particularly China, Brazil, Pakistan and countries in Africa. "The fundamental shared problem of researchers in all of these countries is the lack of resources; the lack of chemicals, equipment, and laboratory facilities, as well as the difficulties of attending international conferences and so on. But in my opinion the most important element that restricts our researchers is access to information. All science takes place in an 'information space' in which researchers make a contribution by adding to the body of existing knowledge. A scientist needs to have access to all the available information in order to be able to perform science at an optimal level. And that is what we really lack."

It has been estimated that there may be around 24,000 scholarly science and technology journals publishing something like 2.5 million articles each year. "Until recently, all the libraries of India combined had subscriptions to only around 1,500 of these journals. And many of the smaller colleges and institutes have only a few hundred journals," notes Arunachalam. "So how can we expect our researchers to perform good science at the level of someone at Oxford or Harvard? An Indian researcher can't get so much of the information and doesn't have the opportunity to meet international scientists, and yet we expect him or her to produce first-class science. It's just not possible."

"We have to keep working hard to convince Indians about the value of Open Access"

Subbiah Arunachalam

People may ask the provocative question "What is the need for people in India to do science in the first place?" Arunachalam feels strongly that scientists in his country have an important contribution to make. "There are many problems, particularly health issues, that are crying out for solutions. These problems will be addressed most effectively where they are felt most," he comments, citing research into areas such as tuberculosis, malaria and cholera as good examples. "We know more about these diseases and the seriousness and gravity of the associated problems. For this reason it is important for us, in developing countries, to be able to perform science here. And to be able to perform science it is important to have easy availability and access to all of the world's literature." He also cites numerous examples of Indians who made significant scientific contributions, such as the famous

"The most important element that restricts our researchers is access to information"

Subbiah Arunachalam

mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and the Nobel Prize-winner C.V. Raman. Arunachalam says that the developing world is full of people with exceptional intelligence and talents, but their potential is seldom realized. "These bright people must be allowed to do science and must be given all the resources necessary to perform good science; their contribution would make the world richer."

The divide between the developing and developed worlds' researchers is not just due to the restricted flow of information into developing countries. Indian scientists feel that their own research does not get widely disseminated outside India. "To be a scientist in a developing country is to be on the periphery of world science - one's work goes unnoticed," says Arunachalam. "A scientist in a developing country, who invariably works under adverse conditions, needs to achieve a lot more to win recognition than those who work under much better conditions in developed countries."

The Internet has provided a potential solution to India's information divide and access problems. "Indian researchers used to have to wait for months to receive journal issues - the time it took for them to arrive by boat. Now they can get them immediately via the Internet, providing that they have computers and Internet access. Our goal is to make all the scientific literature freely available over the Internet and to ensure that researchers in universities, colleges and research institutions across the developing world have access to the Internet. The world will be a much better place to live and there will be much better science," predicts Arunachalam.

Arunachalam studied publications from Indian scientists and found that they are much more likely to cite literature that is freely available. "If they don't have access to certain research literature, then there is no way they can quote it and there is no way that they can use it. Many studies have shown that better access leads to better research." His analysis supports research from others that indicates that Open Access articles are more highly cited than work published in restricted-access journals.

Arunachalam adds that many researchers in developing countries are limited by their access to computers and to good Internet connections, and he urges institutes and departments to establish public-access Internet centers. "To access information in cyberspace one first needs access to the corresponding electronic technology, and most scientists and scholars in the developing countries do not have access to the new information technologies. One computer can be shared by ten or twenty people, or even more. But one problem still remains. How are we going to provide inexpensive Internet access to scientists and scholars in poor countries?" He warns that the transition to electronic publishing runs the risk of widening the gap between the developed countries and the developing countries, unless computer access is available. Arunachalam commends the support from Bruce Alberts, President of the US National Academy of Science, who has suggested that heavy subsidies should be available to provide the computers and Internet connections to all scientists throughout the world. Arunachalam says that governments and international funding agencies must be encouraged to invest in providing broadband Internet connections to all scientists and scholars across the developing world. "Things take time to go from the realm of possibility to the realm of reality. So, we have to keep working hard at it."

Indian Initiatives
Arunachalam is part of a small band of advocates working tirelessly to promote Open Access in India. A couple of years ago he took the initiative to organize workshops on electronic publishing for editors and publishers of scientific journals in India. The workshops were held at Bangalore with financial support (Bangalore) publishes eleven journals, all of which are free online. The most prominent among them is Current Science, which is very popular in India. None of the Indian journals charges a publication fee from its authors. The important Indian journals are published by the government (for example, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research), by scholarly academies or by research institutions (such as Sankhya from the Indian Statistical Institute). The Geological Society of India and the Indian Chemical Society also run their own journals.

Another strategy adopted by Arunachalam and others has been to involve Open Access advocates from developed countries, inviting them to come and talk about the issues to the Indian research community. Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Stevan Harnard were amongst recent visitors to India. Arunachalam is also urging internationally recognized scientists to write about Open Access in the Indian press. 'The Hindu', one of India's top national newspapers, recently ran an editorial about Open Access that discussed initiatives from BioMed Central and Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Arunachalam is also trying to establish links with other developing countries, particularly the National Natural Science Foundation of China. "In my opinion, we should concentrate on India, China and Brazil, three large developing countries. If we manage to convert more and more people to Open Access in these countries, then the others will quickly follow." He is optimistic that the 'World Summit on the Information Society' meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in December this year, will provide a forum for discussions and policy decisions about Open Access in developing countries.

Arunachalam is very convinced that Open Archiving is important for releasing the scientific literature in both the developing and developed world. "I am not really in favor of all this journals business. I want everyone to place their research in interoperable university archives like the open archives used by the physics community." He says that many leading Indian academics in physics submit their work to archives, and he questions why their biology colleagues are slow to follow this example. One example of an Indian archive is the institutional archives of the Indian Institute of Science developed at the National Centre for Science Information, Bangalore.

"I believe we have to go and actively promote these archives," says Arunachalam. He feels that Indian researchers will respond well only to personal contact. "The organizers have to spend time every day meeting with faculty, going and meeting them in the canteen if necessary, explaining to them why Open Access is important and why they should submit their papers to open archives. We have to convince researchers that it's useful to them, but that requires a change of mind and attitude." He cites concerns about quality and impact factors that deter Indian life scientists. It seems ironic that despite the obvious advantages to Indian scientists, they have the same reservations about Open Access as their peers in the developed world. Arunachalam is clearly excited about the recent Open Access support from The Wellcome Trust in Britain and the Berlin Declaration in Germany (see Open Access Now, December 1, 2003). "I have spoken to many funding-agency officials in India," says Arunachalam. "They seem to be very sympathetic and agree with the importance of Open Access. In fact, I expect that some government funding agencies in India will soon insist that publicly funded research be available in open archives. I am working on it and I am confident that this will come through very soon. It's only a question of time now."