The Hindu : Cities / Chennai : Research papers will be available in public domain

“2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL. The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository... What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite... Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it... Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. ‘The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relieve authors of such hassles,’he says.”