An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth — Centre for Internet and Society

“India has been losing out its best talents to the West, however, this trend could be reversed if we create adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, and our scientific productivity and quality of research will improve significantly,’ says Dr. Francis Jayakanth in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. First of all congratulations for winning the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access. [Q.] When did you first take an interest in Open Access and what are your research interests? [A]I have always been impressed with the electronic pre-print servers like the arXiv, Cogprints, etc. I wanted to do something similar for IISc research publications. [Q] Why Open Access is important to science and particularly India? [A] When researchers publish their works in journals and conference proceedings, they would want their works to be read, cited, and built upon by as wide an audience as possible. Much of the scientific publications are being published by commercial publishers. Subscription costs of such publications are very high, constantly increasing, and beyond the means of most of the libraries. The high subscription costs create an access barrier to the scientific literature because of which the publications do not get the kind of visibility that the researchers would like to. The lack of adequate visibility will reduce the potential impact of the publications. This in turn could affect the advancement of knowledge. It is therefore imperative that the access barrier to scientific literature created because of high subscription costs should be overcome and this could be achieved through OA publishing. [Q] Do you support the movement towards making scientific publications as freely accessible as possible and create an institutional repository? What steps are being taken by the Indian Institute of Science to maintain an open access archive? [A] Yes. Open Access Journals and Open Access Archives or Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the two ways to facilitate OA to scholarly literature.  As per the DOAJ statistics, today, there are close to 7500 peer reviewed OA journals and as per the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) there are more than 2770 institutional repositories across the world. In a recent study, Bo-Christer Bjork estimated that the overall percentage of scientific literature currently available OA is about 20 per cent. This includes both papers published in OA journals and those deposited in institutional repositories and directly on the Web. So, still a long way to go in achieving 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature! If all the research institutions set up their IRs and ensure that copies of post-prints are placed in the IRs then 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature could be achieved, at least, from now onwards. ePrints@IISc, the OA institutional repository of IISc was established by NCSI in 2002. The repository holds more than 32,400 publications of IISc making the century-old institute’s research far more globally visible than before. NCSI has also provided technical help and support to several other institutes and universities in setting up their repositories and OA journals...”