Open and Shut?: Open Access in India: Q&A with Subbiah Arunachalam

" ... When Chennai-based information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam began calling for OA, for instance, there were hardly any other OA advocates in India, and not a great many more in the rest of the world either. Yet like all developing countries, India faced (and continues to face) a serious access problem with regard to the scholarly literature — a function of the fact that the costs of subscribing to scholarly journals are very high, and these costs consistently rise at a faster rate than overall inflation. As a result, Indian scientists do not have access to all the journals they need to do their job properly. Arunachalam had long been puzzling over how India’s access problem could be solved, and he had (unsuccessfully) tried a number of ways to resolve it himself. Then in 1996 his attention was drawn to Stevan Harnad’s 1994 Subversive Proposal — which called on all researchers to self-archive their papers on the Internet so that they were free for anyone to read. Immediately seeing the potential of self-archiving, or what later became known as Green OA, Arunachalam decided to organise a two-day workshop at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, to which he invited Harnad. This was in 2000. Since then Arunachalam has devoted a great deal of time and energy advocating for OA in India, an activity that must at times have been a somewhat lonely experience ..."