Social Justice in Scholarly Publishing: Open Access is the Only Way - IR@DST

"We live in an unequal world. There are tremendous differences between countries and between regions in a country in whatever characteristics we want to compare, be it the per capita income, educational opportunities, access to healthcare facilities or capacity to generate new knowledge. The difference is very pronounced in scientific and technical research, in terms of both volume and impact.¹ Writing about the distribution of science among countries some three decades ago, Frame et al had shown that the distribution of land area, national population and GDP, as bad as they are, are not so poor as the distribution of mainstream scientific research as reflected by Science Citation Index.² Back then just ten countries accounted for more than 83% of the world’s scientific literature. Added to these differences are the prejudices inherent to human beings. It is against this backdrop, I would like to view what Chattopadhyay et al have said on the happenings in global bioethics research.^3"