The Changing Landscape and Future of Open Access in India

The past few years have seen a tremendous change in information production and growth with new knowledge disciplines added into academics. With journal subscription costs increasing at 8-10% annually (Miller 2015), libraries worldwide are finding it difficult to sustain subscription costs to scholarly material. On the other hand, making information and data available in interoperable electronic formats freely is a concept that is gaining momentum and OA (Open Access) holds promise to remove both price and permission barriers to scientific communication with the help of the internet. Scientists, policymakers, NGOs, government agencies and librarians are also collaborating together for OA implementation and making knowledge affordable to all. OA journals play a key role in making scholarly material immediately available on the internet. Introduction The OA movement in India started by advocates like Subbiah Arunachalam is more than a decade old. It is now gaining momentum with various organizations and departments under the Government of India such as the DBT (Department of Biotechnology) and DST (Department of Science and Technology) adopting OA policies in 2014. However, there is a long way to go as India does not have a national OA mandate for public-funded research. Few universities and institutions in this region have adopted an OA mandate on university-funded research. It seems that while the awareness about making research outputs publicly available has certainly increased within academia, the steep increase in the number of questionable journal publishers around the world has created a misunderstanding about the credibility and value of adopting the OA publishing route. This paper attempts to provide an account of the changing landscape of OA in India and proposes recommendations that can be taken to improve the adoption of OA in India.