 Third
World superpower or peripheral?
In
his 1982 Annual Magnus Pyke Science Policy Foundation Lecture,
Dr. Eugene Garfield said, "Clearly, India is the research
'superpower' of the Third World." Indian researchers alone
authored half the 16,000 articles from the Third World indexed
in Science Citation Index (SCI) 1973. India had
maintained a steady ranking of eighth place in research papers
published since the beginning of the 1970s, produced five
times more mainstream scientific publications than the
People's Republic of China in the early 1980s, and remained
the uncontested leader among developing countries until the
early 1990s. Since then, the People's Republic of China, which
has shown far more determination, has raced ahead leaving
India way behind. India now occupies the 15 th
rank in the number of papers published
and is in danger of sliding into the periphery. Indeed
research output is growing very much faster in China and
Brazil, the other two large developing countries, and South
Korea, which used to be a minnow. [see Table
1].
Table 1. Number of
papers published by three leading developing countries
|
Country
|
2004
|
2003
|
2002
|
2001
|
2000
|
1981-85 |
|
India |
23336 |
23135 |
20405 |
19339 |
17501 |
10,978 |
|
China |
57378 |
49790 |
40749 |
35392 |
30509 |
2,146 |
|
Brazil |
17731 |
17014 |
14998 |
12807 |
12317 |
1,124 |
|
S
Korea |
24464 |
22958 |
18421 |
17343 |
14629 |
Not
available |
Data obtained
from Web of Science - SCI Expanded, except for 1981-85 for
which the numbers were obtained from the print edition of SCI.
Visibility and impact
When it comes to
citation impact, Indian papers fare rather poorly. For
example, Garfield had shown that the Indian papers of 1973
were cited an average of 2.0 times during 1973-78 compared to
6.9 times for US papers and 6.3 times for UK papers. The
situation has not changed much. Most papers from India appear
in low-impact journals with poor circulation, so much so that
whenever an Indian paper appears in a high impact journal like
Cell
it makes news. The percent share of Indian papers
appearing in high impact factor journals is low.
A recent issue
of Current Science
( here) carried a news story reporting
that two Indian journals have an impact factor of above 1.0
for the first time, in 2004. Ever since Journal Citation
Reports
started appearing, not once did an Indian
journal record an impact factor of 1.0 or above!
As Indian
journals are not perceived to be of high quality, many Indian
scientists want to publish their work in foreign journals. And
many of them are so expensive, not many libraries in India
subscribe to them. The irony is that the editing and
production of many of these 'international' journals take
place in Chennai and other Indian cities. Many major
commercial publishers of STM journals outsource these jobs to
India. The result is papers written by Indian scientists,
often with support from Indian taxpayers' money, are not seen,
read or cited by other Indian researchers.
Open
access advocacy
Clearly what
Indian scientists need is greater visibility and they would
like their work to be cited more often. The obvious thing to
do to achieve both these goals is to adopt open access (OA) in
a big way. Until recently, not much was being done, except for
a small percentage of Indian physicists, especially those
working in the better known institutions such as the Tata
Institute of Fundamental Research, Indian Institute of Science
and Institute of Mathematical Sciences, placing their
preprints (and postprints) in arXiv ( here).
In the past few
years there have been some efforts to promote the idea of open
access. I myself was largely responsible for two three-day
workshops on electronic publishing held in 2002 as part of the
activities of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. The
workshops were conducted at the well equipped classroom of the
Indian Institute of Science's Digital Library programme ( here). We
invited Dr Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto and Dr
Barbara Kirsop of the Electronic Publishing Trust to conduct
the workshops. They were ably assisted by the Late Dr T B
Rajashekar of the National Centre for Science Information.
More than 40 professionals - mostly editorial staff of
scientific and medical journals selected from different parts
of India - benefited.
Open access
journals
Today, at least
80 Indian STM journals are available via OA. These include the
11 journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences, IASc, ( here), the four
journals of the Indian National Science Academy, INSA, ( here) and the
Journal of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The INSA
journals and the Journal of IISc are available for search from
Vol.1 number 1. Soon the digitisation of the back numbers of
Indian Academy journals will be completed and they will also
be available for search from the very first issue. The Indian
Medlars Centre of the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi
is bringing out the OA electronic versions of 35 biomedical
journals. The Centre also has a bibliographic database called
IndMED ( here) which
provides free access to abstracts of all papers in about 50
Indian biomedical journals.
MedKnow Publications ( here), a
private firm in Mumbai, is bringing out both the print and the
electronic OA versions of thirty medical journals published
mostly by professional societies. I have seen many of them and
their production qualities are excellent. Dr D K Sahu of
MedKnow, who was a participant at the Bangalore workshop, says
that since these journals went electronic and open access,
subscription revenue of many of them has increased. In his
talk at the 2004 CODATA symposium on open access and the
public domain, Dr Rajashekar pointed out a similar increase in
the number of overseas subscribers to some IASc journals after
they went OA. However, I believe that the web presence of IASc
journals can improve considerably. They could become as user
friendly as the MedKnow
journals.
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Until a few
years ago the electronic versions of a few journals published
by India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research were
distributed by Bioline, but no longer. For some reason, the
CSIR journals are not going OA.
Open access
archives
India is also
experimenting with interoperable open access archives (or
repositories) - both distributed (or institutional) and
subject-specific central archives. Here again, there was very
little awareness among researchers and librarians. The archive
( here) at IISc,
Bangalore, which uses the GNU Eprints software developed at
the Southampton University, was the first to be set up in
India. But subsequently, no other institution came up with an
archive for a long time.
We organized two
three-day workshops on open access self-archiving at the M. S.
Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, in early 2004. Fifty
participants from different parts of India were selected for
the workshop, with an assurance from the heads of their
institutions that they would provide all help necessary for
the participants to set up and populate the archives. The
faculty consisted of Dr Leslie Chan of Toronto, Dr Leslie Carr
of Southampton, Dr T B Rajashekar of Indian Institute of
Science, and Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications. Participants
were given hands-on training in uploading the GNU Eprints
software on to a Linux server and preparing metadata for
papers to be deposited. Subsequently, both NCSI and Dr. A. R.
D. Prasad of the Documentation Research and Training Centre,
Bangalore, have also conducted a few workshops.
The participants
of the Chennai workshops have set up institutional archives at
the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, and the National
Institute of Technology, Rourkela. A central archive for
biomedical sciences, OpenMED ( here) has been set up at the
National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, and it has more than
550 papers. Another archive set up at the Indian Institute of
Management, Kozhikode, is finding it difficult to attract
papers from the faculty and students of the institute. The
Registry of Institutional Archives ( here) lists
eleven archives from India, but some of them have none or only
a very small number of papers. As Stevan Harnad keeps pointing
out, setting up an archive is no big deal, but filling it with
papers seems to be difficult. The managers of the IISc Eprints
archive and the NITR Dspace repository provide download
statistics and find that it helps in attracting authors to
deposit their papers.
The Government of
India has advised all members of the INDEST consortia ( here) to set up
institutional archives, but progress so far has been slow.
Thanks to sustained advocacy, most senior scientists in India
today are aware of OA. Developments in OA both within the
country and in the wider world are discussed in internet
discussion lists such as oa-india@dgroups and lis-forum.
Results from India are
disappointing
Overall, one is
unhappy that in a country where there are more than 250
universities and institutions of higher learning and hundreds
of research laboratories, both in the government sector and in
the private sector, there are only 11 registered archives and
some of them have hardly anything to offer. The situation can
turn dramatically, if national donor agencies such as the
Department of Science and Technology and the Department of
Biotechnology, and heads of major research councils such as
the CSIR, decide that the results of all publicly funded
research should be made available through self
archiving.
Subbiah
Arunachalam is a volunteer with the M. S. Swaminathan Research
Foundation for the past ten years. He is an Honorary Fellow of
the Chartered Institute for Library and Information
Professionals, and an Honorary Member of ASIST. His research
revolves around the role of access to information in
scientific research on the one hand and rural development on
the other. He is a champion of the public commons approach and
open access and can be reached
here.
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