Open access - current developments in India

Abstract

This is the text of an invited presentation (available in two versions, 9 pages narrative paper, and 26 slides presentation) given at the Berlin 4 Open Access Conference, March 29th-March 31st, 2006, Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam (near Berlin). Abstract: India, the second most populous nation in the world, is emerging as an important player in the world economy and geopolitics. In the nearly six decades since Independence, India has made considerable progress. A number of leading corporations, especially in the areas of automobiles, information technology and chemicals, have set up shop in India for manufacturing, business process outsourcing and R&D. Advanced countries look at India as a huge market to be tapped and a reservoir of English-speaking workforce that can be hired at a fraction of the cost they pay as wages in their home countries. About a million people work in software industry alone. And now India is increasingly looked up to for outsourcing R&D. In the past few months, many heads of states and governments â including President Bush - came calling and President Bush even spoke about the rather sensitive subject of cooperation in nuclear energy. Both the Vice chancellor of Oxford in the UK, the Rt Hon Chris Patten and the President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers in the US visited India recently and are keen to set up centres of excellence devoted to Indian studies. Indeed Harvard is planning to institute a dozen chairs in the new centre. Despite a long history of science, scholarship and philosophical inquiry dating back to millennia before the emergence of modern European civilization, India is struggling to keep pace with the West in science and technology. Although there are about 300 universities, and about the same number of government funded research laboratories under agencies such as the Departments of Atomic Energy and Space and the 1 Ministries of Defence, Agriculture, Science & Technology, and Ocean Development, Indiaâ s research output in science and technology, as seen from the Web of Science, is barely 2.5% of the worldâ s journal literature. What is more, in none of the subjects Indian papers on the whole are cited as often as the world average. It will not be wrong to conclude that India is contributing to growth of knowledge in the sciences sub-optimally. There is a crying need for strengthening higher education (and, indeed, education at all levels) and promoting excellence and innovation in research. India is investing millions of dollars to set up three institutions of excellence in science on the lines of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and six world class medical colleges and hospitals of the quality of the All India Institute of Medical sciences in underserved regions.