[BOAI] Open Access in India: Q&A with Subbiah Arunachalam

[Richard Poynder]

Today the world is awash with OA advocates, and the number of them grows
year by year. But it was not always thus. 

 

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. As the manager of Library and Information
Services at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics
(ICRISAT) Muthu Madhan put it recently, "OA advocacy in India can be
characterised as mostly a one-man effort by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam."

 

The interview with Subbiah Arunachalam can be read here: 

 

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/open-access-in-india-q-with-subbiah.ht
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