MUMBAI: If knowledge is power, then the departments of bio-technology and science and technology are readying to share it by giving unrestricted access to research work funded by them. According to a new draft open access policy, researchers will soon have to deposit their works in an online repository.
According to the draft policy, once a manuscript makes it to a peer-reviewed professional journal, it should be deposited in a bank at the researcher's institution or with a central repository to be created by the government.
"The University of Southampton in UK was the first to create such a bank. Now, Harvard, MIT and several institutions also have adopted it," says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access proponent and a member of the core committee that drafted the policy.
Besides helping students and teachers, the repository will be of use to such universities as are unable to lay their hands on all the costly academic journals.
The draft policy, available on dbtindia.nic.in, says all papers funded by the two departments in 2012–13 should also be placed online.
Researchers who do not comply without valid reasons will not be considered for future grants, says the document, which is open for public comments till July 25. For those in government service, non-compliance will lead to their papers not being counted for promotion, tenure and fellowship opportunities.
"The idea is that taxpayers shouldn't pay twice to access research funded by taxpayers' money. If these works ends up in proprietary journals, we have to pay again to read them," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which helped in the drafting of the document.
T Vishnu Vardhan, programme director, Access to Knowledge, CIS, says the policy will have long-term impact. "A bulk of our higher education budget goes to a handful of institutions. This will help improve the quality of learning and teaching in a few years," says he.