The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is an initiative of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). It recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the scientific research outputs are evaluated. It recommends that one should not use journal-based metrics viz., Impact Factors as a surrogate measure of the quality of articles and scientists contribution for hiring and promotion. Please read its full recommendations and the Declaration here. The Open Access India requests the scholarly community to sign the declaration and support the alternate metrics of scientific research outputs.
1. Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.
Submission to ICAR on its Open Access Policy 2013 Draft
Submission on ICAR’s Open Access Policy 2013 Draft
We on behalf of the Open Access India community submit the following Modified Open Access Policy Draft to Dr. D. Rama Rao, National Director, NAIP for formulating an Open Access Policy of Indian Council of Agricultural Research. This modified draft is built upon the Original Policy Draft prepared by the Committee on Open Access in ICAR after taking inputs from the Global Open Access Community.
- All the constituent establishments under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to set up their Open Access Institutional Repositories, Open Access Data Repositories and Open Educational Resources using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) systems which support the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) protocol for public good.
- All the ICAR establishments to register their repositories, resources and information products/services with the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD)’s Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) for the availability and accessibility of agricultural knowledge produced to the world through CIARD RING India.
- The ICAR shall set up a central harvester using the free metadata indexing system to harvest the metadata from the repositories of the ICAR establishments and other repositories of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) for establishing ‘One Stop Access Portal’ for all the agricultural knowledge generated in the NARS and CIARD RING India.
- All the research outputs produced from the research funded by the ICAR or by other Public Funds at either ICAR establishments or elsewhere in the NARS are required to deposit in the ICAR institute’s Open Access Institutional Repositories or in any other appropriate Open Access repositories of the NARS viz., Agropedia (OpenAgri), Rice Knowledge Management Portal etc.
- The authors of the scholarly literature produced from the research funded in whole or part by the ICAR or by other Public Funds at either ICAR establishments or elsewhere in the NARS are required to deposit the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript at the time of acceptance and no later than the time of publication in the ICAR institute’s Open Access Institutional Repositories or in any other appropriate Open Access repositories of NARS viz., Agropedia (OpenAgri), Rice Knowledge Management Portal etc.
- All the archives, current and future scholarly and grey literature viz., research articles, popular articles, book chapters, books, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, booklets, bulletins, project reports, class/lecture notes, presentation slides, photos, videos, speeches, keynote addresses, patent grant publications, data sets etc., produced by the ICAR establishments to be made available under Open Access via repositories.
- All the ICAR research staff, students and visitors at ICAR institutes are encouraged to confer with the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving and are advised to publish their research outputs in those journals which allows self-archiving in the Open Access Repositories. They are also advised to use ‘Authors Addendum’ mentioning the ICAR’s Open Access Policy of mandatory deposit of the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript at the time of acceptance and no later than the time of publication in the ICAR institute’s Open Access Institutional Repositories while signing the while signing the publishers’ copyright agreements. The embargo if any should not be later than 6 months from publication date for making the deposits open to public.
- Final reports of the completed research projects, Masters, Doctoral and Post Doctoral thesis dissertations produced in the ICAR establishments are to be deposited immediately in the institutes open access repository upon submission. The metadata is freely available from the time of deposition of the content and full-texts be made Open Access after an embargo period not later than 12 months. The ‘Krishi Prabha’, an electronic thesis and dissertations database of NARS be made Open Access and OAI-PMH compatible.
- All the journals published by ICAR have been made Open Access and all the books published by ICAR, journals, books, conference/seminar proceedings and any other scholarly/grey literature published by the ICAR/NARS institutes and scholarly/professional societies with substantial financial support from ICAR are to be made available as Open Access publications.
- The commercial books authored by the ICAR staff on personal contract may negotiate with the publishers to share them via ICAR OAIRs after a suitable embargo period.
- The documents having material to be patented or commercialized, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the institution and/or the author, may be exempted from this policy. However, once they are available, the work is to be made accessible to the public via repositories.
Rights and Permissions
- All the ICAR institute’s website content, print/digital publications, meta-data and full-texts in repositories are recommended to be licensed for public use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported License and unless otherwise noted, the users are free to copy, duplicate or reproduce, and distribute, display, or transmit without permission, and to make translations, adaptations or other derivative works, and to make commercial use of work under the following condition: Attribution — Users must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Implementation
- The Directorate of Knowledge Management in Agriculture (DKMA) to serve as the nodal agency for implementation of ICAR Open Access policy. The DKMA along with Agricultural Knowledge Management Units (AKMUs) in ICAR establishments and other agencies/communities viz., GFAR, CIARD, AIMS and Open Access India would organize advocacy workshops and capacity building for researchers, repository administrators, editors and publishers on Open Access Repositories, Open Access Journals and application and usage of Free and Open Source Software systems related to scholarly communications.
Complied by: Sridhar Gutam, Convenor, Open Access India, with kind inputs and consultation with Ajit Maru, Sanjaya Mishra, Kamal Saxena, Shyamal Lakshminarayanan, Peter Murray-Rust, Mike Taylor, Jenny Molly, Christian Heise, Peter Suber, Stevan Harnard, Heather Morrison (who argued against CC-BY), Reme Melero and many others from Open Access Community.
PS. The original draft may be accessed here or at http://www.icar.org.in/en/node/6056
ICAR’s Open Access Policy Draft (2013)
ICAR’s Open Access Policy Draft (2013)
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had placed its Open Access Policy Draft on its website and is open for comments till 23 May 2013. It is requested that all the stakeholders to see the draft and send their comments to pddkma@icar.org.in or ndnaip@icar.org.in
Opening up of access to Agricultural Knowledge and Information in ICAR
Opening up of access to Agricultural Knowledge and Information in ICAR
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had started a discussion on its Facebook page about Opening up of access to Agricultural Knowledge in ICAR. Please visit the post here and give your suggestions or share your comments. Thank you.
Happy 20th Birthday World Wide Web! You made open access possible
Yes, its because of WWW, OA was made possible… Open Access India salutes all the contributors for Building WWW and OA movement…