AmeliCA Advocacy

AmeliCA a not for profit initiative supported by UNESCO, CLACSO and Redalyc is working policies and infrastrure for Open Science in Global South. In India and for South Asia, the Open Access India had started advocating for the adoption of AmeliCA XML markup system for the Open Access Journals for publication of the articles in enriched reading formats such as ePUBS, HTML, Mobile View etc. The AmeliCA is also making various services available to the not for profit open access publishers like responsible metrics, journals’s policies database, OJS users community forums, indexing journals and books and making them available to the world. In India, the Journal of Horticultural Sciences, published by the Society for Promotion of Horticulture had become the first journal to join the AmeliCA and use the AmeliCA XML. Efforts are also being made to have South Asian hub for AmeliCA in India hosted by the Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru.

Alliance for open Access in India

After the successful organization of the OpenCon 2018 Delhi satellite event there were some thoughts on the formation of Alliance for the Open Access in India. The same was expressed on various social media platforms which had received a welcoming response. Now its a call for all the organizations and entities which are working for the establishment of Open Knowledge Society in India to join together to spearhead the Open Access movement in India. If your organization/society/community of practice would like to join the efforts, please share the details here in this form.

IndiaRxiv (India Archive) – Preprints Repository of India

Seeing the growing need and importance of the preprint services in sharing the science and scholarship, the Open Access India after successful launch of AgriXiv is now planing to launch IndiaRxiv.org (India Archive), a preprints repository for Indian researchers and other scholars to share their research outputs or the scholarly works publicly with the peers to receive comments for improvement and collaborations for generating new knowledge for public good. This preprints service will be launched with the support of Centre for Open Science using their Open Science Framework and more information can be found at IndiaRxiv.in and also via its social media platforms Facebook & twitter.

Forum for Open Access in South Asia

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the regional intergovernmental organization comprises of nations viz., Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in South Asia. During the 11th SAARC Summit held at Kathmandu (26-27 November 2014), the Heads of the nations had resolved to eliminating illiteracy from the region in line with the global goal of education for all. The Open Access movements in these nations are gaining momentum and the communities of practice, Open Access Bangladesh, Open Access India and Open Access Pakistan are advocating for Open Access, Open Data and Open Education in their countries. Now the time has come to have united efforts by forming a Forum for Open Access in South Asia to take forward the movement by learning & sharing the experiences, using the common resources available, building e-infrastructure facilities and designing policies. Towards this, Forum for Open Access in South Asia will be working with the all stakeholders support and is open to all those who have interests in the Open Access and want to contribute to the movement. You may please express your interest here and may please join the Facebook group to get involved in the discussions or follow the Facebook page and twitter handle @asia_open for updates.

National Open Access Policy for India

On behalf of the the Open Access India community, we have submitted a draft of the National Open Access Policy for India to the Ministries of HRD and S&T for their kind consideration to mandate #OpenAccess for all the public funded research and teaching in the country. You may see the draft of the policy here on google docs and is also posted on zenodo. Can be sited as: Open Access India. (2017, February 12). National Open Access Policy of India (Draft) Ver. 3. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1002618

AgriXiv – Preprint Repository for Agriculture

Agriculture in the world is facing many challenges under the changing climate scenario. It needs attention and support for the development of adaptive, resilient and sustainable livelihoods. The research outputs generated in the process of addressing these challenges need to be made available  immediately to all those working for understanding the situation and developing suitable solutions for mitigation. Seeing the importance of agriculture and the agricultural research, there is a need for an exclusive preprints servers in agriculture and allied sciences to facilitate sharing of interim results. Therefore, the Open Access India  is proposing AgriXiv, a preprints repository for agriculture as a part of its objective, ‘development of community e-infrastructure for Open Access’ with the support of Open Science Framework. For more, please see https://agrixiv.wordpress.com/ and follow @AgriXiv.

CrowdSource project on mapping the ISSN Journals from India

The aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive database of all the Journals which has ISSN issued from the NISCAIR. To the data already available from the NISCAIR, the other related information like the city of publication, weblink, copyright policies, contact details, subject and scope etc required to make it a robust database of Indian Journals with ISSN would be added with the help of volunteers. This database would then be integrated with the databases like Sherpa/RoMEO which keeps the record of Copyright policies of all the publishers and journals. To access the project, please see visit the link here.