Open Access Week Celebration at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, October 21-27,2013

Open Access Week Celebration at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

 New Delhi; 21/10/2013: The Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) is partnering with UNESCO, New Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University to organize a national conference on 21 October 2013 at the Convention Centre, JNU campus on “Opening Up by Closing the Circle: Strengthening Open Access in India” to celebrate the worldwide Open Access Week from 21-27 October 2013. About 400 events are expected to be organised around the world this week to promote awareness and advocacy for Open Access to scientific information to all. CEMCA as part of the Commonwealth of Learning has an OER policy for all its publications, and UNESCO also has adopted Open Access policy since July 2013.

Currently only about 20% of research information is available in Open Access, and there is a need to increase the same. Especially for the researches that are supported by public funds, it is expected that the results are also available to all in Open Access. Open Access is the free access to research information to all through either a repository or a journal. There are about 9944 Open Access journals and 2452 repositories at the end of September 2013. While only three countries have national legislation for Open Access in the world, there are over 180 institutional policies and over 80 funder policies registered in ROARMAP. While CSIR and ICAR have adopted OA polices, only a handful of institutional policies are there to promote Open Access in India.

This multi-stakeholder advocacy event will encourage all to promote Open Access through institutional mandates, and create an enabling environment towards national policy guidelines on Open Access to scientific information and research.