This chapter is intended to present briefly the open educational resources initiatives in India especially related to growth of scientific literature. Scholarly communication can be defined as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make it possible as an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet and web 2.0 tools. Thus, the scholarly communications are available in the public domain in the open access platform. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels in electronic media of open access. Also presented is an overview of all available open source resources in Indian context.
TopOpen Access Resources
Open access resources are electronic resources which are freely available to the end user at free of cost. There is no need to pay either by the institution or the individual for accessing, and downloading articles. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full texts of these articles (Prince and Saravanan, 2015). Open access resources are not limited only to open access journal but it also may vary in forms such as open e-book, videos, audios, personal websites, discussion forums, open access databases, institutional websites, personal blogs, open access repositories, and institutional repositories and open source software.
Suber (2012) defined Open Access as “Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. The concept of open access has emerged in response to the restrictive access to knowledge in scholarly and scientific journals imposed by commercial publishing houses via subscription fees, license fees or pay-per-view fees (Christian, 2008).
Open access to knowledge is a generic term used for knowledge resources made available in the public domain for public access or public consumption at large scale, without any hindrance of subscription fee or access charges.
TopEvolution Of Open Access In India
During the year 1999, Indian Academy of Science hosted a meeting on geographical information and virtually every one of the speakers focused on public access to geographical information. The evolution of open access policy in India began on a two day conference on Advances in Information Access and Science Communication held at M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, (MSSRF) on 16-17 September 2000, as a tribute to Dr. Eugene Garfield on his 75th birthday. At this conference Prof. Stevan Harnad, open access arch evangelist spoke about “Scholarly Skywriting” and the need for every research performing institution to adopt open access self-archiving of preprints.