[WSIS CS-Plenary] FYI: Benefits of Open Access [3]

[LADY MURRUGARRA]

Thank you for your comments on Open Access Publishing.

In fact the situation is worse than speculated. Even well-off universities
in affluent countries are increasingly being unable to sustain their
collection of titles - given the increasing price-tag. Situation of Medical
libraries in developing countries are even worse. There are Medical School
libraries in Africa and Asia which have not subscribed to ANY FOREIGN titles
last year due to budget deficits and increasing price of Journals. Many were
even unable to sustain indigenous titles.

Many Open Access Journals in Developing Countries evolved in this
background. BioMedical Journals like Calicut Medical Journal
www.calicutmedicaljournal.org and JPGM www.jpgmonline.com were among the
pioneers in India. These Journals have evolved into Internationally
acclaimed entities in terms of readership and submissions within a very
short time period (6 months for CMJ) - which could have been a mirage if it
were to be conventional print publications (The latter has a Print version
too).

Articles in both Journals are highly ranked in search engines like Google
www.google.com (the most popular search utility), and are planned to be
archived at Cogprints, which adds to the visibility of the articles. Though
Calicut Medical Journal is not yet indexed or Impact factors officially
computed, we have already been noticing citations in submissions, which is a
very good sign. Moreover the low cost of production (web editing was done
inhouse for www.calicutmedicaljournal.org ) makes us economically viable,
even without charging authors for expenses (as many other publishers like
BioMedCentral do).

In fact we are planning to consolidate our expertise by forming an alliance
of Open Access Medical Editors [OpenMEd] which would be officially announced
soon. This is vital to share expertise and infrastructure. It is also
planned to be a common platform for exchange of innovative ideas in Open
Access Publishing.

In my Opinion, IDEAL Open Access should be Scholar led Open Access
Publishing and Archiving, with Scholar led support, which is the key in the
Fig1 of the article. [ http://ojhas.org/issue8/2003-4-1.htm ]

Best regards
Vinod Scaria

Dr.Vinod Scaria
WEB: www.virtualmedonline.com



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