Delivered-To: plenary@mailman.greennet.org.uk From: LADY MURRUGARRA To: Plenaria WSIS Subject: [WSIS CS-Plenary] FYI: Benefits of Open Access [3] Sender: plenary-admin@wsis-cs.org Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 14:26:03 +0100 (CET) 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