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Among the few readers of this blog, I guess three people¹ other than me would have seen an Op-Ed article by Stevan Harnad with the same title as this post in yesterday’s newspaper.

Ask any science graduate or professional in India and you will find them agreeing with the author’s opening lines…

MOST OF the 2.5 million articles published yearly in our planet’s 24,000 research journals are inaccessible to a large portion of their potential users worldwide, but especially to those in the developing world. One might think that the reason for this is that no research institution can afford to subscribe to all 24,000 journals, and most can only afford a fraction of them. And this is true, but it is not the whole story, nor the main part of it. For, even if all those journals were sold at cost — not a penny of profit — they would still remain unaffordable for many of the research institutions worldwide. The only way to make all those articles accessible to all their potential users is to provide open access to them on the Web, so anyone can access them, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free. One could have said the same of food, medicine, and all other human essentials, of course, but one cannot eat digital food or cure diseases with strings of 0s and 1s. Nor, alas, are all the producers of digital products — let alone of physical food or medicine — interested in giving away their products for free. So what makes research different (if it is different) and why is it urgent for all of its potential users to have access to it?

I urge you to read the entire article here.

I learnt a few things from the article, like the changing concept of ‘research impact’ …

Research is funded, and researchers are employed and paid, on the strength of their “research impact.” This used to mean how much they publish, but these days it also means how much their publications are read, used, and built upon, to generate further research and applications, to the benefit of the tax-paying society that funds their research and their institutions.

Although the measure is crude, and far richer measures are under development, citation counts — the number of times an article is cited by other articles — are an indicator of research impact.

What I especially liked in the article was the author’s argument for mandatory self-archiving by researchers…

One would think, in view of these findings, and the fact that researchers give away their articles anyway, that researchers would all be making their published articles open access by now — by self-archiving their articles in their own institution’s online repositories, free for all. Ninety-four per cent of journals already endorse self-archiving by their authors. Yet in fact only about 15 per cent of researchers are self-archiving their publications spontaneously today. Perhaps that is about the same percentage that would be publishing at all, if it were not for the “publish or perish” mandate. So it is obvious what the solution is, for research and researchers worldwide, in the online era: the existing publish-or-perish mandate has to be extended to become a “publish and self-archive” mandate.

A bit of amateur research on my part established that the author is an active Open Access evangelist with a dedicated blog.

His website at the University of Southamptom has extensive links to Open Access and Self-Archiving resources.

Here is a quote from his website:

Footnotes:
1. Arunn, Lakshmi & Suresh².

2. Fellow Tamilians for whom reading The Hindu is a definite morning ritual.