15th T.B. Rajashekar Memorial Lecture : “The State of Open Access: Where does it stand and where is it heading?”

Title : “The State of Open Access: Where does it stand and where is it heading?”

Speaker : Mr. N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD, Informatics India Limited, Bengaluru

Presided by : Professor Subbiah Arunachalam

Date & Time: Monday, 29th June 2020 at 3.30 p.m.

Abstract of the talk:
The Open Access (OA) movement has been going through two decades of the most highly debated evolution. Various initiatives by all stakeholders - scholarly community, authors, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and the Government - involved in the movement have brought in changes in journal publishing today. The number of open access journals outnumbers the subscription journals. Even in total article views, OA has overtaken subscription journals. Currently, 31% of all articles are available as OA and 52% of article views are from OA journals. Yet, all these initiatives and results have been limited in their impact. The movement’s goal post of 100% OA for scholarly communication is still not in sight. On the contrary, libraries and their consortia models continue to spend a significant amount of their budget on their subscriptions besides additional spending by authors on Article Processing Charges (APC). New business models like Plan S are being talked about with no global consensus emerging.

The lecture will focus on the critical issues at the heart of the movement such as the institutional repositories (IRs), OA publishing models, copyright conflicts, challenges of finding a sustainable business model and accelerated role of libraries. The speaker proposes to pose and debate on the question - Is there a disruptive OA model in the reckoning? The lecture will also address the Indian scenario and the challenges it poses for Indian scholarly publishing to become an integral part of global OA models.

About the speaker
Shri. N V Sathyanarayana is a former librarian, information entrepreneur, and information services and products developer rolled into one. He is the Founder Director of Informatics India Ltd., - a leading Information Products and Services Company, established in 1980. Currently, he is the Chairman and of Informatics.

Shri Sathyanaraya started his career as a librarian and worked in institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, HMT, Bangalore, and Smith Kline & French, Bangalore for seven years before promoting his brainchild Informatics. He is also associated with several professional/academic bodies connected with the LIS profession and the information industry. To mention a few: Infotex’93; First National Conference on Digital Libraries (in India) in 1996, Bangalore; Infovision 2005, the first International Information Industry Summit, Bangalore.

He is the recipient of the Young Information Scientist Award (1991). The Government of Karnataka conferred on him the Best Librarian Award (2006).

The lecture was presided over by:

Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, Visiting Professor, DST Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

About Professor Arunachalam
Prof. S. Arunachalam is globally known for his expertise in Scientometrics and their use for assessing the research impact on a wide scale ranging from individuals and departments to institutions and countries. His interests include scientometrics, science policy, information science, public understanding of science, openness in scholarly communication, ICT for Development and rural knowledge centers, and improving information access, both for scientists and for the rural poor. He is one of the earliest in the developing countries to use citation indexes to study developments in science and science policy. He was instrumental in CSIR, DBT and DST adopting Green open access as official policy.