Public Access to Research Reports

[Anand Dodamani]

Dear friends,

I wanted to know the reason for NOT providing public access to the Research Reports funded by different agencies including the UGC and ICSSR in our country.

The Government and its associated agencies have been spending several crores of rupees (tax payers money) every year to fund various research projects across sectors. But unfortunately, the results of such research projects are not made public which is not correct.

The researchers might publish the summary of their research findings in the form of Journal Article or Working Paper but such publications cannot be equated with original research reports.

Sometimes we, the librarians, feel helpless when users approach us for a help to access such reports. Therefore, I strongly feel that the results of all research projects should be made public immediately after their accepting by the funding agencies. Will it happen in the near future? The INFLIBNET or some other national agency should take this up and create a portal for the same.

Regards,

Anand Dodamani
TISS, Mumbai

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Sir,

You have raised a very important point. We should have a policy regarding this and the research funding agency can think of making it mandatory for the researcher to submit their research findings in open access platforms or they can even think of releasing the copy submitted to them in the Open Access platform.

[Anand Dodamani]

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your comments.

Regards,

Anand Dodamani

[Ramesh Yernagula]

Yes Dr. Annad Point is very true. ICHR's documentation Centre has initiated in the same direction for the following reasons. and the Portal name is DHARA(Digital Historical Academic Repository Access). Hope other institutes may also follows this kind of work. This portal will be officialy released by end of this month

Enhance visibility of the output of various Grants awarded by the ICHR • Provide a global platform for the Council research and improved its visibility • Facilities improved research collaboration and information flow • Preserves and provides log-term access to the scholars research output a; • Lower access barriers and offers the widest possible dissemination of an individual scholars' work.

[Anand Dodamani]

Dear Sir,

Thank you for the comments. Let's hope that the other sponsoring bodies would also follow ICHR in future.

Regards,

Anand Dodamani

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Sri Anand Dodamani,

Thanks for addressing a very important issue. As a retired employee of ICSSR Institute I would like to share that there are three types of Research Reports generated by the ICSSR funded Institutes: (a) Working papers , (b) Projects Funded by External Agencies & (c) Projects of ICSSR itself.

Regarding the first type, they are generally not copy righted and for the new Working papers, soft copies are OFTEN (Not on regular basis) launched in the Institutes' websites. For the second types of Research materials, approval from the Funding Agencies are customarily required as the end reports become their properties. For ICSSR Projects (especially for Doctoral Research) the Researchers try to publish them as books and as the manuscripts are accepted by any publisher they make sure whether they are launched as open sources simply because it harms their marketability. In my institute I have taken initiative to launch all of our Working Papers through BLDS, UK. Now one very well-known Publisher expressed their interest to publish a collection of the Working Papers but as they discovered that they are available as a open source material, they lost interest!!

Admittedly, ICSSR Headquarters has no provision (& Vision too; unfortunately) to launch such important materials in public domain. There is one Asian Documentation Centre at the ICSSR Head Quarters at Aruna Asaf Ali Marg and it holds several highly costly reprographic and Desk Top Publishing & Printing  equipments laying un-utilized over the years!! and surprisingly nobody bothers!! Majority of the senior Officials at the ICSSR HQ are retired staff of the HQ itself and above all, the budget allocation of ICSSR is pathetically poor.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta