[afro-nets] Open, Online and Global

[Dr. Vinod Scaria <drvinods@HotPOP.com>]

Open, Online and Global
-----------------------

Dear all,

I invite your valuable comments on the following editorial of
mine.
Citation: Vinod Scaria, Open, Online and Global: Benefits of
BioMedical Journals Going Online and Open.

Online J Health Allied Scs. 2003;4:1
FREE FULL TEXT AT URL: http://www.ojhas.org/issue8/2003-4-1.htm


Best regards,

Dr.Vinod Scaria
Exec Editor Calicut Medical Journal WEB:
Mobile: +91-98474-65452
mailto:vinodscaria@yahoo.co.in
http://www.virtualmedonline.com
http://www.calicutmedicaljournal.org
Editor: Internet Health http://www.internet-health.org


--
Editorial

Open, Online and Global
Benefits of BioMedical Journals Going Online and Open

Vinod Scaria
Center for Cybermedicine and Internet Research


"What is the point of scientific research if the results are not
shared freely?" This question has become the epicenter of
thought internationally as a good number of scholars are being
categorically denied access to vital research information that
could create a difference- and in the health domain, it is most
often between life and death. For scholars from poor and devel-
oping countries, this has been even worse.[1] Well, why is this
question so significant now? There have been scientific journals
before and they probably will continue to exist. But the so-
called 'serials crisis' has taken a significant impact just now,
with the omnipotent Internet affording cheap access to Informa-
tion. The unique crisis, which is by itself a vicious circle of
increasing prices and lower access, has taken its toll. Even
well funded universities of affluent societies have been worstly
affected- not to mention those in poor and developing countries.
Omnipotent Internet and Online Journals - A brief Overview: In
the pre-Internet era, paper afforded the best communication me-
dia and print media offered the best visibility any scholar
could afford to have. The emergence of Internet as a worldwide
network capable of multiple interactions within has changed the
scenario.[2] Internet offers distribution of entire manuscripts
to an unlimited audience, with virtually no extra cost than for
the preparation of the first draft. Being digital also affords
the immense possibility of being indexed, linked, copied, ar-
chived, redistributed and searched at ease and at a lower pro-
duction cost.[3] The initial success of Online Journals - which
were often digital versions of print journals - can be attrib-
uted to this. The immense possibility also paved the way to the
emergence of Online-Only Journals like the Online Journal of
Health and Allied Sciences (www.ojhas.org) - the pioneer online
biomedical journal in India. The Internet era also witnessed
scholars taking an upper hand in disseminating scholarly arti-
cles, with groups of scholars founding new Online Journals and
showcasing research to an ever wider audience, and that too at
meager cost and driven by passion and dedication. Open Access
Movements: Since most of the journals that went online were
owned by commercial publishers, taking advantage of technology
to widen their market potential, most of the scholarly articles
that went digital went behind the virtual barriers of toll-based
access almost eternally. The scientific community at large would
not take any benefit of this move. This fact paved way to the
rise of Open Access movements spearheaded by the Budapest Open
Access Initiative [BOAI](www.soros.org/boai) and the Public Li-
brary of Science [PloS](www.plos.org).The movements were en-
riched by thought and discussions from around the globe mainly
by networked communication on List- serves and public meetings.
'Open Access' means immediate, permanent, toll-free, non- gerry-
mandered, online access to the full-text.[4] This would enable
research to be freely exchanged between scholars. Open Access
Archiving: Open Access archiving offers immediate solution to
the need to free scholarly communication from the shackles of
access barriers. Since 1991, high energy physics researchers
from around the world were networked through an eprint archive
maintained by Paul Gispang of Los Alamos National Library (later
moved to Cornell University which currently hosts the archive).
This archive- 'arxiv' (http://www.arxive.org/) receives two-
third of its total hits from institutions outside the United
States, including many research facilities in developing re-
gions. The archive has become indispensable to researchers in
research institutions that would otherwise be excluded from the
front line of science for economic and other reasons.[5] The
success of Arxiv had its impact worldwide and led to the crea-
tion of the Open Archives initiative which has developed E-Print
(www.eprints.org) software which would enable interoperability
between different archives encompassing different specialties.
The OAI has also developed an Open Archives Metadata Harvesting
Protocol (OAMHP) which would enable interoperability across dis-
tributed archives. Thus the distributed archives form a net-
worked global library that enables cross linking, searching and
permanent archival of meta data enhanced manuscripts. Moreover
these data are available for seamless search and other features
supported by Open Archive search engines like OAIster
(http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister). The new wave has
swept through the biomedical domain too, with a number of insti-
tutional and centralised archives like Cogprints
(http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/) being established. Here the
works of the US National Library of Medicine through the PubMed-
Central (www.pubmedcentral.com), which is now integrated through
the OAIMHP, and other archives like the Clinical Medicine Net-
prints (www.clinmed.netprints.org) maintained by the BMJ pub-
lishing Group and E-Research archive (ERA) by the Lancet are
worth mentioning. The Three great pillars to Open Access: Open
Access can be considered as borne on three major pillars of Open
Access Publishing, Open Access Archiving and Open Access Sup-
port. OJHAS fulfills all the three through publishing the jour-
nal Open Access, archiving it openly at Cogprints- a central re-
pository on Cognitive sciences and promoting authors to self ar-
chive the manuscripts as they wish on their own websites or in-
stitutional repositories by letting the authors retain copy-
rights of their manuscripts. We feel that by upholding all the
major principles for seamless exchange of research communica-
tion, we could serve the global community effectively. Moreover,
the enhanced visibility and additional features like cross cita-
tions afforded through archiving PDF reprints at Cogprints will
take us far ahead in effectively communicating with our target
audience -  Biomedical researchers.

Open Access - What we achieved: Becoming Open Access has earned
us increased visibility in terms of increased traffic to our
websites and an increased number of websites linking back to us.
In our experience, the visibility that we enjoy today cannot be
afforded if we were a toll access or print journal without heavy
investment. Our site statistics speaks on this fact. [Tables 1
and 2]

Table 1: Summary of Site Statistics of the first 150 days of
OJHAS being Open Access

Totals
Unique Visitors 3035 (61.16%)
Visits incl. Reloads 4962
Reloads 1927 (38.83%)
Visitors via Referrers 1215 (40.03%)
Website Referrers 254

Continents Unique Visitors
Table 2: Breakup of visitors by continent

Unknown 189862.53%
North-America 69522.89%
Europe 2959.71%
Asia 712.33%
Australia 441.44%
South America 170.56%
Africa 100.32%
Central America 50.16%

We also noticed a spurt in our ranking on Google, which is
partly due to increased incoming links to our Journal. This af-
fords better visibility of our articles on Google. Similarly
OJHAS affords good visibility on other search engines. How Jour-
nals from Developing Countries can gain by being Online and Open
Access: Biomedical research in developing countries are charac-
teristically featured by low visibility. This is primarily be-
cause journals lack an international audience. It has been taken
note of that, while 25% of all researchers live in developing
countries, they contribute less than 3% of the total scientific
articles published.[6] Moreover, most of them remain entrapped
in geographical, economic and other barriers. The consequent low
impact makes it vulnerable for market forces which compete for
the best articles. Being Online and Open would simply make the
difference. The traffic to websites of startup BioMedical jour-
nals from India like the Calicut Medical Journal outnumbered the
subscription of the largest circulating biomedical journal in
the region. Moreover it would pave way for equitable distribu-
tion of vital research results. It also helps in effectively
disseminating region-specific health information, which is vital
to clinicians and researchers working on regional problems and
which affords fewer audience Internationally.[7] Similarly the
advantages of Open Access archiving has been extensively dis-
cussed.[5] Now and Next: Open Access publishing is perhaps the
future of scientific communication[7] in developing countries.
The landmark success of many new open Access Journals in India
and other developing countries speak for this. The sad fact is
that most publishers are not really aware of the new perspec-
tives offered by Open Access and are often reluctant to convert
their existing publication to Open Access. Since most scholar
societies interested in experimenting with Open Access Journals
are little aware of the intricacies of this domain, a support
organisation comprising of Open Access publishers is the need of
the day. This would enable more Open Access Journals from devel-
oping countries emerge successful, both regionally and interna-
tionally. This would help disseminate research from developing
countries more effectively.

References:

Scaria V. Scholarly communication in Biomedical Sciences, Open
Access and the developing world. Internet Health 2003;1:1

Scaria V. The Joy of being Free and Online. Internet Health
2003;2(1):e1 Originating URL: www.internet-
health.org/editorial0203.html

Ibrahim Mansoor. Online electronic medical journals. Journal of
the Bahrain Medical Society. July 2002; 14:3 : 96-100

Suber P. How should we define "Open Access"? SPARC Open Access
Newsletter Issue 64 , August 04, 2003

Leslie Chan ,Barbara Kirsop. Open Archiving Opportunities for
Developing Countries: towards equitable distribution of global
knowledge.
Ariadne Issue 30, 20-December-2001 Originating URL:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/oai-chan/intro.html

BMJ Rapid Responses on Delamothe T. "Author pays" may be the new
science publishing model. BMJ 2003;326:182
a] Scaria V. Open access: At what cost?
b] Prosser CD. A Unique Opportunity BMJ Rapid Responses (11 Feb-
ruary 2003) [Available at URL:
http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/326/7382/182/b]

Ramachandran PV. Online, open access journals: the only hope for
the future. Calicut Medical Journal 2003;1(1):e1 URL:
http://www.calicutmedicaljournal.org/2003;1(1)e1.htm

Competing Interests:

The author is Editor in Chief of two Open Access International
Biomedical Journals [Internet Health www.internet-health.org and
Asian Student Medical Journal [www.asmj.org] and editorial board
member of two Indian Open Access Journals [The Online Journal of
Health and Allied Sciences www.ojhas.org and Calicut Medical
Journal www.calicutmedicaljournal.org ]. He is a contributor to
Open Access WebLog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html and a consultant
to many Open Access Biomedical journals.