Open access
Open Access is one of the most important issues being currently debated in science community. Open Access model
provides opportunities for free and online access to scholarly literature that can be disseminated further with proper
author attribution. Significant developments in open access publishing have taken place in recent years with several new
major funding policies coming into effect. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced their Public Access
Policy, requiring all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research carried out with NIH funding to be deposited in
PubMed Central and to be made freely available within 12 months of publication. Recently, the European Commission
has introduced a pilot open access project in relation to the EC Seventh Research Framework Program (FP7) of funding
requiring research grant recipients to deposit Open Access copies of published articles into an appropriate repository,
the maximum delay being 6 or 12 months, depending on the subject area.
The conventional research publications do not reach a wide audience even among scientific community, affecting both
its visibility and impact; hence, publishing in OA journals and setting up institutional archives/repositories are important
for scientific advancement. As it provides much greater visibility, it also improves impact for research work. In India there
are only a few research institutions that have their Institutional Archives/ Repositories in place, Indian Institute of
Science, a few constituent laboratories of CSIR and some of the NITs are among those. Initiatives at national level in this
direction and motivation of scientific and technological community for their active involvement in this programme are the
needs of the hour.
Open Innovation
Open Innovation has advantages such as, faster time to market, reducing R&D and product development costs, tapping
global pool of experts, getting new product ideas, uncovering ready made solutions and sharing risk with others.
Organizations in the era of rising cost of technology development and shorter product life cycles. It enables
organizations to expand their reach to the global brain comprising scientists, researchers, students, faculties, research
institutes, inventors, consulting firms, small and medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs.
It is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation. Connections, contacts and
communications between industries and experts of different fields are highly important in the innovation processes. It is
important to create and encourage contexts and environments where serendipity may occur. Growing attention has
recently been devoted to the concept of open innovations both in the academia as well as in the practices of business
life, accessing knowledge and skills from outside including academia and national research laboratories.
Society for Information Science