Open Access: A Growing International Movement

October 23, 2015

Author: OGD PMU Team

Open access is a growing international movement that uses the internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, the open access movement is gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.

The theme highlights the ways in which collaboration both inspires and advances the Open Access movement. The theme also emphasizes the ways in which Open Access enables new avenues for collaboration between scholars by making research available to any potential collaborator, anywhere, any time.

The “Open for Collaboration” theme will also explore how cooperation between stakeholder communities helps to set the open access as the default method for  for scholarly communication.  At a broader level, the theme will provide an opportunity for Open Access supporters to consider working with those in similar, allied movements for Open Data and Open Education to advance common goals more quickly.

International Open Access Week is a distributed, community-driven week of awareness for opening up scholarly communication and research, celebrated by institutions and organizations across the world.

The movement spans a number of areas including open information/open data.

In case of India, there has been significant progress in case of open data, which is open for all to view, use, share and distribute/re-distribute.

As a major initiative of the Government of India, to provide open access to the data, National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) was drafted in March 2012 and put into effect so that the vast amount of data which is collected by the government can be utilised by the various stakeholders particularly researchers, citizens and civil society for socio-economic transformation of India and other various purposes including research. The initiation of NDSAP for furthering Open Government Data is a step in the right direction and one can feel that it is already making an impact in terms of transparency and accountability and engagement of citizens. This is very much apparent from the statistics which can be seen on the Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India (data.gov.in). The Open Government Data Platform India has made it easy to access government data in open format; particularly characterized by machine readability, which enables researchers using any type of platform/software to use this data for analysis/research very easily.

Open Government Data Platform India (data.gov.in) has  the following services for the community/researchers:-

• A very large number of datasets on various aspects of the economy/society/polity etc. as well as scientific data, which can be used and analysed by the researchers for their scientific research, various other socio-economic research etc.
• Many readymade visualizations which can be incorporated by the researchers in their research publication/articles.
• Showcase community apps developed using open data.
• My data tool by which researchers can create their own visualization objects for incorporating in their research/articles.
• Facility for collaboration between Government & Community.

Graph shows the YoY growth of Dataset/Resources during 2012-2015 on data.gov.in. In 2012, there was 16 datasets available on Open Government Data India Portal and increased by 2608 in  2013 . In 2014, the number of new datasets on Open Government Data India Portal was 10199 and 5194 new datasets published in 2015 (till 22 October). There were 18017 datasets were available on 23 October 2015.