Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science

Abstract. The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. Today the world of information is divided between two views on costs and business. One group believes that content should be freely accessible for the development of further knowledge. The other group believes that content should be maintained by market value for quality products and incentives to the intellectual content. Open Access (OA) has come from the growing interest of researchers in experimenting with innovative mechanisms to disseminate their research findings. However OA is still far behind what it should be in the country like India. At least the scientific community is still in a dilemma to embrace OA. This is what we find in our survey of researcher's attitude towards OA. There are many reasons ranging from lack of awareness, myths about OA and biasness towards traditional publishing model for prestige & recognition. We approached scientists of different research institutes and universities around Kolkata with different age groups in different ways. Interesting results have come out which clearly identified the major hurdles to adopt OA by scientific community in India