Open access in India: hopes and frustrations

Current status of scientific research and progress made in open access – OA journals, OA repositories and open course ware - in India are reviewed. India is essentially feudal and hierarchical; there is a wide variation in the level of engagement with science and research and there is a wide gap between talk and action. Things never happen till they really happen. The key therefore is constant advocacy and never slackening the effort, and to deploying both bottom-up and top-down approaches. The author’ own engagement with the Science Academies and key policymakers is described. Indian Institute of Science is likely to deposit a very large proportion of the papers published by its faculty and students in the past hundred years in its EPrints archive. There is hope that CSIR will soon adopt open access