Sridhar Gutam is a Senior Scientist at Indian Council of Agricultural Research and ambassador for OKFN India. He is the founder and convenor of Open Access India. He has written a post sharing how India’s science and technology outputs are now under Open Access.

As a new year 2015 gift to the scholars of the world, the two departments (Department of Biotechnology [DBT] and Department of Science and Technology [DST]) under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India had unveiled Open Access Policy to all its funded research.

The policy document dated December 12, 2014 states that “Since all funds disbursed by the DBT and DST are public funds, it is important that the information and knowledge generated through the use of these funds are made publicly available as soon as possible, subject to Indian law and IP policies of respective funding agencies and institutions where the research is performed“.

As the Ministry of Science and Technology funds basic, translational and applied scientific research in the country through various initiatives and schemes to individual scientists, scholars, institutes, start-up, etc., this policy assumes very significance and brings almost all the science and technology outputs (here published articles only) generated at various institutes under Open Access.

The policy underscores the fact that by providing free online access to the publications is the most effective way of ensuring the publicly funded research is accessed, read and built upon.

The Ministry under this policy has set up two central repositories of its own (dbt.sciencecentral.in and dst.sciencecentral.in) and a central harvester (www.sciencecentral.in) which will harvest the ful-text and metadata from these repositories and other repositories of various institutes established/funded by DBT and DST in the country.

According to the Open Access policy, “the final accepted manuscript (after refereeing, revision, etc. [post-prints]) resulting from research projects, which are fully or partially funded by DBT or DST, or were performed using infrastructure built with the support of these organizations, should be deposited“.

The policy is not only limited to the accepted manuscripts, but extends to all scholarship and data which received funding from DBT or DST from the fiscal year 2012-13 onwards.

As mentioned above that many of the research projects at various institutes in the country are funded by DBT or DST, this policy definitely, encourage the establishment of Open Access Institutional Repositories by the institutes and opening up of access to all the publicly funded research in the country.

This post originally appeared on the Open Knowledge India blog.