Prof. Sumant GoelSecretary Healthcare

TrustProf. Of Orthodontics

JCDV Vidyapeeth-An upcoming University

Dental School

It is so wonderful to be here on this educational paradize and participate in various activities.I would like to thank John Hagen and his colleagues for having us here and giving opportunity to share my thoughts.

I am an orthodontistHave been teaching all my lifeWhen I started guiding thesis I found that students at other schools were not even aware about topics other students were researching for their thesisThere was no access to the unpublished work of other workers.

TodayETD movement in IndiaDigital LibrariesOpen source movement

Information WarHow much of our work is based on Indian research ? (medicine)Hardly any, mostly we rely only on western researchIts high time we pay attention of state of our research.

Information WarThis Era is the Era of Information war.People who are better informed will be the Leaders.If we want to be on the forefront we will have to learn to SHARE and work as a GROUP.

Information WarIn last few years India has gained eminence in field of information technology.Some of the world’s largest IT companies are in India.Surprisingly benefits of IT are yet to fully pervade our society in all relevant sectors.

But it would be fair to say that India is rapidly changing.Communication has seen unprecedented growth.Internet is spreading very fast, broadband access is being given to remote areas and villages.

Wasted ResourceIn US alone 350,000 graduate degrees are awarded each year, but most of these theses are not readily available! ?By making ETDs available via the Web for others to read, we make our work useful to other researchers and both graduate and undergraduate students who will study them for years to come.

Wasted ResourceAbout 3 years ago I met the chief editor of AJODO. When I mentioned to him about ETD he was quite interested but unable to understand why in medicine and related areas ETD implementation has been slow.Is it to do with commercial interests/ or quality of research/ or human nature ?

There are about 1200 Engineering colleges.Over 200 Dental schoolsAbout 242 Medical schoolsTotal of all types of colleges over 15000

ETD In IndiaETD movement in India started from year 2000Digital Dissertation foundation started by us and Vidyanidhi at Mysore by Shalini UrsVidyanidhi has made better progress compared to medical field.Let us look at institutes in India adopting ETDs

December 2003, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) held a one-day conference on access to scientific data and information as part of its annual meeting in Pune They discussed poor access to international journals and the low visibility of papers published by Indian scientists and the possible solutions offered by electronic publishing and open archives.

World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) were helping developing countries improve electronic access to expensive journals through the HINARI and AGORA programs, respectively.

Unfortunately, however, India has not benefited from either of these programs. Although journal publishers are willing to provide toll-free electronic access to researchers in countries where relatively few scientists read their journals, they are not prepared to do so in larger developing countries such as India (GNI 560 USD)

All 10 journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences, for example, as well as the four journals of INSA are open-access journals. In fact, INSA has already produced free-access electronic versions of back volumes for all its journals, and the Indian Academy of Sciences is also attempting a similar 'retro-digitization'.

Several Indian publishers have already adopted the open-access philosophy for the electronic versions of their journals. Unlike some open-access journals in other countries, in which authors pay to publish their papers, Indian open-access journals use government grants and subscriptions to their print version to cover publishing costs.

Medknow Publications, a small company based in Mumbai, has helped 10 medical journals including the Journal of Post Graduate Medicine and Neurology India make the transition from print to electronic open access.All of them are doing much better now than before.

Workshop on open access Bangalore 2002

Workshop on open access 2-8 May 2004

It’s a long ROAD, but A Thousand mile journey Begins with one step

Q & A

etd@healthmantra.com