Open access

The faculty senate at the University of Maryland voted down a resolution supporting open access. The faculty resolved

The University Senate encourages faculty, students, and other researchers, where practical and not detrimental to their careers, to (a) publish in open access journals or journals that make their contents openly accessible shortly after publication, (b)negotiate with the journals in which they publish for the right to deposit articles in an open access repository, and (c) consider the price of the journal as one factor in the decision on where to publish.

The University Senate encourages faculty, students, and other researchers to deposit all reprints and reprints of articles, when permitted, in an open access repository such as the DRUM archive or, where appropriate, in discipline-specific repositories such as PubMed Central.

The scholarly kitchen features a nice article on this. It says, "The assumptions that open access publishing is both cheaper and more sustainable than the traditional subscription model are featured in many of these mandates. But they remain just that — assumptions. "

I have written before on open access and I am firmly for option b and almost 95% of the publishers allow this.

JEE and entrance exams

There is an interesting article discussing the reforms that are needed for JEE. I had written about it in detail before. I had mentioned that JEE may allow only those candidates who have secured among the top 2.5% in their board exams to write the exam. Prof. M.S. Ananth, the director of IIT-M, mentions, "suggestion is that the school board examinations be treated as a screening test, with only the top one per cent of students being allowed to attempt JEE." 

I feel before we take such steps, one should do some statistical analysis. How many percent of the current students in IIT-M (say) have qualified in the top 2.5% (or 1%) of their board exams or have represented in the Olympiads? Is there a linear correlation between the marks obtained in the board exam and the CGPA obtained in IITs? 

Professor Idichandy, who is looking into the reforms for JEE, feels that JEE and all entrance examinations should be abolished and this would lead to the collapse of the coaching classes. Tamil Nadu, for example, has abolished the entrance exams for admission to its engineering colleges. Guess what has happened? The coaching classes for 12th standard have sprung up and replaced the coaching classes for the entrance exam. The coaching industry is not going to disappear because JEE is abolished. It will just shift to another examination. 

Currently, most of the examinations (board exams, several entrance exams) rely only on the student's ability to memorize and not understand concepts. Therefore, board examinations and, consequently, teaching in schools should change first. Maybe make all the board examinations open book exams.

Because the competition to get into IIT is unhealthy, the quantity and quality of NITs and other engineering colleges should be significantly improved so that people feel that not getting into an IIT is not a big deal. 

Without doing any statistical analysis or implementing some reforms in board examinations, simply abolishing a well conducted fair examination may not be a good idea.

Four year B.S. Programme

Bangalore university is planning to start a four year B.S. programme in sciences. The program by Bangalore university is to attract science graduates and become equivalent to the B.E/B.Tech degree. Currently, B.Sc students doing masters degrees are not eligible for scholarship by the government but B.E/B.Tech students doing masters degrees are eligible for scholarship. Making all bachelor's degree uniform is not a bad idea. So far, so good.

The article says,

the proposed B.S. course has on offer a doctorate degree within the next two years. If the candidate does not wish to continue for two full years and comes out after a year, still he/she will get a M.S. degree. In essence, one can become a ‘doctor’ within six years after coming out of the Plus Two science course under this system.

Ph.D two years after a bachelor's ? or one year after a masters? Wonderful. When I heard that people were coming up with ideas to increase the number of doctorates in sciences and engineering, I never figured out that this would be done by giving out doctorates in two years. The next step would be to rename the M.E/M.Tech programs that require also two years after B.E/B.Tech as Ph.D.

Survey in IISc

I wish to congratulate the students who conducted the survey and benchmarked all the services offered in IISc. The results of the survey were published in Voices, which is hosted in NCSI. I read the article with great interest over the weekend. What struck me was not just the professionalism in conducting the survey but also the thoroughness of the analysis of the data. 

None of the services got five stars (excellent) or one star (very poor). Three services got two stars (poor). Of these three, the contract to two of these services may not be renewed next year and we will use this input by the students as a parameter !

I have only one suggestion: increase your sample size from the current 10%. Two ideas for doing this: (a) The survey was open only for a week. Send a reminder through the broadcast at the end of seven days and tell the survey deadline has been extended by two more days (and keep it open for three days :-) Most of us work only after getting a reminder. (b) Keep printed copies of the survey near the messes with the boxes to put them. Someone, of course, has to enter them in the online survey manually. 

I do not know whether anyone from the Voices team reads this blog. If you do, congratulations again.

Undergrad research in India

This will not be applicable to the undergraduates who will graduate from IISc !

If you are undergraduate (B.Sc/B.Tech/B.E) student and interested in doing research, read this post first. The post ends with, "spamming the inbox of professors with 'I want to do summer research' doesn't serve any purpose. Write compelling, personalized and relevant emails that convey your goals and intentions to specific professors whose work interests you. It shows when you have taken the effort to look through their website and read about the projects that they work on. Ask at least a few people to review and proof-read your application."

I could not have put it better. I receive around 10 emails a week from undergrad students for the summer project. Though our department website has clear instructions for summer trainees, no one seems to read them. Prospective candidates should at least read the websites of faculty before applying to them directly. I also request one should proofread the application. Grammatical errors can be forgiven, typographical errors can not be excused. However, this is not restricted to undergraduates. See the following email I received for a post doctoral position,

Hey prof.,

good morning, i introudce myself presently doing my post doctoral fellwo job at X (since 2006 begning), and seraching suitable position in india. I did my phD in IIT Madras. I read your aritcles recently due to curiosity of the name and I pubilshed. I am intrested to continue to my research area related to engery applicaitons, i am also intrested in fluides, i collected many articles recently. I need your suggestion regarding to apply for Reserach Associtate fellowship from IIS to work with you as my principle investigator for your convenice.

Statistics

Mark Twain said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In an interesting article on QSAR, (QSAR is the process where the chemical structure is correlated with chemical or biological activity), the author shows a graph that shows a linear trend that shows that US Highway Fatality rate decreases linearly with an increase with the lemons imported to US from Mexico. He goes on to say, "By not following through with careful, designed, hypothesis testing we have allowed scientific thinking to be co-opted by statistics and arbitrarily defined fitness functions. Statistics must serve science as a tool; statistics cannot replace scientific rationality, experimental design, and personal observation."

While this is one end where the use of statistics is to bolster weak arguments, in India, we usually the follow the other end and disparage statistics that do not support the perceptions. For example, IISc and IITs are often compared with the top universities of USA. As a country, India published 43 articles in Science for the ten year period of 2000-2009 (this includes several articles which had a foreign collaborator). A single university, MIT, published 291 articles in the same period. The numbers are almost exactly the same for publications in Nature (45 and 295).

Other these top journals which are common to science, I have also taken the top three journals in each field of science and engineering. The numbers for chemical engineering has already been published and the rest will be published in a separate paper.

Open access

Yesterday, an open access proponent visited IISc and interviewed the Director and Associate Director. I was also interviewed on the applicability of open access and how it influences the research scenario in India. Unlike some academics who believe that scientists should publish in open access journals only, I have a different view as a researcher.

Unlike other professionals, research scholars write journal articles for free to advance knowledge in their field and, possibly, their careers. The entire process of writing a research paper, reviewing by other peers and editorial decisions are carried out at nearly no cost. There are four kinds of journals: (a) author pays, reader pays (b) author pays, reader does not pay (c) author does not pay, reader pays (d) author does not pay, reader also does not pay. Category (a) is followed by a few journals that are published by some societies. In this case, the author pays the page charges while the reader pays for access. Category (b) is the current open acess model wherein the author pays for publishing the article but the reader does not pay for access. Category (d) is a variation where some open access journals waive the payment for authors. These journals are generally supported by trusts. Category (c) is the most common and is adopted by all commercial publishers. Previously, when most the journals were available only in the print form, categories (b) and (d) did not make much sense and open access was not commonly used. However, with most journals going online and some journals going exclusively online, the cost of print is not an issue anymore.

Why is there such an uproar against commercial publishers and for open access? The average cost of a journal in chemistry, physics, engineering and biology are US$ 3490, 3103, 1919 and 1810, respectively, with an average increase of 5–9% in cost per year. The consumer price index (CPI) for the USA city average for all items is a widely used measurement for the general rate of inflation in USA. The Association of Research Libraries 3 USA mentions that the CPI has increased by 73% between 1986 and 2004, but the research library expendi-ture for journals has increased by 273% during the same period. These rapidly rising journal prices have thus battered the ability of researchers, libraries and institutions to access scientific publications. Global research article output is estimated to be around two million articles per year in around 18,000 journals (of which 8000 are indexed in ISI)and constitute an US$ 15 billion market. Researchers expect that the administration will subscribe to all journals that are available; librarians like to give access to all journals for the researchers,while the publishers would like to continuously increase their profit. With the current library budget of IISc at $ 2.4 million dollars per year, the efforts to contain bloating library budgets ultimately seem to rest on the director of the institute, who is unable to alter the dynamics because of resistance from every quarter. 

Thus many proponents of open access feel that scientists should publish only in open access journals. On the other hand, researchers in any prestigious institute like to publish their research in prestigious journals, which need not be open access. This is because publishing in a particular journal adds value not only to the journal but also to the publication. A publication in the top journal is likely to further the career of a scientist and he/she is not worried about whether the journal is open access or not. Therefore, a researcher, especially from South Asia/India, is likely to publish in a journal that is considered prestigious internationally, rather than just open access. Here is where an open access institutional repository will help. Almost all publishers (> 95%) of journals allow archiving a postprint of the research paper after peer review in an institutional repository. 

At the national centre of science information (NCSI) at IISc, we have the largest repository of research papers in India. Currently, the repository contains more than 11,000 full text research papers published by IISc faculty. The repository also contains the abstracts of all the 28,000 research papers published by IISc in its last hundred years. Because search engines like google index the full text of a paper that are available in these open access repositories, researchers using these search engines land up in the repositories rather than at the publisher site. Based on my analysis of the number of accesses and downloads of papers from the eprint repository of IISc, I find that people who search from developed countries see the paper in the repository but download it from the publisher site (for which they will access because the institution pays for it) while people who search from developing countries see the paper in the repository and download the postprint version of the paper. 

While agencies like NIH (and some NITs in India) have mandated that all publications should be archived in a repository, I am not so sure whether a mandate will be so effective. Instead of a top down approach, scientists should become convinced that deposition of their research work in an institutional repository will help. Why should the scientist take 10-15 minutes of his/her (or their student's) time to make the deposition in a repository? Other than the social issues aside, my analysis (not yet publishable) shows that the citations of a paper are bound to increase if it is available as open access in a repository. 

First the most prestigious journals in each field has to become open access. Then, the cost an author has to pay to publish in these journals should be reasonable. Till such time, scientists should be strongly encouraged to deposit their research papers in an open access repository. This would greatly impact the open access movement in India.