Press Release

Bengaluru | 14th August 2019

Research outputs find a home at IndiaRxiv, India’s first Preprints Service



Open Access India partners with the Center for Open Science to launch IndiaRxiv on the eve of India’s 73rd Independence Day as the country joins the global march for open science.

Open Access India and the Center for Open Science have collaborated to launch IndiaRxiv, India’s first preprint service. IndiaRxiv began as a vision for a single open platform that could provide free access to all publicly-funded research outputs (publications) from India and to provide Indian scholars with a way to share their scholarly outputs. Today, on the eve of India’s 73rd Independence Day, we are happy to introduce IndiaRxiv. Beginning 15th August, 2019, the preprint service will be open to all researchers and scholars of India and others who are working on issues related to India.

IndiaRxiv is being launched not only for scholars to share their articles and read the work published by their peers, but also to provide public access to the latest research, allowing authors to gather feedback and ideas and build upon existing work.

NITI Aayog, the policy think tank of the Indian government envisions in its ‘Strategy for New India @ 75‘ that by 2022, five of the scientific research institutions in India should be among the top 100 in the world. The Open Access India community believes that when research produced by the research institutes is made freely available, it will reach a wider audience having a larger impact and increase in collaborations. It is hoped that the IndiaRxiv repository will become a portal for sharing and showcasing the latest research produced across all the institutes and universities in the country and the open access community will strive towards this goal.

What are Preprints?

Preprints are the first draft of the versions made by the authors before submitting to the journals for publication. The researchers posting preprints in public repositories will help them in date stamping their work and showcasing the same for making grant applications or for applying for any positions.

There is growing support from eminent scientists and academic bodies like Indian National Science Academy (INSA) for preprints and advocating that preprints should be used for evaluation at par with the peer reviewed publications in the recruitment of postdocs or faculty and also for funding grants.

“Let’s give freedom to our scholarly literature and make it available freely to the world.” – Sridhar Gutam, Convenor, Open Access India and Senior Scientist, Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru.

“IndiaRxiv should now be the flagship and window of cutting-edge science happening in India; a first choice publication platform.” – Biswapriya Misra, Steering Committee Member, Assistant Professor, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA.

“I am really happy to see the dream of IndiaRxiv – the ‘freedom’ statement of free India – come true. India gained her political freedom over seven decades back; she now aspires to earn her academic freedom through IndiaRxiv, a noble initiative in matured open access research and learning. IndiaRxiv will be fully indexed in National Digital Library of India to reach every corner of the world within a single click.” – Partha Pratim Das, Joint Principal Investigator, National Digital Library of India Project and Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Kharagpur

IndiaRxiv is managed by a steering committee comprised of researchers and scientists from various institutes and universities, and its advisory board includes internationally renowned advocates and supporters of open science and open access. With the support of COS and the international steering committee, the Open Access India community previously launched AgriXiv, an open access scholarly repository for agriculture and allied sciences.

The desired outcome is that journal publishers and funding agencies in India will amend their policies to allow their authors to submit preprints to IndiaRxiv, which accepts all scholarly works in all Indian languages. IndiaRxiv has a policy to moderate all the submissions and the same will be made available on the license terms of CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-Attribution 4.0 International.

IndiaRxiv is the 26th community preprints service built on the COS’s flagship platform, OSF, which helps researchers design and manage their project workflow, store their data, generate DOIs, and collaborate with colleagues. COS has leveraged the platform to help the research communities in many disciplines to discover new research as it happens and to receive quick feedback on their own research prior to publication. COS’s preprints platform provides an easy, robust, and stable solution for organizations that want to launch their own preprints service. COS is currently supporting branded services in marine and earth sciences, psychology, social sciences, engineering, agriculture, imaging, paleontology, sports research, contemplative research, law, library and information science, nutrition, as well as national, multidisciplinary services in Indonesia, France, the Arab nations, and Africa.

About the Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology and culture change organization founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. The OSF is a web application that provides a solution for the challenges facing researchers who want to pursue open science practices, including: a streamlined ability to manage their work; collaborate with others; discover and be discovered; pre-register their studies; and make their code, materials, and data openly accessible. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

About OSF Preprints

The branded preprints platform from COS provides organizations that want to launch their own preprints service an easy, robust, and stable solution. The platform can be configured to match their brand, editorial focus, licensing requirements, and taxonomy. Once configured, a new service can be up and indexing new preprints in a matter of days. Preprints contributors are also encouraged to include links to their research, if available. If the preprint is associated with an existing OSF project, that project can also be easily accessed and explored. OSF Preprints uses SHARE to aggregate search results from a variety of other preprints providers like arXiv, bioRXiv, PeerJ, CogPrints and others into its archive.

About Open Access India

The Open Access India is a community of practice was initially an online Facebook group formed on 8th July 2011. The community members are working for taking forward the Open Access movement in India with the following aims and objectives.

Advocacy – sensitizing the students, researchers, policy makers and the general public about Open Access, Open Data and Open Education.

Development of community e-infrastructure, capacity building and framework for policies related to Open Access, Open Data and Open Education.

To support the cause and to work for the aims and objectives, the Open Access India has Ambassadors, a committed Working Group, Convenors and the Advisory Board. Everyone who as interests in Open Access, Open Data and Open Education and the Open Access Movement in India, are welcome to join.

Contact for IndiaRxiv | Open Access India

Media: Sridhar Gutam indiarxiv@gmail.com | sridhar@openaccessindia.org

Web: https://indiarxiv.org | http://openaccessindia.org/

Twitter: @IndiaRxiv | @OAIndia

Contact for the Center for Open Science

Media: Claire Riss claire@cos.io

Starting a Branded Preprints Service: Nici Pfeiffer nici@cos.io

Web: https://cos.io/preprints

Twitter: @osframework