From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2014 20:32:31 +0100

Today the world is awash with OA advocates, and the number of them
grows year by year. But it was not always thus.

When Chennai-based information scientist Subbiah Arunachalam began
calling for OA, for instance, there were hardly any other OA advocates
in India, and not a great many more in the rest of the world either.

Yet like all developing countries, India faced (and continues to face)
a serious access problem with regard to the scholarly literature — a
function of the fact that the costs of subscribing to scholarly
journals are very high, and these costs consistently rise at a faster
rate than overall inflation. As a result, Indian scientists do not
have access to all the journals they need to do their job properly.

Arunachalam had long been puzzling over how India’s access problem
could be solved, and he had (unsuccessfully) tried a number of ways to
resolve it himself. Then in 1996 his attention was drawn to Stevan
Harnad’s 1994 Subversive Proposal — which called on all researchers to
self-archive their papers on the Internet so that they were free for
anyone to read.

Immediately seeing the potential of self-archiving, or what later
became known as Green OA, Arunachalam decided to organise a two-day
workshop at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) Chennai, to
which he invited Harnad.

This was in 2000.

Since then Arunachalam has devoted a great deal of time and energy
advocating for OA in India, an activity that must at times have been a
somewhat lonely experience. As the manager of Library and Information
Services at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid
Tropics (ICRISAT) Muthu Madhan put it recently, “OA advocacy in India
can be characterised as mostly a one-man effort by Prof. Subbiah
Arunachalam.”

The interview with Subbiah Arunachalam can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/open-access-in-india-q-with-subbiah.html