Open Access to Scientific Information in Context With IPR Issues.

Abstract

Scientific information, which is the most important resource should be openly accessible and free from pricing and licensing restrictions. It is very essential for the worldwide information flow and socio-economic development. The open access movement in the domain of output of scientific research has come into existence globally because of continuous rising of prices of subscriptions of journals resulting restricted access to scholarly articles. This forced to the scholars and researchers to look for the alternate ways for sustaining sharing of information and knowledge. The open access is possible only due to willingness of scientists, scholars and organisations to share information and knowledge produced by them. The recent advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), specially the Internet and web has revolutionized the concept and playing a very important role in collecting, organising, storing, sharing and communicating the information in digital form. In India, many organisations took initiatives for participating actively in Open Access Movement. There are several Open Access Repositories such as institutional repositories have been developed in India by collecting and organising research documents in digital form for the benefit of scientists and researchers. The open access facility available in the form of full text articles and books has played major role in providing services to the users of the libraries without involving any extra burden on the budget of the libraries. But simultaneously when we move faster towards OA initiatives, the chances of violation of Intellectual Property Rights are also increased. The paper advocates open access to scientific information and argues the sharing of knowledge and building partnerships for optimal utilisation and benefiting from existing scientific information, but the Rights of Intellectual Property of individuals and organisations should be safeguard.