Today (13th September 2013) the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had announced its Open Access policy on its website. The full-text of Open Access policy of the ICAR is follows:

ICAR adopts Open Access Policy

• Each ICAR institute to setup an Open Access Institutional Repository.
• ICAR shall setup a central harvester to harvest the metadata and full-text of all the records from all the OA repositories of the ICAR institutes for one stop access to all the agricultural knowledge generated in ICAR.
• All the meta-data and other information of the institutional repositories are copyrighted with the ICAR. These are licensed for use, re-use and sharing for academic and research purposes. Commercial and other reuse requires written permission.
• All publications viz., research articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins, summary of the completed projects, speeches, and other grey literatures available with the institutes to be placed under Open Access.
• The institutes are free to place their unpublished reports in their open access repository. They are encouraged to share their works in public repositories like YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook ®, Google+, etc. along with appropriate disclaimer.
• The authors of the scholarly articles produced from the research conducted at the ICAR institutes have to deposit immediately the final authors version manuscripts of papers accepted for publication (pre-prints and post-prints) in the institute’s Open Access repository.
• Scientists and other research personnel of the ICAR working in all ICAR institutes or elsewhere are encouraged to publish their research work with publishers which allow self- archiving in Open Access Institutional Repositories.
• The authors of the scholarly literature produced from the research funded in whole or part by the ICAR or by other Public Funds at ICAR establishments are required to deposit the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript in the ICAR institute’s Open Access Institutional Repository.
• Scientists are advised to mention the ICAR’s Open Access policy while signing the copyright agreements with the publishers and the embargo, if any, should not be later than 12 months.
• M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis/dissertations (full contents) and summary of completed research projects to be deposited in the institutes open access repository after completion of the work. The metadata (e.g., title, abstract, authors, publisher, etc.) be freely accessible from the time of deposition of the content and their free unrestricted use through Open Access can be made after an embargo period not more than 12 months.
• All the journals published by the ICAR have been made Open Access.  Journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly literature published with the financial support from ICAR to the professional societies and others, to be made Open.
• The documents having material to be patented or commercialised, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the institute and/or the author, may not be included in institute’s Open Access repository. However, the ICAR scientists and staff as authors of the commercial books may negotiate with the publishers to share the same via institutional repositories after a suitable embargo period.

Implementation

The DKMA to function as nodal agency for implementation of the ICAR Open Access policy. The DKMA will organize advocacy workshops and capacity building of scientific & technical personnel, repository administrators, editors and publishers on Institutional Repositories, application and usage of Free and Open Source Software.

End Note

OA initiative is not a single event. It is a process and expects full compliance over a period of three years.  Therefore, the proposed modest policy is a first step in the journey towards formal declaration of openness and then after reviews progress, compliance and impact periodically.