Open access in India

In India, the Open Access movement started in 2001 with the launch of Journal of Tropical Agriculture by the Kerala Agricultural University. In March 2002 when the Indian Academy of Sciences organsied workshop on Open Journal Systems at the Indian Institute of Sciences, Bengaluru. And in May 2004, two workshops were organized by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. In 2006, the National Knowledge Commission in its recommendations proposed that "access to knowledge is the most fundamental way of increasing the opportunities and reach of individuals and groups". In 2011, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research began requiring that its grantees provide open access to funded research, the Open Access India forum formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India. The Shodhganga, a digital repository for theses, was also established in 2011 with the aim of promoting and preserving academic research. The University Grants Commission made it mandatory for scholars to deposit their theses in Shodhganga, as per the Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M. Phil./Ph.D. Degrees Regulations, 2016. Currently, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals published in India, of which 233 have no fees.
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Landmarks

2001 - is the First Open Access Journal in Agricultural Sciences published by the Kerala Agricultural University.
2002 - First workshop on Open Access Journals organised at IISc, Bengaluru.
2004 - First workshop on Open Access and Institutional Repositories by M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai.
2006 - India's first institutional mandate of open access adopted by the National institute of Technology, Rourkela.
2008 - First UNESCO book on OA released in India titled "Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives - the South Asian Scenario"
2009 - National Knowledge Commission recommends Open Educational Resources .
2011 - formed
2011 - Council of Scientific & Industrial Research constitutes for implementation of in CSIR.
2011 - UGC and INFLIBNET Centre launched the Shodhganga : A Reservoir of Indian Theses, to disseminate theses and dissertations produced in Indian universities.
2013 - National Repository of Open Educational Resources
2013 - Indian Council of Agricultural Research adopted for the establishment of Open Access institutional repositories in the ICAR institutes
2014 - Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology jointly made .
2016 - UGC M. Phil & Ph.D. thesis deposition.
2017 - Open Access India had developed and submitted a draft '' to the Ministries of Human Resource Development and Science & Technology.
2017 - AgriXiv, preprints repository launched by Open Access India with the support of the Centre for Open Science.
2018 - The "Delhi Declaration on Open Access" in South Asia was issued on 14 February 2018, signed by dozens of academics and supporters.
2018 - The University Grants Commission's thesis repository, Shodhganga which is in place due to the Ministry of HRD's directives, encourages the authors to tag the submissions with Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
2019 - IndiaRxiv, India's preprint repository launched by the Open Access India community.
2019 - Open Access India joins in taking forward the 'non-profit publishing model to preserve the scholarly communications' in India
2020 - AgriXiv is relaunched as agriRxiv by jointly by the Open Access India and CABI.
2020 - propose to make preprints and post prints available through a central repository.
2022 - relaunched using Open Preprint Systems of Public Knowledge Project.
2022 - The Open Access Policy
2024 - The Open Access India community launches , a Diamond Open Access platform for not for profit scholarly journals
2026 -

Forums

The Open Access India forum was started in 2011 as an online forum and as a community of practice. The members of the community of practice, had adapted the PLOS's Open Access logo and modified it to represent it as the Open Access movement in India and had formulated a draft policy on Open Access for India.

Journals

As of April 2022, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 326 open access journals which are being published from India of which, 233 are having no Article Processing Charges. Titles include the Indian Journal of Community Medicine, ''Indian Journal of Medical Research, Indian Journal of Medical Microbiology and Journal of Horticultural Sciences.''

Repositories

As of April 2018, there are at least 78 collections of scholarship in India housed in digital open access repositories. They contain journal articles, book chapters, data, and other research outputs that are free to read. The Open Access India with the help of Centre for Open Science had launched a preprint repository for India, on 5 August 2019 which had recently crossed 100 records mark. However, it is not accepting the records currently on its OSF but there is an update of resumption on new website. The Open Access India earlier had launched AgriXiv, preprints repository for agriculture and allied sciences which is now currently with CABI as agriRxiv.

Third Global Summit on Diamond Open Access

The third edition of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access under the theme: Collaboration for Equitable Digital Infrastructures and Knowledge Commons in Agriculture and Broader Scientific Research Systems is scheduled to be held at Bengaluru during February 2-6, 2026. The first Global Summit on Diamond Open Access was in Toluca, Mexico, and the second Summit in Cape Town, South Africa brought together global experts and resulted in significant collective outcomes, including the Toluca–Cape Town Declaration on Diamond Open Access. The Bengaluru Summit aims to builds directly on these foundations, with an emphasis on implementation, sustainability, and institutional alignment.