Invited Talk on Quality Assessment of Science and Technology Policies, 24 August 2022

Invited Talk on Quality Assessment of Science and Technology Policies, 24 August 2022

ย Invited Talk on “๐๐ฎ๐š๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ ๐€๐ฌ๐ฌ๐ž๐ฌ๐ฌ๐ฆ๐ž๐ง๐ญ ๐จ๐Ÿ ๐’๐œ๐ข๐ž๐ง๐œ๐ž ๐š๐ง๐ ๐“๐ž๐œ๐ก๐ง๐จ๐ฅ๐จ๐ ๐ฒ ๐๐จ๐ฅ๐ข๐œ๐ข๐ž๐ฌ”

Speaker: Bhavya Mehta, Consultant – S&T Policy, Centre for Civil Society.

Date & Time: ๐–๐ž๐๐ง๐ž๐ฌ๐๐š๐ฒ, ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ’ ๐€๐ฎ๐  ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ, ๐Ÿ’ ๐๐Œย 

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DORA funded project โ€œExploring Research Assessment Practices in Indian Academia

Exploring the Current Practices in Research Assessment within Indian Academia

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Funded by: DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) under the Community Engagement Grant Programย 

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About the projectย 

India has a considerably large research community of ministries, scientificย  and industrial research organisations; universities, research councils, and autonomous institutions directly dealing with research/funding. The country also boasts of ~0.34 million FTE researchers. The quantum of research undertaken/funded by these institutions are also quite large. Research assessment criteria vary with the type of institutions, research, and the goal of assessment.ย 

However, like many other countries, research assessment in Indian institutions and funding agencies is currently overly dependent on matrices such as Journal Impact Factor (JIF), h-index, etc. Though started well intended, matrices proliferated to be an abused instrument. Keeping this in view, the proposed project aims to initiate a broader discussion on the framework used by these institutions, their institutional capacities, and strengths and gaps in the existing practices.ย 

For this purpose, we plan to organise a series of workshops with the major stakeholders of the Indian research ecosystem to understand and deliberate on the strengths and weaknesses of current practices.ย 

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Expected outcome

The workshop outcome will help us better understand the existing practices, how to look beyond the quantitative journal indicator-based metrics, and suggest pathways to make them more effective and inclusive wherever necessary. The project outcome will help the institutions build robust, flexible research assessment frameworks.

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For more information, please contact Dr. Momita Koley or Dr.ย Suchiradipta Bhattacharjee

Open Access Digital Publishing Platform

Open Access Digital Publishing Platform

Time for India's own open-access digital publishing platform?

Knowledge sharing is the key to research in academia, and scientific journals play a crucial role in that. It started with noble intentions and sponsorships from various learned societies almost 400 years ago. Then in the 1950s, Robert Maxwell turned scientific journals into a money-making instrument. Presently the academic publishing industry functions in a concentrated market filled with big players and driven by revenue. Elsevier, one of the biggest publication houses, earned aprofit margin of more than 35% higher than tech giants like Apple and Microsoft. The success of their business model hinges on the prosumer nature of the researcher. Even though technological advancements have shifted the industry to adopt the digital format, most knowledge is still paywalled. Initiatives likeBudapest Open Access Initiative, stresses self-archiving and open-access. The extortionatelyhigh article processing fee (APC) charged by publishing groups for open-access publication beats the purpose of equity and inclusivity. Academic communities in transitioning economies like India also face the added challenge of scattered community involvement in the peer-review process, which combined with theUS effect, breeds inequity.

Advancements in open-access practices have fuelled innovative approaches, especially in Latin America.Non-commercial models to scholarly communication like the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and Redalyc have emerged. They successfully function with decentralised electronic publishing platforms, no APCs, open-access repositories, and not for profit indexing services. On a similar adaptability approach, African Journals OnLine (AJOL) and Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) also function in open-access mode.

Viewing the increasing acceptability and advocacy of open access, some dominant and young academic publishers such asF1000Research,eLife,Gates Open Research, etc. have also made subtle shifts in their operating model. Concepts like an open peer-review system removes the opaqueness of the peer-review by publishing the reviewer comments along with the manuscript. Preprint open-access repositories like bioRxiv, engrXiv, SocArXiv, etc., are also steering the changes in online paper archiving models.

Technological progression and open-access advocacy have trickled down to compel the publishing industry to evolve its business models and practices. Still, this hasn’t changed the management of peer-reviewed academic journals. Non-profit initiatives such as Public Knowledge Project, supported by Stanford University, the Simon Fraser University Library and various other development partners, have focused on strategizing and developing open software solutions to improve the online environment for better management, publication, and indexing of journals.

Indian academia, as a result of access and equity challenges, is falling prey to predatory publishing. Recognition biases coalesced with financial and infrastructure constraints prevent researchers from publishing in high-quality journals. TheUGC mandate of one compulsory publication as a pre-condition to PhD also fuels predatory publishing. This calls for the development of a digital open-access environment with minimal (funded by the research project) to no-APCs. There is already a precedent, the Open Research Europe by the European Commission. This platform encourages quick but quality open-peer-reviewed publications for research across all subject areas, stemming from Horizon 2020 funding.

India has many opportunities to leverage from its own digital publishing platform. The country is currently positioned third in the world in scientific publication with a 12.9% growth rate in scientific publications. Indiaโ€™s digital expertise at both individual and corporate levels is also well acknowledged. Only a few Tier 1 public sector universities at present can afford to make scholarly publication accessible to researchers. A potential solution discussed is One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS). But it will call for huge investments every year without addressing core issues like improving the quality of Indian research, more practical research evaluation matrices, and monetisation of public-funded research output by a few corporate publishers. Against this backdrop, a digital publishing platform will address access issues of publicly funded research in India. It can create a vibrant community of researchers enabling scholarly knowledge sharing and communication. Further, a digital publishing platform with a very firm stand on quality publication not only holds promises to provide fair and open-access avenues for Indian (and the rest of the world) researchers to publish, but associated analytics such as views, download, social media presence, etc. of a published article. This can open up new possibilities to judge the impact of research not based on the impact factor of a journal but the real impact of the said work.

Innovation Challenge to build an AI powered pre-print and publishing platform

Background

Currently, the scientific publishing system faces the problem of access and equity. Commercial publishing houses charge exorbitantly high article processing and subscription charges. Even though most of the research published is publicly funded and digital interventions have substantially reduced the processing costs, most of the scholarly knowledge still resides behind paywalls, not only for the general public but also for researchers generating academic content. The exclusion of the global south perspective and increase in the number of predatory journals have also escalated the debate on the knowledge-quality and effectiveness of the current process of knowledge creation and dissemination.ย 

The recently released draft UNESCO Open Science recommendations advocates for open access to scientific publication, unrestricted distribution, interoperability and long-term digital preฬservation and archiving.The draft of the 5th STI policy India also promotes open access to publicly funded research output.

With the belief that knowledge is a public good and must be accessible without barriers, we propose an open-access publication platform. One of the primary goals of this platform will be to foster unhindered access to scholarly publications, primarily through digital technologies. Working on the recommendations of various stakeholders, the idea is to build a robust digital platform that is transparent, efficient, cost-effective, and addresses the mainstream problems faced by both the scholars and editors.

Problem/Opportunity

The problem is one of access and equity. Access relates to both access to read and access to publish. A bulk of material is behind paywalls. Open Access publication is prohibitively expensive. Community involvement is scattered and peer review is difficult to find. Metric bases are cherry-picked by corporate interests, like impact factor, h-index, etc., and promoted in a way that it benefits those who are already at the top of the food chain (western, first world scholarship).

There is an opportunity to build a pre-print archive and an open national research publishing platform that solves the problems of access and equity. There are possibilities to attribute matrices on each article based on pragmatic research evaluation criteria that suit the needs of Indian funding agencies. This will encourage research that address the local challenges which usually are overlooked by the international community and benefit in one or more of the components of research content, namely:

Title, Abstract, Affiliation, Keywords, Bibliography.

Additional opportunities are available: A pragmatic approach to a publishing model that is digital first with an option to print, when and if needed, can leapfrog the platform ahead of all prior art.ย ย 

Challenge statement

Develop an automated, AI-powered digital open-access publication platform for accessible, equitable, and efficient dissemination of knowledge in academia.

Programme: Joint workshop on โ€˜Science Technology and Innovation Policy for Transformative Change’

Day 1 (18 Feb., 2021)

9:00 โ€“ 9:15ย  GMT

14:30 โ€“ 14:45ย  IST

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

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Dr. Marion Clarke, Research Unit Manager, SPRU, University of Sussex, UK

Prof. T. A. Abinandanan, Coordinator DST-Centre for Policy research, IISc Bangalore, India

9.15 – 10.15ย  GMT

14:45 – 15:45ย  IST

PLENARY I : STI POLICY: PERSPECTIVES FROM INDIA AND TIPC

9:15 โ€“ 9: 45ย  GMT

14:45 โ€“ 15:15ย  IST

INDIAโ€™S 5th NATIONAL STI POLICY: AT A GLANCE & PROCESS OF PARTICIPATORY POLICYMAKING
Dr. Akhilesh Gupta, Head STIP Secretariat, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India

9:45 โ€“ 10:00ย  GMT

15:15 โ€“ 15:35ย  IST

TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION POLICY CONSORTIUM: MAIN OUTCOMES OF TIPC EXPERIMENTS IN 2020

ย Dr. Matias Ramirez, Senior Lecturer, SPRU, University of Sussex, UK

ย Christina Miariti, Programme co-Director, TIPC

10:00 โ€“ 10:15ย  GMT

15:35 โ€“ 15:45ย  IST

OPEN-FLOOR DISCUSSION

10:15 โ€“ 10:45ย  GMT

15:45 – 16:15ย  IST

FLASH TALKS BY STI POLICY RESEARCHERS

BREAK

11.00 – 11.55ย  GMT

16:30 – 17:25ย  IST

PLENARY II : HISTORICAL OUTLOOK INTO STI POLICY IN INDIA AND IN THE WORLD

11:00 โ€“ 11:20ย  GMT

16:30 โ€“ 16:50ย  IST

INTERSECTORAL CONVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGIES FOR SDGs

Prof. Shubhini A. Saraf, Coordinator DST-Centre for Policy research, BBAU Lucknow, India

11:20 โ€“ 11:40 ย GMT

16:50 โ€“ 17:10ย  IST

THREE FRAMES OF INNOVATION POLICY

Prof. Johan Schot, Academic Director, Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC)

11:40 โ€“ 11:55ย  GMT

17:10 โ€“ 17:25ย  IST

OPEN-FLOOR DISCUSSION

11:55 โ€“ 12:00ย  GMT

17:25 โ€“ 17:30ย  IST

CLOSING AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Day 2 (19 Feb., 2021)

9:00 โ€“ 9:15ย  GMT

14:30 โ€“ 14:45ย  IST

WELCOME TO THE SECOND DAY

Prof. Jeremy Hall, Professor and Director at SPRU – Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UKย 

9.15 – 10.15ย  GMT

14:45 – 15:45ย  IST

PLENARY III: STI POLICY IN GLOBAL SOUTH

9:15 โ€“ 9: 35ย  GMT

14:45 โ€“ 15:05ย  IST

STI POLICY FOR DEVELOPMENT IN SPRU: PAST AND PRESENT
Dr. Adrian Ely, Reader in Technology and Sustainability, SPRU, University of Sussex, UK

9:35 โ€“ 9:55ย  GMT

15:05 โ€“ 15:25ย  IST

DATA GOVERNANCE AND EQUITY: AN INDIAN PERSPECTIVE

Prof. Anjula Gurtoo, Chairperson, Centre for Society and Policy, IISc Bangalore, India

9:55 โ€“ 10:15ย  GMT

15:25 โ€“ 15:45ย  IST

OPEN-FLOOR DISCUSSION

10:15 โ€“ 10:45ย  GMT

15:45 โ€“ 16:15ย  IST

FLASH TALKS BY STI POLICY RESEARCHERS

BREAK

11:00 โ€“ 11:45ย  GMT

16:30 โ€“ 17:15ย  IST

THEMATIC GROUP DISCUSSIONS

11:45 โ€“ 12:00ย  GMT

17:15 โ€“ 17:30ย  IST

CLOSING & THANKS

CLOSED SESSION

12:15 โ€“ 13:15ย  GMT

17:45 โ€“ 18:45ย  IST

EXECUTIVE MEETING

FLASH TALKS

Day 1 (18 Feb., 2021)
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Dr. Imogen Wade, Research Fellow in Transformative Innovation, SPRU, University of Sussexย 

Dr. Venkat Nadella, Post-doctoral Policy Fellow, DST-CPR-Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Ms Yasemin Aslan, PhD scholar, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussexย 

Dr. Nimita Pandey, Post-doctoral Policy Fellow, Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the GoI and UNESCO New Delhi

Ms Nora Nedge, PhD Scholar, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex ย 

TITLE
Implementing transformative innovation policies across geographical contexts: TIPC in South Africa, Sweden and the European Union
Financing Science, Technology and Innovation: Lessons from Polycentric System of Governance
A Novel Index Knowledge Triangle: The Entrepreneurial and Innovative University Index of Turkey
Gender Equity and Inclusion in STI: Towards Institutional Transformation
Investing in Science, Technology and Innovation: Learning from a complimentary approach piloted in East Africa
Day 2 (19 Feb., 2021)
Dr. Suchiradipta Bhattacharjee, Senior Policy Fellow, DST-CPR Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Dr. Alexandra Boni, INGENIO (CSIC-UPV), Universitat Politรจcnica de Valรจncia

Dr. Mansimran Khokhar, Senior Scientist D, DST-CPR Panjab University, Chandigarh

Dr. Joshua Moon, Research Fellow, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussexย 

Dr. Saumya Pathak, Post-doctoral Policy Fellow. DST-CPR BBAU Lucknow University
Looking at India’s climate change initiatives in agriculture through an innovation systems lens

Evaluating transformative innovation policies in a formative way

Public-Private Partnerships in STI: Key to Multi-stakeholders Participation in STI

Fear and Apathy in Implementation: Learning the lessons of learning lessons for epidemic preparednessย 

Internationalisation of Indian Standard Medicine: Strengthening Patent Regime, Strategies and Modulation of Policy

Thematic Group discussions (Break-out rooms)

  • Conceptualising STI Policy: Global context
  • STI Policy for Transformative Change
  • Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  • STI Governance Developmental Context
  • STI roadmaps for the SDGs
  • Open Science and Science Communication
  • Implementation and Evaluation of STI Policy
  • Inclusivity and Equity in STI

Reports

  1. Sheth BP, Basha CB and Roy I. Workshop Report on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Research. Current Science 2018; Vol 118 [Accepted for publication]
  1. Reddy M, Basha CB. Data-Collection Methodology for R&D Statistics โ€“ Indian Scenario and International Comparison. 2017. Report submitted to Policy Research Cell, DST, India
  1. Rani M T, Madhan M, Arunachalam S, Abinandanan T A. Chemistry research in India as seen from InCites 2006-2015. Report submitted to Policy Research Cell, DST, Indiaย 
  1. Rani M T, Madhan M, Arunachalam S, Abinandanan T A. Engineering research in India: An analysis based on papers indexed in InCites for the period 2006-2015. Report submitted to Policy Research Cell, DST, India
  1. Rani M T, Madhan M, Arunachalam S, Abinandanan T A. Materials Science Research in India: An analysis based on papers indexed in InCites for the period 2006-2015. Report submitted to Policy Research Cell, DST, India
  1. Pandey P. EU-India Meeting on Advanced Biofuels. New Delhi 2018, Report submitted to Biofuels Working Group, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India.

Research Articles

  1. Arunachalam S, Madhan M. Adopting ORCID as a unique identifier will benefit all involved in scholarly communication. The National Medical Journal of India 2016; Vol 29, No. 4, pp. 227โ€“234.

http://www.nmji.in/temp/NatlMedJIndia294227-6319386_014519.pdf

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  1. Muthu M, Kimidi SS, Gunasekaran S, Arunachalam S (2016) Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published? Current Science 2017; Vol 112, No. 4, pp. 703-713.

http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/1/Post-print_APC_paper.pdf

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  1. Arunachalam, S. and Madhan, M. and Gunasekaran, S. Chemistry research in India: making progress, but not rapidly. Current Science 2017; Vol 112, No. 7, pp. 1330-1339. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/07/1330.pdf
  1. Madhan M, Gunasekaran S, Arunachalam S. Evaluation of research in India: Are we doing it right? Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Published online on March 23, 2018. DOI: 10.20529/IJME.2018.024

http://ijme.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180323_evaluation_of_research.pdf

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  1. Subbiah Arunachalam. Social Justice in Scholarly Publishing: Open Access Is the Only Way. The American Journal of Bioethics 2017: Vol 17, No. 10, pp. 15-17, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2017.1366194

http://dst.sciencecentral.in/36/3/UAJB_A_1366194-Postprint.pdf

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  1. Francis Jayakanth and Muthu Madhan. Open Access for Engineers and Engineering. IEEE India Info 2017; Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 53-57.

http://sites.ieee.org/indiacouncil/files/2018/01/p53-p57.pdf

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  1. Chagun Basha. Mapping Indian National STI to Garner 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Proceedings of RIS-ITEC Capacity Building Programme on Science Diplomacy, New Delhi 2017: pp 43-46.

http://www.ris.org.in/itec-programme-science-diplomacy

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  1. Pandey P, Desai P.N, Chaturvedi S. Towards a Global TA. [Accepted for publication, KIT Scientific Publishing, Germany 2018]
  1. Pandey P, Dutt. U. RRIโ€™s Commitment to Care and Vulnerabilities of Agricultural Systems: A Case of Rice Straw Burning in India. [Manuscript under review for Science, Technology and Society, Sage Publication 2018]
  1. Pandey P. What Values Drive Innovation? A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Academia-Industry Interaction for Nanobiotechnology in India. [Paper peer-reviewed and accepted for presentation in Globelics conference 23-25 October 2018, Accra, Ghana]

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  1. Pandey P, Valkenburg G. All we want is to get rid of the strawโ€™: How Biofuel Policies Need to Take Account of Different Visions of Biomass. [Under review for Energy Policy]