One-day seminar on Open Innovation organized at IISc, Bangalore

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Indian Institute of Science
ย Invited Talk on “๐๐ฎ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ๐๐ฌ๐ฌ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ ๐จ๐ ๐๐๐ข๐๐ง๐๐ ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐๐๐ก๐ง๐จ๐ฅ๐จ๐ ๐ฒ ๐๐จ๐ฅ๐ข๐๐ข๐๐ฌ”
Speaker: Bhavya Mehta, Consultant – S&T Policy, Centre for Civil Society.
Date & Time: ๐๐๐๐ง๐๐ฌ๐๐๐ฒ, ๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐๐๐๐, ๐ ๐๐ย
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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
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. Indiaโs 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 preฬservation 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.
9:00 โ 9:15ย GMT 14:30 โ 14:45ย IST | WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION ย 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 | INDIAโS 5th NATIONAL STI POLICY: AT A GLANCE & PROCESS OF PARTICIPATORY POLICYMAKING |
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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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 |
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 |
NAME |
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 |
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 |
http://www.nmji.in/temp/NatlMedJIndia294227-6319386_014519.pdf
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http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/1/Post-print_APC_paper.pdf
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http://ijme.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180323_evaluation_of_research.pdf
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http://dst.sciencecentral.in/36/3/UAJB_A_1366194-Postprint.pdf
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http://sites.ieee.org/indiacouncil/files/2018/01/p53-p57.pdf
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http://www.ris.org.in/itec-programme-science-diplomacy
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Pandey, P., Valkenburg, G., Mamidipudi, A. and Bijker, W.E. (2017). The key to resolving straw burning: farmersโ expertise. Policy brief on missing cultural perspectives. Maastricht, the Netherlands: Maastricht University.ย http://www.maastrichtsts.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Policy_brief_final.pdf