After a lot of consultations and recommendations from experts and public, the final draft of the open access policy (OAP) has been approved. The final OAP document is now available on the DBT and DST websites.

The policy assumes significance as the researchers and others will now have access to the DBT and DST funded projects. While these high profile departments of the ministry of science and technology expect the scientists to publish their research work in the journals of choice, these also feel that the researchers are best judges of that.

The policy document mentions maximizing of the distribution of these publications by providing the free access by depositing them in an institutional repository is the most effective way of ensuring that the research funded by these agencies, gets utilized for the benefit of society.

The published work can be either deposited in the local institutional repository or the central repository (in case there is none). As per the December 13 document, papers resulting from funds received from the fiscal year 2012-13 onwards are required to be deposited. Authors are recommended to also deposit manuscripts of their earlier publications even if they are unrelated to curent projects funded by DBT or DST. Instiutions are encouraged to use these repositories as central repositories for al the publications arising from research in their organizations irrespective of source of funding.

Every year DBT and DST institutes have been directed to celebrate “Open Acess Day� during the International Open Acess Week by organizing sensitizing lectures, programmes, workshops and taking new open aces initiatives.