Bangladesh: An Overview of Open Access (OA) Initiatives

Introduction Universal access to information and knowledge is the UNESCO's overall mandate to promote the free flow of information and making information available at the fingertips of research communities. Open Access (OA) is an innovative form of scholarly communication within the digital environment aimed at achievement of universal access to information and knowledge. OA emerged as an alternative model of scholarly publishing. This is very much related to serials crisis, the term serials crisis is used to describe the rising costs of journal subscriptions during the last several years. As the budget of the libraries hardly ever rose, hence, a good number of libraries were obliged to cancel a significant amount of their subscriptions. OA to knowledge is a model adopted by many International and Inter-Governmental organizations, such as World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), for disseminating full-text contents to online communities. (1) OA during last decades, with growth of world population, literacy and movement, the demand for information and knowledge also increased exponentially. Similarly, there were simultaneous growth in the production and supply of information and knowledge. The quantitative increase in scientific information, had a number of implications, these included; rapid growth of research articles, rapid growth of specific journals, increase of prices of these journals, and tight library budget for purchase of these journals. The impact of increase in prices of journals has been felt in all countries across the world. (2) Academic community in general and librarians, particularly, are concerned about constant increase in the cost of journals year after year especially in Science, Technology and Medical (STM) titles. The monopoly of commercial publishers first led to the skyrocketing prices of print journal subscriptions, then the licensing system for accessing to electronic resources and collection of electronic publications in disguise of "big deal", makes it more and more challenging for libraries to purchase the reading materials are required by libraries to meet their users' need. At the same time it is also felt that most of the research are carried out with public money, so public should have free access to the products, publications of any institutions/organizations. (3) Aims of the Paper The aim of this paper is to examine how the concept of OA movement and OA initiatives happened, in line context of global access to information and knowledge in Bangladesh. Also to describe the current status and progress of OA journals and institutional repositories in Bangladesh. This will provide an understanding of OA movement in Bangladesh at the same time will encourage establishment of institutional repositories and making journals published from Bangladesh freely available in OA for global research community. Methodology In order to get better understanding and clear ideas on OA initiatives in Bangladesh a comprehensive literature search has been conducted by the authors of this paper. An exhaustive literature search has been conducted through Google and Google scholar platform. General phrase and Boolean search techniques have been applied. The following search terms were used: "Open Access AND Bangladesh", "Open Access initiatives AND Bangladesh", "OA AND Bangladesh", "OA journals", "Role of OA in library", "OA initiatives AND Bangladesh", "Institutional repositories AND Bangladesh" etc. In addition, a variety of grey literature was consulted including different project proposals, reports, book chapters and conference proceedings and others. Finally, personal contacts and discussions with scientists, researchers, and librarians have also been carried out in order to explore significant information for this study. Basic Concept of OA Definition of OA Peter Suber a dedicated promoter of the OA movement defines OA as "Open access to scientific articles means online access without charge to readers or libraries. …