Open Knowledge

1. Open Access

Open access (OA) refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions on access (e.g., access tolls) and free of many restrictions on use (e.g. certain copyright and license restrictions). Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs. In short, Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open access represents a convergence: scholars and scientists share their research, without payment, through publication, and the technological innovation of the internet allows for worldwide distribution.

Why Open Access?
As economic pressures grow and libraries purchase fewer books and journals, it will be more difficult for newer faculty to build their reputations through the traditional publication models of books and journal articles. Changes in technology offer opportunities for new forms of both creation and dissemination of scholarship through Open Access. Removing access barriers to peer-reviewed journal literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals (“gold OA”) and OA repositories (“green OA”).
The green/gold distinction is about venues or delivery vehicles, not user rights or degrees of openness.
The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA repositories do not. This difference explains many of the other differences between them, especially the costs of launching and operating them.

OA journals (“gold OA”):
OA journals conduct peer review. Some OA proponents use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its peer-reviewed research articles, without delay), green (permits authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in OA repositories), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn’t oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above).
For details on the business side of OA journals, see the OAD list of Guides for OA journal publishers.
For a list of OA journals in all fields and languages, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
E.g. of OA journals: PLOS https://www.plos.org/
E.g. Indian OA journals: NISCAIR http://www.niscair.res.in/

OA repositories (“green OA”):
OA repositories can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics- http://arxiv.org/ ) or institution (e.g. Kautilya for IGIDR (RBI) – http://oii.igidr.ac.in:8080/xmlui/ ). When universities host OA repositories, they usually take steps to ensure long-term preservation in addition to OA.
OA repositories do not perform peer review themselves. However, they generally host articles peer-reviewed elsewhere.
OA repositories can include preprints and postprints of journal articles, theses and dissertations, course materials, departmental databases, data files, audio and video files, institutional records, or digitized special collections from the library.
The two leading lists of OA repositories around the world are the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
Author Rights
The rights of creators should be protected when they have submitted their manuscripts for publishing to the Publishers. Following link explains the details
http://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/

Data Repositories: Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators / researchers for reuse.
Repository refers to a central place where data is stored and maintained, often for safety and preservation. It can be a place where multiple databases, datasets or files are located for preservation and distribution over a network that is directly accessible to the user.
It may include requisite infrastructures, often referred to as data archives or data centers and depositing data to facilitate further sharing, analysis and reuse. Data repositories are continuing to evolve in almost all disciplines as an active component of virtual research ecosystem.

ICSSR: http://www.icssr.org/ Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) was established in the year of 1969 by the Government of India to promote research in social sciences in the country. It supports a network of 27 ICSSR research institutes.

ICPSR: https://www.openicpsr.org/
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), US was established in 1962. An integral part of the infrastructure of social science research, ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. ICPSR provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their research projects.