Bangalore: India can make the most out of its investments in scientific research to spur its growth and promote domestic talent through the Open Access route, a global expert in the field says.

India could easily make its scientific research widely accessible for greater impact at very low costs, thus helping take its research forward, Open Access proponent Steven Harnad has said.

Hungarian-born Harnad, a professor at the University of Quebec, Montreal and Southampton, one of the big global names in Open Access philosophy in academic publishing, suggested that current gaps were making things tougher for researchers in India.

His comments came in the respected Bangalore-based Current Science journal, widely influential among the scientific community.

Open access scholarly publishing involves making material available to all potential users without financial or other barriers. It has proven successful especially in fields like scholarly journals, e-text or other e-books (scholarly, literary or recreational), music and the fine arts.

"There are plenty of institutional repositories in India, and they are cheap to create because the software is free. But they are mostly empty, because self-archiving has not been mandated," Harnad contended.