Making Science Indian

Science and technology has been an important site of constituting the national-modern. Elites, especially the Tatas, led the way in founding institutions of scientific research and training across the country. Such institutions were supposed to help the country overcome the deficit in scientific infrastructure, institutions, and individuals. Others such as Birlas and Thakurdas took a more pragmatic approach and invested in institutions of applied technologies such as cotton and textiles to fuel India’s industrialization. In addition to funding such ‘big’ science, elites also invested in ‘small’ science—on and off-farms—linking scientific laboratories to the field. Post-1990, elites took on a networking role linking new nexuses across lab–field–policy. At the turn of the twenty-first century, elites are now funding digital infrastructure and platforms over brick-and-mortar institutions from an earlier generation. In their pursuit of modern science, elites’ philanthropy has remained firmly tied to the national question as science has been closely tied to national self-reliance and sovereignty.

Does open access to academic research help small, science-based companies?

PurposeThis study investigates the extent to which a company's usage of open access (OA) literature for R&D activities depends on its size. The authors’ assumption is that smaller pharmaceutical companies have less access to (usually expensive) journal subscriptions.Design/methodology/approachA fixed-effect Poisson model was used to study a panel dataset of USPTO pharmaceutical company patents. The dependent variable is the count of citations to OA resources in a given company patent.FindingsResults support current anecdotal evidence that many SMEs suffer from high journal prices.Originality/valueThis result justifies the assumption made by policymakers about the potentially positive impact OA mandates have on national innovation activity. It was also shown that collaborating with universities can be a potential coping mechanism for companies that struggle to gain access to the journals they need. In addition to the novelty of its findings, this study introduces a new way to study the impact of OA in nonacademic contexts.