“One thing about Indians is that they really work well when it comes to adversity, and that has been the case even across the country when it comes to the crisis, and the way the crisis has been managed by the government,” says Vikas Gupta of Wiley India.
Interview with Vikas Gupta, Tracey Pan and Siddharth Singh
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Estimates vary, but somewhere from a fifth to half of the world’s population are confined today to their homes in a global effort to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. Two and a half million people worldwide have already been infected and more than 166,000 have died.
In this special report for Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series, Chris Kenneally travels virtually to India and China to learn how publishers and researchers in the most populous countries on earth are managing.
From Delhi, Vikas Gupta, managing director of Wiley India, describes the 2020 pandemic as the latest and most serious challenge to his industry, one which Indians have met with resolve.
“One thing about Indians is that they really work well when it comes to adversity, and that has been the case even across the country when it comes to the crisis, and the way the crisis has been managed by the government,” Gupta says.
“Publishing as an industry is under threat globally. We know that. It’s not about Wiley, but across the publishing industry we are fighting multiple battles for the last few years, battles around free content, battles around copyrights, battles around re-exports. There are multiple battles they are fighting. So there is a resolve in the people who are in publishing. They work in publishing because that’s their passion. That’s what they want to do.”
From Beijing, Tracey Pan of the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House recalls the urgency to publish COVID19 findings so that researchers in China and abroad might pursue clinical evidence for the treatment of COVID-19.
“The platform continuously updates and summarizes the relevant academic research and the public academic resources which were published in the Chinese Medical Association journals and other domestic biomedical and health academic journals,” explains Pan. “And the articles are classified by specialty and the type of literature. Therefore, it helps the readers to quickly link to the relevant content. Up to now, 816 articles in 101 academic articles have been published on the platform, and total reads has been reached 2.75 million.”
As the COVID19 pandemic grips the world in a viral vise, authors like Siddharth Singh in Delhi are coming to terms with the ways that their work is being transformed by a destructive disease.
“I think that this pandemic will also mean at the very personal level, we’ll have to change the ways of doing things,” Singh notes. “I think being an author is already a fairly lonely job. Doing things to keep ourselves mentally healthy even in isolation will become very critical.
“In addition to this, now our meetings are mostly online,” he adds, “so I think some form of human interaction is lost. It’s harder to gauge the emotions and the perspectives of the person when the meetings are online, and also it creates a level of formality due to which we are unable to prod deeper in ways that we would if we were meeting in person. So I think as a researcher, this definitely has an impact on the way that I’m able to draw out information from the people I’m speaking to.”
