The Changing Scenario of Agriculture - The Changing Scenario of Agriculture - Open Access Pub

DOI 10.14302/issn.2639-3166.jar-17-1901 Research in science or for that matter in any field of activity is curiosity-driven. Einstein was curious to know how the laws of motion of planetary bodies given by Newton would behave if time is measured relative to some external frame instead of being treated as absolute. It led to the famous special theory of relativity published in a reputed journal in 1905. Mendel, an Austrian monk, was curious to know, through hybridization experiments on garden pea plants, whether factors for characters like color of flower, seed coat color etc. blend in F1 generation or preserve their identities and reappear in subsequent generations in definite proportions. He published his results, as two laws of inheritance, in an obscure journal, in 1865 with the result that they remained unnoticed for as long as 35 years when in 1900 they were rediscovered independently by De Vries in Holland, Correns in Germany and Tschermak in Austria. In very recent times researchers observed defense mechanism adopted by bacteria to repeated viral infections in a cup of yoghurt and got curious to know whether this trick of bacterium could be used to cut not only viral DNA but any DNA sequence in any organism at a selected gene position. This led to the genome editing (GE) technology CRISPR/Cas9, released as a biotechnological tool in 2012. This illustrates the boosting of curiosity by technology. There are several instances of curiosity-cum-technology driven researches in plant genetics and breeding as discussed in an article entitled ‘Some Aspects of Plant Genetics and Breeding in the context of Scientific and Technological Advancement’ in this issue elsewhere. However it is only when such attempts to find something new and original gets published expeditiously and circulated widely for sharing with other researchers and even made public that the benefits accruing therefrom can be used by one and all. Scientific journal publishing therefore serves the community in many useful ways. Open access journal publishing is currently gaining momentum since its start by PLOS Biology in 2003 and has shown how it can result in reducing the cost of publication for the overall academic community, apart from making research open to all, particularly the public. This is made possible by the technology of internet in that the discovered knowledge is distributed more widely and more efficiently and at a lower cost than was previously possible. It is linked to open research which is research conducted in a spirit of free and open-source software via the internet