Dr Srinubabu, CEO, OMICS International, in an interaction with Sachin Jagdale, gives an outlook about the company, its activities and plans for India
Can you explain the idea behind OMICS International?
OMICS was founded in 2007 with an idea of providing open, free and interconnected scientific research outcomes. When I was a young Ph.D. scientist at Andhra University, I personally experienced a lot of problems in accessing relevant literature from different sources. On October 9, 2007, I received the Young Scientist Award from HUPO [The Human Proteome Organization]. There I shared the problems of budding scientists in accessing relevant literature, especially from developing nations. During the meet, few other scientists who had encountered similar problems, gave me the support and cooperation to start a new open access journal in the field of proteomics. We started our first open access journal “The Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics” in early 2008.
In 2009, as an organisation, we have added another 10 open access journals with the support of Stanford Alumni during my post-doctorate at Stanford University. In the same year, we also started organising conferences to provide a global platform for researchers to share across their research outcomes.
Currently, we are operating with 700 open access journals and 1000 conferences across different verticals and horizontals in medical, pharma, engineering, science, technology and business. We have a a team size of over 1000 employees operating from the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Annually you conduct more than 1000 conferences across the globe. It’s a huge task. How do you manage this?
You are right. Organising 1000 conferences in more than 50 countries is a huge challenge in terms of breaking the cross cultural barriers, logistics and putting the right people on board every time we need to get our feet and get the foothold as every event is like aligning head and eye.
Hosting successful events every time needs right planning, time, effort and good project management skills. We manage to execute this in perfection through our detailed plan of action and committed workforce.
In the country like India a significant percentage of brilliant researchers/ students belong to rural India. How do you recognise them and make them aware of your journals/ conferences/ opportunities offered by you?
India currently has about 120,000 scientists, just about a tenth of the number in the US. Hailing from a rural backdrop, I personally believe that creativity and talent are evenly distributed among the population irrespective of caste, creed, religion and socio-economic status or geographical location.
OMICS International, through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, tries to identify the ‘creative pool’ through Young Researchers Forum (YRF) where free seminars, symposiums and workshops are organised in many universities and rural colleges to nurture scientific rigour. We also award $1000 to colleges or faculties in meeting the students’ conveniences.
We also offer special privileges to young researchers, who want to publish their research work at our international journals and attend our conferences at discounted price. Our aim is to scout and spot untapped rural students’ potentials by providing a global platform to showcase their research and explore the opportunities.
What is the total number of research papers that you get from India annually?
On an average, we receive 5000 papers annually from India, which occupies seven per cent of our total papers that we receive across globally.
Indian pharma industry is generally not considered as research friendly. What is your observation?
On certain aspects, the comment holds true as Indian pharma is still blowing its trumpet in terms of only high volume generic products and lacks in serious research and innovations. Probably, the economics like high R&D cost, affordability, market scope, RoI along with low patent regimes are pulling back the giant pharma to concentrate more into the low hanging fruit of generics. As compliance and regulations are becoming more stringent these days, our pharma is also transforming into end-to-end R&D, which seems optimistic. India has a very good scientific pool in terms of human resources, however, due to lack of opportunities many of them are heading towards foreign shore. Big pharma companies to even small start-ups are keen in attending our pharma conferences, workshops, symposiums and are willing to make partnerships with researchers and academicians to scale up their research outcomes into lifesaving products.
Tell us about the awards/ recognitions received by OMICS International.
OMICS International has made a significant progress in areas of open access publications, e-books and international conferences. Awards and recognition demonstrate our commitment to excellence.
In recent times, we have received the following accolades. Our subsidiaries ImedPub and Conference Series have bagged Healthcare Excellence Awards as Best Medical Journals Company and Best Medical Events Company for the year 2015. The award was presented by ESL Narasimhan, Governor of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Our international events are recognised and appreciated by eminent personalities like
- Pat Quinn, Mayor of State of Illinois, USA for Women’s Health, Gynecology, & Obstetrics 2015
- Brian Sandoval, Mayor of Nevada, USA for Food Technology 2015
- Boris Johnson, Mayor of London for Neurology 2016
- Kasim Reed, Mayor of Atlanta, USA for Virology 2015
- Greg Stanton, Mayor of Phoenix for Parkinson’s 2016
Will you be increasing the number of conferences in the coming years?
Since the time of inception, we have transformed a lot. We started with two conferences in 2008 and reached to 1000 in 2015. With the existing infrastructure and employee size, we are planning to organise 3500 conferences in 70 countries by the end of 2017.
Globally you are one of the most respected publishing hubs. You are well-known for conferences that you organise in different parts of the world as well. What is going to be your next initiative?
We will continue to set our bar higher and make further progress to organise 3500 conferences in 70 countries across all continents by 2017. We have recently launched online digital video library where all our conference proceedings would be shared and be accessed by the online communities freely. We are also building up global databases of 3000000 eminent researchers profiles, abstracts, articles and powerpoint presentations from medical, pharma, engineering, science, technology and business communities which would bring greater visibility to their profiles and research globally.
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