Enhancing the Impact of Indian Scholarly Communication
through Institutional Repositories
Poornima Narayana*, Biradar B S**, I R N Goudar*
* Information Center for Aerospace Science & Technology
National Aerospace Laboratories
Bangalore –560017 India
** Department of Library and Information Science
Kuvempu University, Shankarghatta
Shimoga – 577 451 , India
ABSTRACT:
The high quality research accompanied by innumerable scholarly communications to various
national and internationals journals and conferences has put India in the forefront in the developing world
and leader of South Asian countries. Unfortunately, only the elite institutions have reasonably good
information provision facilities that support scholarly communications. On one hand the paucity of funds
for the subscription based scholarly journals and on the other the shrinking budget discourage both the
access to vast scholarly publications and publication process itself. The open access literature plays a vital
role, both in terms of research communication and access, provided, of course, the benefits in terms of
economic and social recognitions are assured by this system. The open access movement was triggered by
the journal crisis due to exorbitant price increase of the publications. Institutional repositories represent an
important OA-channel and are relatively new developments in scholarly communication process compared
to open journals and subject-specific repositories. The paper presents the Indian scenario in adopting the
open access and the status of the open access journals and Institutional Repositories. The authors depict the
main bottlenecks for setting up of IRs in various Indian institutions and come up with appropriate
suggestions.
1. INTRODUCTION
India has prospered through its strong academic and research establishments. The
R&D organizations have also developed expertise in their respective areas that are now
recognized worldwide. Leading Indian scientific research institutions, such as Indian
Institute of Science (IISC), Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Statistical
Institute (ISI), laboratories under the Council of Scientific and Industrial
Research
(CSIR), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Indian Council Agricultural
Research (ICAR), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Department of Atomic
Energy (DAE), traditional universities, deemed universities and Corporate R & Ds have
been playing crucial role towards national development. The high quality research
accompanied by innumerable scholarly communications to various national and
internationals journals and conferences has put India in the forefront in the developing
world and leader of South Asian countries. Only the elite institutions have reasonably
good information provision facilities that support scholarly communications. On one
hand the paucity of funds for the subscription based scholarly journals and on the other
the shrinking budget discourage both the access to vast scholarly publications and
publication process itself. The open access literature plays a vital role, both in terms of
research communication and access, provided, of course, the benefits in terms of
economic and social recognitions are assured by this system. While the ICT infrastructure
necessary to take advantage of the open access is not adequate in developing countries,
the situation in India, is the other way round.
The situation has improved to a
considerable extent. The number of Internet subscribers in were 140,000 in 1998 and now
the number has crossed 5 million. There is a big leap in the telecommunication facility
and Internet bandwidth available.
Although it is now possible to have free access to exhaustive information on the
web, still significant amount of research is not available freely. While the delivery
technique for scientific publications has changed rapidly, the economic ramifications
have hardly changed. The open access movement was triggered by the journal crisis due
to exorbitant price increase of the publications. During the 1990s several e-print archives
as well as a few hundred peer-reviewed, electronic, scholarly journals emerged. The
common denominator for most of these is that they offer free access to the electronic
product. This has become known as "open access publishing".
2. OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT
Open access may be defined as a philosophy to achieve the goal of accessing and
making available the digital material free of charge, which may or may not be free from
copyright and licensing restrictions. 'Open access' (OA) means that a reader of a scientific
publication can read it over the Internet, print it out and even further distribute it for noncommercial purposes without any payments or restrictions. At the most the reader is in
some cases required to register with the service in question, which for instance can be
useful for the service providers in view of the production of readership statistics. The use
of the content by third parties for commercial purposes is, however, as a rule prohibited.
Thanks to the open availability the linking from reference lists to OA publications is
substantially facilitated, since the reader does not encounter barriers such as use licenses,
and each reference is only a mouse-click away. In general, the author keeps almost
complete copyright and can also publish the material elsewhere. The concept of OA came
into existence sometime in 1991 due to the necessity of facilitating scholarly
communication. According to Berlin Declaration act “open access is a comprehensive
source of human knowledge and cultural heritage approved by the scientific community”.
Budapest Initiative defines Open access as ‘freely available on Internet for the public,
permitting to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text, crawl
them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful
purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from
gaining access to the Internet itself”.
'Bangalore Commitment' (November 2006): a commitment to mandate Open
Access self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an example for
emulation by the rest of the world: 'Self-archive unto others as you would have others
self-archive unto you'.
Recently a group of young professionals has formed a Registered Society known
as Open Knowledge Society (http://www.oksociety.org) under The Travancore Cochin
Literary, Scientific and Charitable Societies Registration Act, 1955. This 'OKSociety'
aims to promote Open Access in India through creating awareness and organizing
training programmes and would act as a forum to provide support services through an
array of volunteers.
3. OPEN ACCESS CHANNELS
The four most important OA channels are – refereed free electronic journals,
research-area-specific archive (e-print) servers, institutional repositories of individual
universities/institutions and self-posting on authors' home pages.
3.1. Open Access Journals
Open access journals are e-journals that are freely available (some open access
journals have supplementary fee-based print versions as well). Open access journals
provide access to full-text contents of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. There are two
types of open access journals - the one, available in electronic version only and the other,
available in both electronic as well as print versions viz., Current Science. In the first
type, the journals are published in regular intervals on the Internet that do not have any
print-on-paper counterpart. In the second type, the journals are published in print-onpaper format and distributed to the subscribers. The same contents of print-on-paper are
available to the scholars free of charge in electronic form. OA journals perform peer
review and then make the approved contents freely available worldwide. Some OA
journal publishers are non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) and some are
for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC).
There is a healthy sign of adopting the open access much faster in India compared
to many developing countries. A good number of high quality, peer-reviewed open access
journals are being published covering a wide spectrum of subjects. While there are many
publishers in this category, six major publishers need special mention. They are - Indian
Academy of Sciences (IAS, 11 journals); Indian National Science Academy (INSA, 4
journals); Indian Medlars Center of NIC (MedInd, 38 journals); Medknow publications
(28 journals); Indian journals.com (8 journals) and Kamala-Raj enterprises (5 journals).
Libraries and information centers in India attached to various types of institutions are
now taking part in open access movement, by establishing institutional digital
repositories to provide worldwide access to their research documents. (Table 1)
Table – 1: Indian Open Access Journals
Sl.
No.
Publisher
Number of
Titles
1.
Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS)
11
2.
Indian National Science Academy
(INSA)
4
Indian Medlars Center of NIC
(MedInd)
39
4.
Medknow Publications
45
5.
Indian journals.com
12
3.
3.2. Self Archiving
Making electronic preprints and post prints available on author home pages or
depositing them in digital archives and repositories. Self-archiving serves two main
purposes: it allows authors to disseminate their research articles for free over the internet,
and it helps to ensure the preservation of those articles in a rapidly evolving electronic
environment. A key problem with such archives is that they can be unstable, as authors
move from institution to institution, retire, make other life changes or die. As will be seen
later, e-prints from such archives are not made as easily visible to the research
community as those in disciplinary archives or institutional archives and repositories
because they cannot be easily harvested. While self archiving on repositories ensures
their conformity with OAI-PMH enabling their publications to be harvested by Metadata
Harvesting Services and general search engines like Google, archiving on their
personal/institutional website may not.
3.3. Subject based E Print archives
E-prints are electronic copies of academic research papers, which may be in the
form of pre-prints (papers before referring) and post prints (papers after referring).
E-prints archive is simply an online repository of materials, freely available on the web
for widest possible dissemination of knowledge. Archives may contain the research
output of institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines such as physics,
economics, mathematics etc. OA archives can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for
physics) or institution (e.g. eScholarship Repository for the University of California).
3.4. Institutional Repositories
Institutional repositories represent an important OA-channel and are relatively
new developments in scholarly communication process compared to open journals and
subject-specific repositories. Institutional Repository are repositories designed to manage,
host, preserve and enable distribution of the scholarly output of an Institution.
Institutional repositories are “a managed storage system with content deposited on a
personal, departmental, institutional, national, regional, or consortial basis, providing
services to designated communities, with content drawn from the range of digital
resources that support learning, teaching and research”.
The characteristics of IR include - Institution-based; Scholarly material in digital
formats; Cumulative and perpetual; Open and Interoperable. Institutions and their
libraries are in a better position than individual researcher to guarantee that the material is
available even after decades and that the collection is systematically maintained, for
instance, to take account of changing file formats and media. Institutional repositories
represent an integral part of the long-term strategies of the universities in question, in
particular as these have to redesign their publishing and library policies to take into
account the totally new conditions created by the Internet. The institution’s own
production of theses and working papers can easily be put up on such repositories, but in
the long run the posting of the central production of the university's researchers, that is,
their conference and, in particular, journal papers, is crucial. Although institutional
repositories can be seen as useful marketing channels for individual universities their
most significant impact on the global scale can only be achieved via co-operation via
open access indexing services.
IRs are “digital archives of intellectual products created by the faculty, staff and
students of an institution or group of institutions accessible to end users both within and
without the institution. The IR may hold various kinds of publications, such as pre-prints
and post-prints of journal articles, conference papers, research reports, theses,
dissertations, seminar presentations, working papers and other scholarly items. This way,
intellectual contributions of researchers are made accessible free of charge to the whole
community of researchers across the world. Thus, the open access which was evolved out
of the necessity of wider access to scholarly publication relies on the initiatives of
individuals (self archives), institutions. It is more of a philosophy of facilitating wider
communication, feedback and use.
A number of software packages both proprietary and free on net have been
developed for archiving and managing digital collections. However open source software
packages such as Dspace developed by MIT and HP (http://www.dspace.org/), E-prints
developed by University of Southampton (http://www.eprints.org/), Fedora developed by
University of Virginia and Cornel University (http://www.fedora.info/) are driving the
OA movement especially the development of IRs in the world.
From 2000 onwards repositories have developed from being subject based to
include the complimentary institutional based model and their growth has been fuelled by
timely project funding from a variety of sources. Both the Registry of Open access
repositories ROAR (http://archives.eprints.org) and the Directory of Open access
Repositories OpenDOAR (www.opendoar.org) now evidence the increasing number and
diversity of repositories: subject, institutional, national, national/subject, international,
regional, consortia, funding agency, publisher and data archives.
United States accounts for 26.18% (22.96%), followed by Germany 11.44%
(8.43%), United Kingdom 10.86% (10.87%), Japan 6.40%(4.57), Australia 5.04%
(3.35%), The Netherlands 4.26% (2.33%), Canada 3.39% (3.96%), France 3.39%
(3.96%) and so on as per the lists of Open DOAR and (ROAR) respectively. The
developed countries account for about 70% of IRs. Among developing countries Brazil
accounts for maximum IRs followed by India.
4. INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES IN INDIA
In India, majority of the professionals are experiencing that accessing overseas
information, particularly western countries, is easier than accessing Indian information or
accessing information of the respective institute.
The main reason for the
non-accessibility of the Indian information is due to lack of developing e-information
environment and putting Indian information on to the Internet or having their websites.
Though some of the organizations have their own web (portal) and having good Internet
bandwidth, not much effort has been to feed (host the Indian Information) or even the
institutional academic or research output. Institutional repository needs to follow some
standards, guidelines and procedure to make it compatible to share with international
academia and research community or organizations also to work out the restriction and
security. Availability of open source software has also accelerated major initiatives in
India like disseminating new knowledge generated within the institutions or organizations
which has resulted in another way of disseminating scholarly literature, i.e. open access
literature. In contrast to subscription-based literature, the open access literature does not
have any restriction on access, and major initiatives in India like disseminating new
knowledge generated within the institutions or organizations which has resulted in
another way of disseminating scholarly literature, i.e. open access literature. In contrast to
subscription-based literature, the open access literature does not have any restriction on
access, and is free from any subscription fee or licensing fee. India is ahead of many
developing countries and a few developed countries in terms of establishing a number of
digital libraries or digital archives and creating digital contents for them. World
communities have appraised Indian efforts, and contents of some digital libraries are
regularly accessed in different parts of the world.
4.1. India Takes Lead
In India, some institutions, like Indian Institute of Science; Indian Institute Management,
Kozhikode; Indian
Statistical Institute, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi; National Institute of Technology Rourkela; National Aerospace Laboratories
(NAL);
National
Chemical
Laboratory;
Information
and
Library
Network
(INFLIBNET); National Institute of Oceanography; Raman Research Institute; etc. have
set up open access institutional repositories (IRs) that archive and disseminate research
outputs of respective institutions. While self-archiving by authors is slowly picking up,
mostly it is IR staff that collect and archive the documents to respective IRs on behalf of
authors. There are some subject specific IRs as well, Librarian’s Digital Library (LDL) of
Documentation Research and Training Center (DRTC), Bangalore and OpenMed@NIC
of National Informatics Centre, New Delhi are examples giving access to LIS and
biomedical literature respectively. Vidyanidhi of University of Mysore is an example of
document type specific collection that archives and provides access to theses and
dissertations of Indian Universities. Some archives like OpenMed@NIC offer RSS
(Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feeds to the registered users, who also
get notification on addition of new items in regular intervals. Search engines and
metadata harvesters index most of the Indian operational repositories. Registry of Open
Access Repositories (ROAR) from University of Southampton lists out 34 IRs of
Academic and Research Institutions in India as depicted in Table 2. These IRs have
adopted self-archiving model and have been using two most popular open source
software – Dspace and GNU Eprints.
Somehow ROAR has not listed few Indian IRs
such as that of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations
(www.icrier.org/publications.html),
IITB
(www.library.iitb.ac.in/~mnj/gsdl/cgi-
bin/library), IIT Kanpur (library.iitk.ac.in:8080/examples/thesis/index.html), INSA
Digital Library (drtc.isibang.ac.in/insa), Vidhyanidhi of University of Mysore
(www.vidhyanidhi.org.in). A number of new initiatives still being in the initial stages are
yet to be listed by ROAR.
Table 2
Indian IRs Listed by ROAR
Name
Eprints@IISc
Dspace@IIMK
Dspace@IIA
Dspace@NITR
ETD@IISc
Dspac@
INFLIBNET
Librarian's Digital
Library (LDL)
NAL Institutional
Repository
EPrints at NCL
Digital Repository
Service of NIO
Host Institution
URL
Indian Institute of
Science, (IISc)
Bangalore.
Indian Institute of
Management,
Kozhikode (IIMK)
Indian Institute of
Astrophysics (IIA)
National Institute of
Technology,
Rourkela (IITR)
Indian Institute of
Science (IISc)
INFLIBNET
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/
Items
Jun
2006
5106
Soft.
Used
http://dspace.iimk.ac.in/
146
EPrints
http://prints.iiap.res.in/
998
DSpace
http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/
269
DSpace
http://etd.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/
166
DSpace
http://dspace.inflibnet.ac.in
428
DSpace
Docum. Res. &
Training Centre
(DRTC)
Nat. Aerospace
Laboratories (NAL)
https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/
249
DSpace
http://nal-ir.nal.res.in/
886
EPrints
Nat. Chemical
Laboratory (NCL)
National Institute of
Oceanography
(NIO)
http://dspace.ncl.res.in/
354
DSpace
http://drs.nio.org/drs/
141
DSpace
EPrints
Dspace@NITR
Eprints at OWSA
OpenMED at NIC
Eprint@DU
Digital Repository
of
RRI
Eprints@Bioinformation
DSpace@UOH
EPrints@IIMK
EPrints@IIITA
ISI Library,
Bangalore
Eprints at RGCFB
Eprints at
Medknow
Delhi College of
Engineering
Bangalore
Management
Academy
Cochin Univ of
S * T (CUSAT)
Guru Gobind Singh
Indraprastha Univ.
N Delhi
ICFAI Buisness
School
DU Eprint Archive
Eprints@IIT, Delhi
National Institute of
Technology,
Rourkela
http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/
DSpace
OneWorld South
Asia Open Archive
Initiative
National Informatics
Centre (NIC)
University of Delhi
Raman Research
Institute (RRI)
http://open.ekduniya.net/
89
EPrints
http://openmed.nic.in/
1125
EPrints
http://www.du.ac.in/
http://dspace.rri.res.in/
104
1296
EPrints
DSpace
Bioinformation
http://www.bioinformation.net/
#
EPrints
University of
Hyderabad
Indian Institute of
Management,
Kozhikode (IIMK)
Indian Institute of
Inf. Technology,
Allahabad (IIITA)
Indian Statistical
Institute,
Bangalore
http://igmlnet.uohyd.ernet.in
#
DSPace
http://eprints.iimk.ac.in/
146
EPrints
http://eprints.iiita.ac.in/
#
EPrints
http://library.isibang.ac.in:8080/
dspace/
#
DSpace
Rajiv Ghandi Center
For Biotechnology
MedknowEprints
http://www.rgcb.res.in/
#
EPrints
http://eprints.medknow.com/
#
Eprints
269
http://202.141.12.109:8080/dspa
ce
http://bma.ac.in:8080/dspace/
Dspace
http://dspace.cusat.ac.in:8080/ds
pace/
http://dspace.ipu.ernet.in:8080/d
space/
DSpace
http://202.131.96.59:8080/dspac
e/
http://eprints.du.ac.in
http://eprints.iitd.ac.in
Dspace
Dspace
DSpace
Eprints
Dspace
# Number of items not available in ROAR and could not be ascertained through respective IR sites as some
of them were not accessible.
4.2. Metadata Harvesters
Few Indian institutions have been experimenting metadata harvesting. Search
Digital Libraries (SDL) of DRTC is one such service harvesting library information
science subject-specific open access archives and repositories. The ‘Knowledge
Harvester@INSA’, is an experimental initiative from Indian National Science Academy
that harvests metadata from 3 archives. “SJPI Cross Journal Search Service” is a recent
initiative from NCSI at IISc that harvests metadata from 13 Indian open access journals.
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi has initiated a metadata harvesting service called
SEED that indexes 4 archives. NAL has initiated harvesting OAI compliant IRs of CSIR
Laboratories in India and making them accessible through a unified search interface. All
these metadata harvesters in India use PKP Harvester, developed by Public Knowledge
Project UBC, Canada. Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.org), a free service on net is an
open access journals indexing service initiated by Informatics India Private Limited. It
covers more than 3,500 open access academic, research and industry journals world over
of which > 1,500 are peer-reviewed scholarly journals. More than 0.3 million new articles
added every year to this service.
4.3. Advantages of IR

IRs provide a new and innovative channel of scholarly communication both for
already published documents and the documents falling under the grey literature
category.

The most important advantage as opined by both IR system staff is that IRs
provide wider access and visibility to the research output as in the case of Indian
Journals which usually have low impact factors and are rarely cited. Providing
access to these journal articles through IRs obviously enhances the visibility
factor.

The IRs play a vital role in the preservation of institution’s heritage as the
authorities/ faculty/ scientists would not permanently be in the institution but the
IRs once built up, maintained and updated will continue to be the source for
information on the research carried in the concerned institute irrespective of its
age.

The IT has reduced the publication delay as it helps faster communication and
avoids duplication of work especially while preparing the manuscript, editing and
reviewing. In spite of this the publication delay ranges from two months to one
year by different journals even today. However, this delay is very minimal in case
of IR.

The grey literature like Technical Reports, Theses, in house publications
are not generally published for wider circulation. IRs fill up this gap.

IRs not only increase the prestige of institution but also increase the citation to the
publications be it a grey literature or an item already published in a journal.

IRs especially in India have brought an IT culture in the library and defined a new
role of library in scholarly communication.

Institutional Repositories strengthens research especially in Indian environment.

While communication channels like journals and conference proceedings make
available only scholarly communication, IRs provide an effective communication
channel giving access to all kinds of documents including journal articles,
conference papers, technical reports, thesis, inhouse publications, patents,
standards, images, teaching material, PPTs and so on.
4.4. Favourable Environment for IRs

The National Knowledge Commission has suggested Institutional Level
discussions to set up IRs.
 Quite a Good number of conferences/seminars/training programs have been
conducted by DRTC, NCSI, NAL, IIM etc.

Libraraians have taken lead in setting up of IRs. Indian library community has
taken a lead to bring an awareness about open access through list-forums,
Discussion forums, listserves etc.

IRs are useful for developing country like Indian scholarly communication will
grow. Visibility and import of Indian research output will increase.
4.5. Constraints of Institutional Repositories
Initial costs may be high as contributors perceive high risks. The Open Access
Movement has a big challenge especially the publishing industry of journals under
commercial sector challenging their sovereignty. The management support, availability
of IR expertise, willingness of authors to participate are very important factors for the
success and sustainability of IR.

Absence of a well defined institutional policy is a serious constraint for IR
development. Uncertainty will exist about the norms to be adopted for inclusion
of documents regarding the person depositing the document, the need for review
and technical evaluation of the document, types of documents to be included and
the level access control.

IR being a new development, there is serious lack of IR expertise especially in a
developing country like India. Many institutions although serious to set up IR
failed due to non-availability of IR expertise from both library and IT staff.

The management and the authors concerned about forms a serious bottleneck in
building the content of an IR. Many institutions fail to allocate sufficient funds
for IR. The basic necessities like IR infrastructure availability of expertise can
not be fulfilled without adequate funds

Another important constraint is apathy of authors towards time consuming and
lengthy deposition procedure.

Ignorance of users in the absence of appropriate literacy program is another
constraint with viz. one cannot expect any developments in IR.

In case of journals and conference proceedings usually copyright of a research
publication lies with the publishers. The publisher’s rigid attitude for allowing
the published item in IR and the authors concerned in this matter is another
constraint to be sorted out appropriately

A good number of institutions in India although have set up the IRs, but made
them available only on the LAN of their institute or on a single system due to
various reasons like copyright problem from publishers or reservation of their
management to throw open their publications. Apathy of Creators/authors for
depositing content

Customization of open source software is a bottle neck

They affect the balance of institutional power as some departments proceed faster
than others.

Nature of content: Classified/restricted and Unclassified/Open

Diversity of content and the language used in the full texts

They rely on unproven methods for long term digital preservation.
4.6. Suggested Measures
An Institutional Repository is the intellectual capital of an institute which
recognizes the intellectual life and scholarship of our academic and research
organizations. IRs facilitate building the digital collections to be searched and accessed
freely by anybody in world. Above all, IRs preserve the heritage of the institute. Setting
up of an IR needs a planned approach for the implementation tasks defined by their
governance structure, management framework, operational strategies and a well
documented workflow. Adoption of the standards and choice of models are critical
factors for developing an IR.
More than 1,100 IRs have been set up in the world, and India with 34IRs as listed
in ROAR leads the developing countries with in this regard. Most of the IRs particularly
in India have neither preferred the governance and management structures nor
documented the procedures and practices.
A good number of institutions in India although set up their IRs have not made
the content open access due to various reasons. There is no perceived growth in the
number of documents added to many IRs in the world. Apart from a good number of
metadata harvesting services like OAISter, ARC, general Internet search engines like
Google, Yahoo and SCIRUS also harvest the metadata of repositories in the world and
give the links to the individual IRs for full texts. Among the IR software adopted DSpace
and GNU Eprints are very popular and also are open source.

The government and the governmental agencies including universities, and
important research establishments like CSIR, ISRO, DRDO, ICAR, ICMR,
ADE, DST, DBT have to take a policy decision for setting up of IRs in their
respective organizations.

An intensive awareness should be brought among both the librarians and the
users (contributors and readers) covering the benefits of IR both for the
individual concerned and the institution.

Apart from inclusion of the topic IR as a part of syllabus in Indian L & IS
curriculum.

Need to conduct workshops and training programs leading for creating expertise
in setting up of IRs.

At national level, we need to develop the capability of customizing the Open
Access software to suit local requirements.

It would be nice if one arrives at consensus on standards to be adopted for
implementation of IRs in the country.

While one can think of announcing some incentives for contributions of research
output to IR, one can also think of making it mandatory at individual
Institutional level for contribution.

While it is advisable to have IRs at the Institutional level, one can also think of
setting up of metadata harvesting services covering different sectors both by
organizations and by subject.

There is a need to set up a Registry of Indian Repositories in line with ROAR
and OPENDOAR registries.

All leading universities and R&D establishments and also consortia coordinators
should write to all commercial and societal publishers to allow individual
scientist to deposit their research publications from the concerned individual
institutional IRs. This would facilitate development of IRs without infringement
of IPR of publishers.

All institutions should provide necessary infrastructure including servers, PCs,
scanners, internet bandwidth and software required for setting up of IR and also
required funds and manpower.

It is better for the institution intending to set up IRs to adopt one of the open
source software like Dspace or Eprints as they are already popular and satisfy
most of the functionalities of IR, open source and comply with all open source
standards concerned.

Apart from developing Institutional repository, the individuals can also think of
making available publications through subject based e print archives and also
individual personal websites as another step towards Open access movement.

Libraries should also try to integrate OPACs with their respective IRs.

Solutions to be found for Restricted reports, Copyrighted material access.
Proper review required for unpublished and unreviewed (peer) material.

There is a need to pick up the manpower training for developing IRs as well
motivate the authors to submit their documents.

There have been few open access declarations by few professional societies and
also governments of few countries by legislation. This move is yet to picked up
by other countries.

A
collaborative
effort
by
academicians/scientists/users,
librarians,
IT
professionals and archivists is required to develop a successful and sustainable
IR.

The self deposition of documents by the creators is yet to pick up in the world
and in particular, India. The copyright restrictions of publishers discourage the
authors to submit their papers to IR. However, many publishers including the
commercial ones have relaxed their attitudes in this regard by allowing the copy
of the final referred manuscript of the paper accepted for depositing in IR. The
SHERPA’s RoMEo Project serves as a directory of copyright policies of
different publishers. Both IR Managers and the users recognize the important
role of library professionals in the IR development.
5. CONCLUSION
It is satisfying to note that good numbers of institutions in the country are aware
about IR developments and plan to set up IRs in their respective organizations. IR models
should also be developed to address the issues and concerns and also understand the
procedure and policies for implementing IRs. There is a lot of scope in India to develop
IRs at institutional level under various apex bodies like CSIR, ICMR, ICAR, DRDO,
ISRO, DST, UGC, etc,. It is advisable to have repositories at institutional level with
harvesting facilities at apex body and national level.
Despite the growing strength of the Open Access movement, it is difficult to
predict whether IR as a communication model would survive in the long run. The study
concludes with a positive note as the current global momentum for Open Access is
picking up results in setting up of good number of institutional repositories and there by
realizing the goal of making freely available the intellectual output created using public
funds.
The self deposition of documents by the creators is yet to pick up in the world and
in particular, India. The copyright restrictions of publishers discourage the authors to
submit their papers to IR. However, many publishers including the commercial ones have
relaxed their attitudes in this regard by allowing the copy of the final referred manuscript
of the paper accepted for depositing in IR. The SHERPA’s RoMEo Project serves as a
directory of copyright policies of different publishers. Both IR Managers and the users
recognize the important role of library professionals in the IR development.
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Poornima Narayana: poornima@css.nal.res.in
I R N Goudar: goudar@css.nal.res.in
B S Biradar: bsbiradar53@rediffmail.com