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
Presented at Intl Conf . on “Empowering Knowledge for All: Librarian’s
Role” ILA Platinum Jubilee celebrations 12th-15th November 2008,
Tata Inst.of Social Sciences, Mumbai
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.
Scientific Research in India
• The third largest scientific and technical manpower
in the world
• Vision oriented efforts since Independence (1947 +)
• Exclusive Government Departments for Science &
Technology, Atomic Energy, Space, Electronics,
Oceanography, Biotechnology…
• Over 300 Research Laboratories belonging to CSIR,
ICMR, ICAR, ICSSR, DRDO, ISRO…
• Education/Science performed by IISc, IITs, NITs,
IIMs…and most of the Medical/
Engineering/Business Schools, Universities and
research labs are of international standards
Publication Channels
 Journals
 Technical Reports
 Conference Proceedings
 House Magazines
 Institutional Repositories
 E-print Archives
 Institutional Websites
 …….
Principles and Strategies for the Reform of
Scholarly Communication
 The broadest possible access to published research
and other scholarly writings
 Increased control by scholars and the academy
over the system of scholarly publishing
 Fair and reasonable prices for scholarly
information
 Competitive markets for scholarly communication
 A diversified publishing industry
 Open access to scholarship
Source: ACRL, 2003
Principles and Strategies for the Reform of
Scholarly Communication ……
 Innovations in publishing that reduce distribution
costs, speed delivery, and extend access to scholarly
research
 Quality assurance in publishing through peer review
 Fair use of copyrighted information for educational
and research purposes
 Extension of public domain information
 Preservation of scholarly information for long-term
future use
 The right to privacy in the use of scholarly
information
Source: ACRL, 2003
What is Open Access
 User’s aspect
Its free availability on the public Internet,
permitting any users to read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of
these articles,
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
the Internet
itself.Initiative, 2002
Source: to
Budapest
Open Access
What is Open Access
Author’s aspect
The only constraint on reproduction and
distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be given
to authors control over the integrity of
their work and the right to be properly
acknowledged and cited.
Source: Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002
Drivers of OAP and OAA
• Rising prices of journals
• ARL and SPARC initiatives
• Librarians want OA so they can afford
• Scientists want OA so they could be read
and recognized
• People want OA because they pay for the
research
Open Access Scenario
• Open Access Movement
- World:
Berlin declaration, Bethesda Statement on
Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Budapest Initiative,
OECD Declaration on OA, Scottish Declaration on OA
- India:
+ Bangalore Commitment.(Nov 2006):
'Self-archive unto others as you would have others
self-archive unto you'.
+ Open Knowledge Society:
- Promote Open Access in India
- Create awareness, training programmes
- Forum to provide support services
OA Movement
Subscription
Journals
Abstracting
Services
Articles,
Books, etc.
OA Journals
Search
Engines
Reports,
Theses, etc.
OA
Repositories
Publishers
Funders
Researchers
Open access increases impact
Nature, vol. 411, No. 6837 (2001) p. 521
Open Access Channels
- Refereed free electronic journals,
- Research-area-specific archive
(e-print) servers,
- Institutional repositories of individual
universities/institutions and
- Self-posting/archiving on authors'
home pages.
Indian Open Access Journals
Sl.
No
.
1.
Publisher
Number of
Titles
Indian Academy of Sciences
(IAS)
11
Indian National Science
Academy (INSA)
4
Indian Medlars Center of NIC
(MedInd)
39
4.
Medknow Publications
45
5.
Indian journals.com
12
6.
Kamala-Raj Enterprises
9
2.
3.
Indian OA Journals
• International Open Access Day on 14 October
2008
• National Institute of Science Communication And
Information
• two journals of NISCAIR [ CSIR India ] • Indian Journal of Chemistry - Section A and
• Indian Journal of Biochemistry & Biophysics in
Open Access mode .
• NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository [NOPR]
[ http://nopr.niscair.res.in ].
Institutional Repositories
Definition:
• An Institutional repository is an Organization based set of services
which the organization offers to the members of its community for
the management and dissemination of digital materials created by
the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an
organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital
materials, including long-term preservation, where appropriate, as
well as organization and access or distribution” (Clifford Lynch
2003)
• “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.”
Institutional Repositories
• Institutionally based
• Scholarly material in digital formats
• Cumulative and perpetual
• Open and interoperable
– But not necessarily free!
IR Users
•
•
•
•
•
•
Senior administration
Graduate students
Retiring professors
University research documents
Institutes and Centres
Your own organization
Institutional Repositories
Institutional Repositories World Scenario: Country Wise
Sl.
No.
Country
OpenDOAR
No.
%
ROAR
No.
%
1.
United States
292
26.11
226
22.96
2.
Germany
124
11.09
83
8.43
3.
United Kingdom
118
10.55
107
10.87
4.
Australia
53
4.74
33
3.35
5.
The Netherlands
44
3.93
23
2.23
6.
Canada
40
3.57
42
4.26
7.
France
37
3.30
39
3.96
8.
Sweden
30
2.68
35
3.55
9.
Brazil
26
2.32
55
5.58
10.
Italy
38
3.39
29
2.94
11.
India
29
2.59
28
2.84
12.
Belgium
22
1.96
15
1.52
13.
Japan
68
6.08
45
4.57
14.
Spain
24
2.14
32
3.25
15.
Others
229
20.48
192
19.51
16.
TOTAL
1118
100.00
984
100.00
IR Statistics
Software:
• Dspace
• GNU / Eprints
Document Type:
- 30%
- 25%
English
German
French
Spanish
Thesis
– 50%
Grey List
– 45%
Conference Proceedings – 35%
Books
– 30%
Subject Type:
Language:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
- 85%
– 15%
– 10%
– 6%
•
•
•
•
Multidiscipline
– 55%
Medicine
– 7%
History
– 7%
Library & Information Sc – 5 %
Directories of Open Access Repositories
OpenDoar (http://www.opendoar.org/)
ROAR (http://archives.eprints.org/)
The University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry
(http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/Info.asp)
Openarchives.eu
(http://www.openarchives.eu/home/home_do.aspx)
OpCit: The Open Citation Project
(http://opcit.eprints.org/opcitabout.shtml)
RoMEO
(Rights
MEtadata
for
(http://romeo.eprints.org /publishers.html)
Open
archiving
Institutional Repositories:
Indian Scenario
• Nearly 50 Institutions
• Public Domain (Internet): 35
• Campus Network/LAN : 15
• Leading IRs
• IISc, ISI, NAL, NCL, NIO, RRI, DU, IITs
Institutional Repositories:
Indian Scenario
• IR Software
•
Dspace – 25
• Eprints - 11
• Greenstone – 7
• Inhouse
- 7
Metadata Harvesters
• Search Digital Libraries (SDL) /DRTC harvesting L&IS
•
s.
•
•
•
•
subject-specific open access archives and repositories.
‘Knowledge Harvester@INSA’, experimental initiative
harvests metadata from 3 archives.
“SJPI Cross Journal Search Service” initiative from NCSI
at IISc 13 Indian open access journals
SEED IITD indexes 4 archives
NAL OAI compliant IRs of CSIR Labs. through a unified
search interface (PKP Harvester)
Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.org), a free service open
access journals indexing service Informatics India Private
Limited
IR - Advantages
• New and innovative channel of scholarly
communication
• Provide wider access and visibility to the
research output
• Preserves of institution’s heritage
• Reduce the publication delay
IR – Advantages (Contd…)
• Faster communication
• Increase the citation to the publications
• Strengthens research especially in the
Indian context
• Effective communication channel
• A boon for Gray Literature visibility
Favorable Environment in India
• National Knowledge Commission: Institutional
Level discussions to set up IRs.
• Conferences/Trainings/Seminars: DRTC, NCSI,
NAL
• Librarians have taken lead
Constraints of IR
• Absence of a well defined institutional policy
• Lack of IR expertise in India
• Insufficient funds for IT Infrastructure and
manpower
• Apathy of authors towards time consuming and
lengthy deposition procedure.
• Ignorance of users in the absence of appropriate
literacy program
Constraints of IR (Contd…)
• Publisher’s rigid attitude towards copyright policy
• Customization of open source software is a bottle
neck
• Nature of content: Classified/restricted and
Unclassified/Open
• Diversity of content and the language used in the
full texts
• Relying on unproven methods for long term
digital preservation.
Suggested Measures

• Policy decision by governmental agencies viz., CSIR,
ISRO, DRDO, ICAR, ICMR, DST, etc
• Intensive awareness for both the librarians and the users
(contributors and readers)
• Part of syllabus in Indian L & IS curriculum
• Need to conduct workshops/training programs for creating
expertise
• Adoption of uniform standards
• Incentives for contributions of research output to IR
• Mandatory deposition of research output
Suggested Measures (Contd…)

• Setting up of metadata harvesting services by
organizations/subject.
• Need to set up a Registry of Indian Repositories ROAR,
OPENDOAR
• United approach to publishers for permission to add papers
to IRs
• Necessary infrastructure including servers, PCs, scanners,
internet bandwidth and software ,required funds and
manpower
• Adoption of open source software Dspace, Eprints
• Self deposition of documents by the creators
• Integration of IRs with OPAC
• Open access declaration and legislation by Goverment
Conclusion
• It is satisfying to note that good numbers of
institutions in the country are aware about
IR developments.
• IR models should also be developed to
address the issues and concerns.
• 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,.
Conclusion
FREE scholarly communication
is our common goal!
IRs for sustainable development?
A light at the end of the tunnel…..
Thank you
?