Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

of its existence, ICRISAT scientists have published about 4,500 papers in peer-reviewed
journals; about 300 books have been published as well. A reasonable volume of training
materials have been generated. At the time when this meeting took place, ICRISAT did
not have a repository where at least all the research publications could be accessed publicly.
The library services had been operating a bibliographic service providing citations
only. A key research director of ICRISAT agreed that open access was a potential route
that ICRISAT could make use of.
William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT 86 since 2000 is a champion of making
search results and documents freely and openly available. In his stint in the Philippine
agricultural research bodies in the ‘90s, he had promoted the use of web as a medium to
make available farmer extension material on mango and banana, important crops of the
Philippines. He started a process of frequent discussions in the committee of ICRISAT
research leaders on open access for peer-reviewed research publications. The practicing
researchers and the library staff were generally concerned about potential copyright
fringement issues in relation to making available peer-reviewed papers. In this background,
he initiated a large scale digitization and publication of all the printed research
publications where ICRISAT owned the copyright. By late 2008, about 48,000 pages
equivalent of printed publications were digitized and PDF copies were made available via
ICRISAT web site. This step, which involved much planning and meticulous work, was
primarily carried out by the staff of the library services.
This step also enabled the advocates of open access to take the discussions towards
the open access mandate for peer-reviewed publications. By now, a broad understanding
that the setting up of an institutional repository would not contravene any intellectual
property obligations had emerged among the group of research leaders, thanks to the
championing by the Director General. In this background, William Dar, in a meeting of
the top management in May 2009 asked that a formal open access mandate be endorsed
which was accepted. Since then the IR at ICRISAT, hosted on a DSpace platform, has
increased its holding, and stands at nearly 3,000 full text publications in peer-reviewed
journals. The repository of printed publications of ICRISAT has been merged with this
repository. It was also the reason for ICRISAT holding a special workshop on open
access for Indian national agricultural research institutes and universities and professional
societies in that sector that publish peer-reviewed journals (Sep 2009). Indian Agricultural
Research Institute (founded in 1905), the premier multi -disciplinary research and
education institute of India, launched its IR within a few weeks of this workshop. Two
professional societies in agricultural sciences have made their journals open access.
In a related development, a group in the Computer Science Department of IIT-
86 http://dspace.icrisat.ac.in.
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