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

The growth of open access repositories in India (the red line) and the number of new
records deposited in them (green bars) in the past ten years, as found in the Registry of
Open Access Repositories (ROAR) are shown in Figure 10. One notices a large increase
in the number of records in 2010 — from about 11,000 in 2009 to over 42,000 in 2010.
This was made possible by a few active repositories: EPrints@CMFRI, the repository of
the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, which was set up in 2010 alone accounts
for more than 7,900 records. EPrints@NML, the repository of the National Metallurgical
Laboratory, which was established in 2010, has over 2,400 records. Managers of
EPrints@IISC, the repository of the Indian Institute of Science, deposited a few thousand
legacy papers in 2010 following a drive started in the Institute's centenary year. Thus a
large percent of papers deposited are legacy papers. What matters is the number of current
papers deposited.
We would take ROAR data with a bit of caution. ROAR lists 64 Indian repositories.
Some of these are no longer active and some are repetitions. Then there are a few which
are yet to be listed in ROAR. On examining each one of them we found that there are 30
institutional repositories, three subject repositories and five electronic theses repositories
(as on 6 March 2011). Besides, a few open access journals have used the repository software
(e.g. NISCAIR journals). A list of Indian repositories is given in Appendix 3. Not
all of these repositories are confined to journal articles and conference papers. Some include
annual reports, newsletters, and other institutional publications.
The IISc repository, the first to be set up in India, has over 25,000 papers. Five CSIR
laboratories, four ICAR laboratories, three Indian Institutes of Technology, two DST
laboratories, a society, an NGO, an international institution and a private research institution
are among those which have hosted institutional repositories. Four among these institutions,
viz. NIT Rourkela, ICRISAT, NIO and IIHR, have an open access mandate. NIT
Rourkela was the first in India to adopt an open access mandate [See Box 9,
Dspace@NITR].
Box 9, Dspace@NITR
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela (NITR), was established 50 years ago.
With additional funding, starting from 2003 the Institute's emphasis on research is more
pronounced.
NITR had access to hardly 50 international journals in 2003. Once it became a
ber of the INDEST consortium, NITR started getting access to more than 1,500 online
journals in the fields of technology and engineering. The institute has also taken license
to access 500 more journals on its own and a couple of databases from publishers who are
not enlisted in the INDEST consortia negotiations. Even after providing access to more
than 2,000 professional journals, the library of NITR gets plenty of requests from re-
Page | 49