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

ever, we could not persuade all.
Two months later, the repository had 50 papers. The library team intensified its
campaign. Using the RSS feeds facility of licensed multi-disciplinary databases, the
library easily received alerts about just published papers indexed in those databases. The
library team started sending emails (with publisher self -archiving policies) to
corresponding local authors requesting them to upload the post-prints of the papers.
Seeing that many authors agreed and sent the post-prints, others also started doing the
same.
The library team prepared download statistics for the uploaded papers, parsed from
the server log file, and sent them privately to the authors. Also, the library team employed
the official library blog to garner support for open access. We interviewed senior
professors who were at once prolific authors and open access supporters and blogged the
interviews. We developed stories on well-cited papers available in the repository and
posted them on the blog.
The researchers who uploaded their papers could see
creased visibility of their papers. They realized that they
could reach a wider audience. “I am often receiving requests
for consulting from small scale industries after I started
loading papers in Dspace”, says a professor of NITR.
ously, small industries cannot afford to subscribe to even to a
few journals. Many scientists started realizing the potential
of the repository and started to send papers voluntarily for the
repository. Through relentless campaign the library team could convince many scientists
in favour of depositing their papers in the institutional repository. However, we wanted
institutional policy support to open access in the form of a mandate to make archiving
part of the mainstream work of our researchers. The library proposed to the Senate of
NITR to mandate archiving of locally produced research output in the institutional
tory. The Senate agreed to the proposal and formally issued a note on open access mandate
on 12 May 2006 111 .
A clause seeking repository handle number was inserted in the forms related to
project approvals and permission to attend conferences. Through this step, it became
necessary for researchers to upload all papers in order to get the handle numbers. Without
the handle number the Finance Department will not process their travel reimbursement
claims. At present the repository holds more than 1,300 documents. After mandate all
conference papers are uploaded in the repository. As far as journal articles are concerned,
80 per cent of journal papers published are uploaded in the repository till 2009.
111 http://roarmap.eprints.org/20.
Page | 51