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

In March 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, nominated one of the
librarians to take part in the International Repositories Workshop jointly organised by
UKOLN, JISC, SURF Foundation and Driver and held at Amsterdam. This enlarged the
vision and gave ideas for future work. On return, he helped at least five other institutions
to set up their own repositories. In future he plans to develop repository add-ons such as
linking it to citation databases.
Madhan Muthu
Assistant Librarian (On Leave)
National Institute of Technology Rourkela
Rourkela 769008
Email: madhan@nitrkl.ac.in
Three of the five CSIR laboratories, viz. the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL)
[See Box 10, Institutional Repository @ NAL], the National Institute of Oceanography
(NIO) [See Box 11, NIO’s Institutional Repository] and the National Metallurgical Laboratory
(NML) 112 , have more than 2,200 papers in their repositories according to ROAR as
on 13 March 2011. CSIR also has a harvester called OARH to aggregate papers from repositories
of all CSIR laboratories. Four ICAR laboratories have their own repositories,
and CMFRI stands out with more than 7,900 papers.
Box 10, Institutional Repository @NAL
NAL's Institutional Repository was initiated in 2003 using Greenstone, with journal
articles. Later, in early 2006 we switched over to Eprints 2.0 on Red Hat Enterprise
form and then again to 3.2.0 on Fedora platform. NAL-IR started with well established
archiving metadata, data, content, submission and preservation policies. Document types
included in the repository were journal articles, conference papers, project documents,
books, book chapters, presentation/lecture materials, images, etc. Care was taken to
load the full text of unclassified documents without infringing copyright (as given in
Sherpa- Romeo website). One can browse the documents by author, division, subject,
date and document type. Both simple and advanced search facilities have been provided.
During April 2009-March 2010 the repository received more than 500,000 hits (abstract
views) and more than 3,300 full text papers were downloaded. Metadata is harvested by
Google Scholar, ARC, OAISTER, Scientific Commons, CASSIR and CSIR Knowledge
Harvester. The Repository has been indexed by ROAR and DOAR. NAL is also
ing and indexing at present, the metadata of 5 CSIR IRs on ‘CSIR Knowledge Harvester.
113
Initially we searched annual reports of NAL, bibliographic databases, e-journal
112 http://eprints.nmlindia.org.
113 http://csirpubls.nal.res.in.
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