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

3600
3500
3400
3300
3200
3100
3000
2900
2800
Dr. Poornima Narayana
Head, ICAST
National Aerospace Laboratories 114
Bangalore 560 017, E mail: poornima@nal.res.in
Box 11, NIO’s Institutional Repository
National Institute of Oceanography’s institutional repository 115 is an offshoot of NIO’s
contributions database (NIOPub) available on the website which facilitates requesting a
reprint of the published papers. This facility was opened over the Internet in 2004.
thused with the demand that we received for the reprints on this database, we soon realized
the importance of the availability of the literature in an open access mode – the
movement that had just picked up then.
With a quick review of the software available for the purpose, we settled on DSpace
and used the institute’s existing server to give birth to the “Digital Repository Service”
(DRS) of the library in early 2006. Studying the copyright issues, sensitizing authors to
upload their manuscripts, obtaining permissions from publishers to use their copies,
decisions on how to obtain and upload the previously published full-texts were the challenges
in the early phase of setting up the repository.
A lecture on “Open Access: Current Developments in India” sensitizing the staff of
the institute in general and the authors in particular by an Indian missionary dedicated to
the Open Access movement — Prof. Arunachalam, permissions to upload the scanned
papers from the Indian society journals, and very strong moral and infrastructure support
from the Institute’s management placed the repository development on the right track.
Cool response of the authors in depositing their manuscripts, unavailability of manu-
114 http://nal-ir.nal.res.in.
115 http://drs.nio.org.
Page | 54