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

scripts of published papers of early years with authors, negative responses to the requests
to place full-text articles from commercial publishers (their pdf files) on the repository
helped us in formulating our decisions in going ahead on this effort.
Follow-up with the authors to upload their manuscripts after the publication of a
paper was a very hard and time consuming task. We therefore realized the limitations of
the ‘voluntary’ option and soon changed our voluntary mode of deposition to mandatory
mode. We also realized that the authors would leave the organization one day but the
organization would continue. In order to maintain that record and provide user service,
designated staff for the service was considered essential. We plugged in a feature for a
deposition of final manuscript for a repository in an existing workflow in the publications
monitoring system of the Institute. Computerization of the workflow of disclosing a
publication out of research being carried out at this Institute made the task easy for the
authors and they had not to do the additional task of creating a record for the repository
and uploading of the manuscript. This part of the work is now being done by the library
staff (on behalf of the authors). Once the record is added, the maintenance of metadata
and providing services to the end-user, if any, are taken care of by the library staff.
The total number of publications from NIO is about 150 per year. So it was realized
that the repository would not show a growth in the initial period. Therefore deposition of
full-text with ‘restricted access’ had been introduced for the older literature. The full-text
item with this feature remains available within the institute (restricted access with login,
etc) whereas, the users of the repository from outside the institute can only ‘request’ for
the desired document. The request is then received in the form of mail with a link to the
record. The library staff takes care of sending the document under restricted access to the
requester after confirming that the request so received is from an authentic user. We used
this feature for storing scanned copies of the old published literature way back until 1991.
The half-life for oceanography literature is eight years and hence we felt that archiving
this much old literature should serve most of the users.
The repository is currently listed on general and disciplinary as well as regionspecific
harvesters: Google Scholar (one place where the information seeker generally
initiates his/her search for information across many disciplines and sources), OAIster (a
union catalog of OCLC representing open access resources), Avano (a marine and
aquatic sciences OAI harvester — the discipline the DRS belongs to), CASSIR (Cross-
Access Search Service for Indian Repositories — the country DRS belongs to).
Besides browse feature, the records in the DRS can be searched (Advanced search)
either by keyword (including a word in the full -text) or other specific fields in the
data such as Author, title, source, abstract, document type and year. We limit the scope of
this repository to the published and gray literature (such as doctoral theses and technical
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