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

eports). RSS Feeds facility exists to those who are routinely interested in being informed
of new additions. As of now (early December 2010), there are over 3,700 records and approximately
15,000 downloads are noticed per month in the recent past.
The library does not stop with uploading the records and making them available to
the users on Internet. The search expressions with which the users reach this repository
and number of downloads’ are continuously being monitored to find why the users
downloaded the full-text of the documents. The data is too small to make any conclusive
statements and therefore the results are yet to be published.
The repository today is considered as a good product by
the researchers within the organization as well as by the
tem that ranks the World's Open Access Repositories. This has
always been among the first 10 Indian repositories and marine
science repositories world over. It is a repository of a research
laboratory with a limited number of researchers and
tions and therefore we are aware that this would not populate
as other repositories that have come up in the recent past. But
we are satisfied with the developments within the given framework.
Murari Tapaswi
Head, Library & Information Services
National Institute of Oceanography
Panaji, Goa, India
Email: murari@nio.org
Only three of the seven IITs (not counting those which were set up in the past two
years) have set up institutional repositories as seen from ROAR. The Computer Science
Department of IIT Kanpur has customized Drupal for hosting open access repository for
agriculture and a plug-in called Agrotagger for both EPrints and DSpace. But they do not
yet have an institutional repository for their own Institute! Madurai Kamaraj University
has a mandate but their repository carries papers from only their School of Biotechnology
and so far it has less than 100 papers.
Bangalore seems to be the happening place for open access. That is where both NCSI-
IISc and DRTC-ISI held many workshops and training programmes. The first four repositories
were set up there. One of the two harvesters, viz. CASSIR, operates from there.
An important international conference that led to the Bangalore Declaration and a workshop
on electronic journals was held at IISc. Much of the early activities that led to the
open access movement in India happened in a small development research foundation in
Chennai, viz. MSSRF, with a visit by Prof. Stevan Harnad in 2000. Conspicuously, Calcutta,
which was the home of Renaissance in India in the 18th and 19th centuries and
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