Institutional Repositories in India: a case study of National Aerospace Laboratories (nal)
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Enhancing the Impact of Indian Scholarly Communication through Institutional Repositories Poornima Narayana*, Biradar B S**, I R N Goudar* * Information Center for Aerospace Science & Technology National Aerospace Laboratories Bangalore –560017 India ** Department of Library and Information Science Kuvempu University, Shankarghatta Shimoga – 577 451 , India ABSTRACT: The high quality research accompanied by innumerable scholarly communications to various national and internationals journals and conferences has put India in the forefront in the developing world and leader of South Asian countries. Unfortunately, only the elite institutions have reasonably good information provision facilities that support scholarly communications. On one hand the paucity of funds for the subscription based scholarly journals and on the other the shrinking budget discourage both the access to vast scholarly publications and publication process itself. The open access literature plays a vital role, both in terms of research communication and access, provided, of course, the benefits in terms of economic and social recognitions are assured by this system. The open access movement was triggered by the journal crisis due to exorbitant price increase of the publications. Institutional repositories represent an important OA-channel and are relatively new developments in scholarly communication process compared to open journals and subject-specific repositories. The paper presents the Indian scenario in adopting the open access and the status of the open access journals and Institutional Repositories. The authors depict the main bottlenecks for setting up of IRs in various Indian institutions and come up with appropriate suggestions. 1. INTRODUCTION India has prospered through its strong academic and research establishments. The R&D organizations have also developed expertise in their respective areas that are now recognized worldwide. Leading Indian scientific research institutions, such as Indian Institute of Science (IISC), Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), laboratories under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Indian Council Agricultural Research (ICAR), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), traditional universities, deemed universities and Corporate R & Ds have been playing crucial role towards national development. The high quality research accompanied by innumerable scholarly communications to various national and internationals journals and conferences has put India in the forefront in the developing world and leader of South Asian countries. Only the elite institutions have reasonably good information provision facilities that support scholarly communications. On one hand the paucity of funds for the subscription based scholarly journals and on the other the shrinking budget discourage both the access to vast scholarly publications and publication process itself. The open access literature plays a vital role, both in terms of research communication and access, provided, of course, the benefits in terms of economic and social recognitions are assured by this system. While the ICT infrastructure necessary to take advantage of the open access is not adequate in developing countries, the situation in India, is the other way round. The situation has improved to a considerable extent. The number of Internet subscribers in were 140,000 in 1998 and now the number has crossed 5 million. There is a big leap in the telecommunication facility and Internet bandwidth available. Although it is now possible to have free access to exhaustive information on the web, still significant amount of research is not available freely. While the delivery technique for scientific publications has changed rapidly, the economic ramifications have hardly changed. The open access movement was triggered by the journal crisis due to exorbitant price increase of the publications. During the 1990s several e-print archives as well as a few hundred peer-reviewed, electronic, scholarly journals emerged. The common denominator for most of these is that they offer free access to the electronic product. This has become known as "open access publishing". 2. OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT Open access may be defined as a philosophy to achieve the goal of accessing and making available the digital material free of charge, which may or may not be free from copyright and licensing restrictions. 'Open access' (OA) means that a reader of a scientific publication can read it over the Internet, print it out and even further distribute it for non-commercial purposes without any payments or restrictions. At the most the reader is in some cases required to register with the service in question, which for instance can be useful for the service providers in view of the production of readership statistics. The use of the content by third parties for commercial purposes is, however, as a rule prohibited. Thanks to the open availability the linking from reference lists to OA publications is substantially facilitated, since the reader does not encounter barriers such as use licenses, and each reference is only a mouse-click away. In general, the author keeps almost complete copyright and can also publish the material elsewhere. The concept of OA came into existence sometime in 1991 due to the necessity of facilitating scholarly communication. According to Berlin Declaration act “open access is a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage approved by the scientific community”. Budapest Initiative defines Open access as ‘freely available on Internet for the public, permitting to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself”. 'Bangalore Commitment' (November 2006): a commitment to mandate Open Access self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world: 'Self-archive unto others as you would have others self-archive unto you'. Recently a group of young professionals has formed a Registered Society known as Open Knowledge Society (http://www.oksociety.org) under The Travancore Cochin Literary, Scientific and Charitable Societies Registration Act, 1955. This 'OKSociety' aims to promote Open Access in India through creating awareness and organizing training programmes and would act as a forum to provide support services through an array of volunteers. 3. OPEN ACCESS CHANNELS The four most important OA channels are – refereed free electronic journals, research-area-specific archive (e-print) servers, institutional repositories of individual universities/institutions and self-posting on authors' home pages. 3.1. Open Access Journals Open access journals are e-journals that are freely available (some open access journals have supplementary fee-based print versions as well). Open access journals provide access to full-text contents of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. There are two types of open access journals - the one, available in electronic version only and the other, available in both electronic as well as print versions viz., Current Science. In the first type, the journals are published in regular intervals on the Internet that do not have any print-on-paper counterpart. In the second type, the journals are published in print-on-paper format and distributed to the subscribers. The same contents of print-on-paper are available to the scholars free of charge in electronic form. OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available worldwide. Some OA journal publishers are non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) and some are for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC). There is a healthy sign of adopting the open access much faster in India compared to many developing countries. A good number of high quality, peer-reviewed open access journals are being published covering a wide spectrum of subjects. While there are many publishers in this category, six major publishers need special mention. They are - Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS, 11 journals); Indian National Science Academy (INSA, 4 journals); Indian Medlars Center of NIC (MedInd, 38 journals); Medknow publications (28 journals); Indian journals.com (8 journals) and Kamala-Raj enterprises (5 journals). Libraries and information centers in India attached to various types of institutions are now taking part in open access movement, by establishing institutional digital repositories to provide worldwide access to their research documents. (Table 1) Table – 1: Indian Open Access Journals
3.2. Self Archiving Making electronic preprints and post prints available on author home pages or depositing them in digital archives and repositories. Self-archiving serves two main purposes: it allows authors to disseminate their research articles for free over the internet, and it helps to ensure the preservation of those articles in a rapidly evolving electronic environment. A key problem with such archives is that they can be unstable, as authors move from institution to institution, retire, make other life changes or die. As will be seen later, e-prints from such archives are not made as easily visible to the research community as those in disciplinary archives or institutional archives and repositories because they cannot be easily harvested. While self archiving on repositories ensures their conformity with OAI-PMH enabling their publications to be harvested by Metadata Harvesting Services and general search engines like Google, archiving on their personal/institutional website may not. 3.3. Subject based E Print archives E-prints are electronic copies of academic research papers, which may be in the form of pre-prints (papers before referring) and post prints (papers after referring). E-prints archive is simply an online repository of materials, freely available on the web for widest possible dissemination of knowledge. Archives may contain the research output of institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines such as physics, economics, mathematics etc. OA archives can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. eScholarship Repository for the University of California). 3.4. Institutional Repositories Institutional repositories represent an important OA-channel and are relatively new developments in scholarly communication process compared to open journals and subject-specific repositories. Institutional Repository are repositories designed to manage, host, preserve and enable distribution of the scholarly output of an Institution. Institutional repositories are “a managed storage system with content deposited on a personal, departmental, institutional, national, regional, or consortial basis, providing services to designated communities, with content drawn from the range of digital resources that support learning, teaching and research”. The characteristics of IR include - Institution-based; Scholarly material in digital formats; Cumulative and perpetual; Open and Interoperable. Institutions and their libraries are in a better position than individual researcher to guarantee that the material is available even after decades and that the collection is systematically maintained, for instance, to take account of changing file formats and media. Institutional repositories represent an integral part of the long-term strategies of the universities in question, in particular as these have to redesign their publishing and library policies to take into account the totally new conditions created by the Internet. The institution’s own production of theses and working papers can easily be put up on such repositories, but in the long run the posting of the central production of the university's researchers, that is, their conference and, in particular, journal papers, is crucial. Although institutional repositories can be seen as useful marketing channels for individual universities their most significant impact on the global scale can only be achieved via co-operation via open access indexing services. IRs are “digital archives of intellectual products created by the faculty, staff and students of an institution or group of institutions accessible to end users both within and without the institution. The IR may hold various kinds of publications, such as pre-prints and post-prints of journal articles, conference papers, research reports, theses, dissertations, seminar presentations, working papers and other scholarly items. This way, intellectual contributions of researchers are made accessible free of charge to the whole community of researchers across the world. Thus, the open access which was evolved out of the necessity of wider access to scholarly publication relies on the initiatives of individuals (self archives), institutions. It is more of a philosophy of facilitating wider communication, feedback and use. A number of software packages both proprietary and free on net have been developed for archiving and managing digital collections. However open source software packages such as Dspace developed by MIT and HP (http://www.dspace.org/), E-prints developed by University of Southampton (http://www.eprints.org/), Fedora developed by University of Virginia and Cornel University (http://www.fedora.info/) are driving the OA movement especially the development of IRs in the world. From 2000 onwards repositories have developed from being subject based to include the complimentary institutional based model and their growth has been fuelled by timely project funding from a variety of sources. Both the Registry of Open access repositories ROAR (http://archives.eprints.org) and the Directory of Open access Repositories OpenDOAR (www.opendoar.org) now evidence the increasing number and diversity of repositories: subject, institutional, national, national/subject, international, regional, consortia, funding agency, publisher and data archives. United States accounts for 26.18% (22.96%), followed by Germany 11.44% (8.43%), United Kingdom 10.86% (10.87%), Japan 6.40%(4.57), Australia 5.04% (3.35%), The Netherlands 4.26% (2.33%), Canada 3.39% (3.96%), France 3.39% (3.96%) and so on as per the lists of Open DOAR and (ROAR) respectively. The developed countries account for about 70% of IRs. Among developing countries Brazil accounts for maximum IRs followed by India. 
4. INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES IN INDIA In India, majority of the professionals are experiencing that accessing overseas information, particularly western countries, is easier than accessing Indian information or accessing information of the respective institute. The main reason for the non-accessibility of the Indian information is due to lack of developing e-information environment and putting Indian information on to the Internet or having their websites. Though some of the organizations have their own web (portal) and having good Internet bandwidth, not much effort has been to feed (host the Indian Information) or even the institutional academic or research output. Institutional repository needs to follow some standards, guidelines and procedure to make it compatible to share with international academia and research community or organizations also to work out the restriction and security. Availability of open source software has also accelerated major initiatives in India like disseminating new knowledge generated within the institutions or organizations which has resulted in another way of disseminating scholarly literature, i.e. open access literature. In contrast to subscription-based literature, the open access literature does not have any restriction on access, and major initiatives in India like disseminating new knowledge generated within the institutions or organizations which has resulted in another way of disseminating scholarly literature, i.e. open access literature. In contrast to subscription-based literature, the open access literature does not have any restriction on access, and is free from any subscription fee or licensing fee. India is ahead of many developing countries and a few developed countries in terms of establishing a number of digital libraries or digital archives and creating digital contents for them. World communities have appraised Indian efforts, and contents of some digital libraries are regularly accessed in different parts of the world. 4.1. India Takes Lead In India, some institutions, like Indian Institute of Science; Indian Institute Management, Kozhikode; Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; National Institute of Technology Rourkela; National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL); National Chemical Laboratory; Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET); National Institute of Oceanography; Raman Research Institute; etc. have set up open access institutional repositories (IRs) that archive and disseminate research outputs of respective institutions. While self-archiving by authors is slowly picking up, mostly it is IR staff that collect and archive the documents to respective IRs on behalf of authors. There are some subject specific IRs as well, Librarian’s Digital Library (LDL) of Documentation Research and Training Center (DRTC), Bangalore and OpenMed@NIC of National Informatics Centre, New Delhi are examples giving access to LIS and biomedical literature respectively. Vidyanidhi of University of Mysore is an example of document type specific collection that archives and provides access to theses and dissertations of Indian Universities. Some archives like OpenMed@NIC offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feeds to the registered users, who also get notification on addition of new items in regular intervals. Search engines and metadata harvesters index most of the Indian operational repositories. Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) from University of Southampton lists out 34 IRs of Academic and Research Institutions in India as depicted in Table 2. These IRs have adopted self-archiving model and have been using two most popular open source software – Dspace and GNU Eprints. Somehow ROAR has not listed few Indian IRs such as that of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (www.icrier.org/publications.html), IITB (www.library.iitb.ac.in/~mnj/gsdl/cgi-bin/library), IIT Kanpur (library.iitk.ac.in:8080/examples/thesis/index.html), INSA Digital Library (drtc.isibang.ac.in/insa), Vidhyanidhi of University of Mysore (www.vidhyanidhi.org.in). A number of new initiatives still being in the initial stages are yet to be listed by ROAR. Table 2 Indian IRs Listed by ROAR
# Number of items not available in ROAR and could not be ascertained through respective IR sites as some of them were not accessible. 4.2. Metadata HarvestersFew Indian institutions have been experimenting metadata harvesting. Search Digital Libraries (SDL) of DRTC is one such service harvesting library information science subject-specific open access archives and repositories. The ‘Knowledge Harvester@INSA’, is an experimental initiative from Indian National Science Academy that harvests metadata from 3 archives. “SJPI Cross Journal Search Service” is a recent initiative from NCSI at IISc that harvests metadata from 13 Indian open access journals. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi has initiated a metadata harvesting service called SEED that indexes 4 archives. NAL has initiated harvesting OAI compliant IRs of CSIR Laboratories in India and making them accessible through a unified search interface. All these metadata harvesters in India use PKP Harvester, developed by Public Knowledge Project UBC, Canada. Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.org), a free service on net is an open access journals indexing service initiated by Informatics India Private Limited. It covers more than 3,500 open access academic, research and industry journals world over of which > 1,500 are peer-reviewed scholarly journals. More than 0.3 million new articles added every year to this service. 4.3. Advantages of IR
are not generally published for wider circulation. IRs fill up this gap.
4.4. Favourable Environment for IRs
4.5. Constraints of Institutional Repositories Initial costs may be high as contributors perceive high risks. The Open Access Movement has a big challenge especially the publishing industry of journals under commercial sector challenging their sovereignty. The management support, availability of IR expertise, willingness of authors to participate are very important factors for the success and sustainability of IR.
4.6. Suggested Measures An Institutional Repository is the intellectual capital of an institute which recognizes the intellectual life and scholarship of our academic and research organizations. IRs facilitate building the digital collections to be searched and accessed freely by anybody in world. Above all, IRs preserve the heritage of the institute. Setting up of an IR needs a planned approach for the implementation tasks defined by their governance structure, management framework, operational strategies and a well documented workflow. Adoption of the standards and choice of models are critical factors for developing an IR. More than 1,100 IRs have been set up in the world, and India with 34IRs as listed in ROAR leads the developing countries with in this regard. Most of the IRs particularly in India have neither preferred the governance and management structures nor documented the procedures and practices. A good number of institutions in India although set up their IRs have not made the content open access due to various reasons. There is no perceived growth in the number of documents added to many IRs in the world. Apart from a good number of metadata harvesting services like OAISter, ARC, general Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and SCIRUS also harvest the metadata of repositories in the world and give the links to the individual IRs for full texts. Among the IR software adopted DSpace and GNU Eprints are very popular and also are open source.
5. CONCLUSION It is satisfying to note that good numbers of institutions in the country are aware about IR developments and plan to set up IRs in their respective organizations. IR models should also be developed to address the issues and concerns and also understand the procedure and policies for implementing IRs. There is a lot of scope in India to develop IRs at institutional level under various apex bodies like CSIR, ICMR, ICAR, DRDO, ISRO, DST, UGC, etc,. It is advisable to have repositories at institutional level with harvesting facilities at apex body and national level. Despite the growing strength of the Open Access movement, it is difficult to predict whether IR as a communication model would survive in the long run. The study concludes with a positive note as the current global momentum for Open Access is picking up results in setting up of good number of institutional repositories and there by realizing the goal of making freely available the intellectual output created using public funds. The self deposition of documents by the creators is yet to pick up in the world and in particular, India. The copyright restrictions of publishers discourage the authors to submit their papers to IR. However, many publishers including the commercial ones have relaxed their attitudes in this regard by allowing the copy of the final referred manuscript of the paper accepted for depositing in IR. The SHERPA’s RoMEo Project serves as a directory of copyright policies of different publishers. Both IR Managers and the users recognize the important role of library professionals in the IR development. 6. REFERENCES
Poornima Narayana: poornima@css.nal.res.in I R N Goudar: goudar@css.nal.res.in B S Biradar: bsbiradar53@rediffmail.com Yüklə 90,85 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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