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
Sl.No. / Publisher / Number of Titles
1. / Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) / 11
2. / Indian National Science Academy (INSA) / 4
3. / Indian Medlars Center of NIC (MedInd) / 39
4. / Medknow Publications / 45
5. / Indian journals.com / 12
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.