[LIS-Forum] Open Access Initiative, Self-Archiving and Instituitional Repositories

T. Shahab tshahab at jamiahamdard.ac.in
Fri Aug 10 11:12:09 IST 2007


The time when the scholarly community was at at the mercy of publishers
of scholarly journals to give their reserches and findings a wide
circulation is soon coming to an end. The revolution in the field of IT
and communication technology has liberated the world of scholarship from
the clutches of profit oriented publishers who were bent on restricting
the usage of the research data on various pretext.
Moreover, being bogged down with an uncertain future on account of
decreasing availabilty of schorly journals every year because of the
esclating cost of printed journals, the scholarly world must address
itself to a new mechanism of redressal. What is required is a paradidigm
shift at the part of the scholars as well as the information managers.
The access denial and hence the impact denial can be overcome if we
embrace the liberating concept of "OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE" (OAI).
Information centres have to look at them no more as stand alone
collectors of printed version rather they have to develop themselves as
global sharing digital repositories. OAI aims to facilitate the efficent
dissemination of scholarly content through the creation of e-print
archives.Thus the libraries and information centres are now-a-days
increasingly developing into Instituitional Repositories (IR).
Another and a very significant rational behind OAI is that the research
outputs of all publicly funded research programmes should be freely
accessible to be shared among the academic community so that other
researchers at other universities and research institutions world wide
can use, built-upon and cite those findings in their own reseaches and
applications.
This bring us to the requirement for an "Institutional Repository" (IR).
The IR actually works like a digital clearing house of the intellectual
output of an institution/ a University in digital form. 

The principal difference from a convential library is that in an IR our
main focus is on the internally generated research ouputs whether peer
reviewed (either preprint or postprint version) or rejected. Moreover,
the onus for depositing the reseach materials etc is on the faculty
members. However, the logic behind an IR is the similar to that of a
traditional library- conservation, preservation, dissemination and
impact.

Self-Archiving refers to depositing digital documents in a publicly
accessible website; preferably, an OAI compliant archive. Depositing
involves a simple web interface where depoistors copy/paste in the
metadata and then attaches the text-document. The full text document may
be in different formats and locations , but if we use the same metadata
tags they become 'interoperable'. These metadata can be harvested and
all the documents can thus be jointly searched and retrieved as if they
were all in one global collection, accessible to everyone. 
In nutshell, the reward of self-archiving in terms of visibility,
accessibility and impact is great.

Note: The above piece is being circulated with a view to generate
interest among the scholarly community and the administrators of
Academic institutions as well as the Information centres towards
usefulness of digitization, the need for Self Archiving and building of
Instituional Repositories of digitised materials and finally embrace the
philosophy of Open Access.
With best regards.
Dr. T. SHAHAB
Central Library, 
Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi.


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