Friends, There is much talk about open access in India but if we talk about action we have a long way to go. I would even say OA in India is a story of missed opportunities. More than 20 years ago, thanks to the efforts of Dr T B Rajashekar and Dr Francis Jayakanth, NCSI at IISc set up the first institutional repository for research papers based on EPrints. That repository is not only the first in India but one of the earliest in the world. But we lost the lead. Incidentally, EPrints was the first software for repositories and it was developed by a group of researchers at the University of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science, where Prof. Stevan Harnad, the archevangelist of open access, was on the faculty. Here is a fabulous talk (52 min) on institutional repositories by an expert in scholarly communication and one of the pioneers of the OA movement, Dr Alma Swan, who was also associated for some years with the Univ. of Southampton: https://hstalks.com/t/2293/institutional-repositories/. Although delivered more than 10 years ago, what she spoke is applicable to us today. Dr Alma Swan has played an important role in promoting OA in India and the developing world. She spoke at a special session on OA at the 63rd Indian Science Congress at Hyderabad in 2006. She convinced Dr David Hoisington, Deputy Director of ICRISAT (who had not yet made up his mind when Dr Balaji, the head of Knowledge Resources at ICRISAT had put together all that was needed) that it would be good to have an IR, and that led the entire IGCAR system to adopt IRs. She also came to India in 2006 for a three-day international workshop hosted jointly by IASc, IISc and MSSRF and spoke to delegates from India, China, Brazil, South Africa and a few other countries from the Global South, and helped draft an OA policy for developing countries, that came to be known as the Bangalore declaration. Please see MEETING REPORT: Open access and developing countries Barbara Kirsop, Current Science, Vol. 92, No. 3 (10 February 2007) https://www.jstor.org/stable/i24096703, pp. 276-277. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24096714. Arun - https://hstalks.com/t/2293/institutional-repositories/# - https://hstalks.com/t/2293/institutional-repositories/# -- -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.