Fellow information scientists and librarians, When Dr T B Rajashekar, the founder of LIS-Forum passed away in June 2005, Prof. N Balakrishnan and I wrote "The best tribute the LIS professionals in this country could pay to Raja is to set up institutional open access archives as soon as possible and fill them with papers, modernize their curricula and teach their students the values practiced by him." See https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4589.html. Raja was the first in India and one of the earliest in the world to set up an institutional open access repository. Raja's able deputy Dr Francis Jayakanth hosts an annual memorial lecture as well as carries on with the wonderful discussion forum, one of the largest of its kind in the world (with over 6,000 members), and also continues with the IISc's Eprints repository. But the status of OA in the country as a whole is, if I may say that, depressing. According to *Web of Science *data, with only about 30% of papers from India available as open access (as of 2021), India is third from the bottom in a list of about 200 countries in % share of OA documents, just above North Korea (293 papers, 18.8% OA) and French Polynesia (one paper, 0% OA). India, with over 1,37,000 papers in 2021, is seventh in terms of number of papers published. In a country where there are 55,000 higher education institutions (more than 1,170 universities, nearly 43,800 colleges and 11,300 stand-alone institutions) [ https://www.statista.com/statistics/660862/higher-education-institutions-byt...], we have less than 150 institutional open access repositories today. According to Manju Naika and Sandeep Pathak in *Nature*, "as of April 2020, the UK-based Directory of Open Access Repositories ( Open DOAR https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/ ) listed 92 such repositories in India. Besides institute-level repositories, India has set up several national ones to promote OA."[https://www.nature.com/articles/nindia.2020.125]. Most of these repositories are incomplete; not all papers published by an institution's researchers find their way into the institution's repository. But a large number of LIS graduates and academic and research librarians write papers about open access. There are some bright spots, though. For example, two Indian academic librarians have won international recognition (the EPT award) for making outstanding contributions to the promotion of OA in a developing country [ https://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/oa-interviews-francis-jayakanth-of.html and http://www.icrisat.org/newsroom/latest-news/happenings/happenings1609.htm#7 ]. One of them persuaded his institute's Director to mandate OA for all research papers, at a time when there were less than a dozen OA mandates worldwide. Two Secretaries to the Government of India, one heading DSIR and the other heading both DST and DBT, took less than a few seconds to accept the suggestion to make all papers resulting from their funding open access! Their decisions led to the setting up of CSIR Central and Science Central at CSIR-URDIP, Pune, as well as many IRs in the CSIR, DST and DBT laboratories. In the early days of the OA movement, starting from 2000, three great institutions, viz. M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science, and not to forget the then fledgling Centre for Internet & Society, provided invaluable support to the movement. A large number of global experts - including Stevan Harnad, Alma Swan, Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan, Leslie Carr, John Willinsky, Abel Packer and others - visited India to promote the culture of OA. Although Peter Suber and Richard Poynder have not visited India, they have done much to promote OA in India (and the world). We even tried and succeeded in persuading the CGIAR management, based on the experience of ICRISAT, Hyderabad, to adopt a system-wide open access policy [ https://poynder.blogspot.com/2010/05/], and thought of strengthening the culture of OA in other emerging economies such as China, Brazil and South Africa. [See Barbara Kirsop, *Current Science*, Vol. 92 (10 Feb 2007), 276-77]. Prof. Balaram wrote many editorials in *Current Science* on the need to adopt OA, especially OA archiving. And yet, as of 2021, *only about 30% of India's papers (as per Web of Science, * *lens.org http://lens.org and COKI) are OA. India is third from the bottom in a list of about 200 countries in terms of % of OA publications.* The situation would have been far better had our scientists and scholars self-archived their papers and had our friends in the LIS community put in diligent efforts to set up IRs. People like Prof. ARD Prasad, Dr D K Sahu, the late Dr Rajashekar, Dr Francis Jayakanth and Muthu Madhan have put in much effort in training librarians in setting up such facilities. We have been talking about OA for a long time. It is high time we walk the talk. With warm regards, Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.