Re: [LIS-Forum] OA repositories in India

Dear All I guess open access means access without any credentials and a boundary wall. Recently INFLIBNET got approval from ME to archive the thesis of CFTIs on Sodhganga. Let's see how many rich libraries/CFTIs follow the same. With Regards, Vinod Kumar Mishra, Assistant Librarian, Biju Patnaik Central Library (BPCL), NIT Rourkela, Sundergadh-769008, Odisha, India. Mob:91+9439420860 URL: http://vinod.itshelp.co.in/ ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4666-7874 Scopus ID: 57223138343 *"Spiritual relationship is far more precious than physical. Physical relationship divorced from spiritual is body without soul" -- Mahatma Gandhi* On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 4:36 PM Subbiah Arunachalam < subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 23, 2022 at 9:56 PM Francis Jayakanth wrote:

...

To date, about 55,500 Indian Institute of Science (IISc) articles have been uploaded to the IISc's institutional repository, ePrints@IISc ( eprints.iisc.ac.in).

IISc has roughly 62K items in the Scopus database, which spans the years 1908 to 2022. So, the ePrints@IISc repository has a bit more than 90% coverage of IISc publications. In terms of full-text inclusion in the repository, it's somewhere between 80 and 85 percent.

Thanks very much Francis for making this information public. [I wish other IR managers in India make available such information about their repositories.] I have often heard that the IISc repository has only metadata (or bibliographic details) and NOT full texts. Also, I have heard people say that it is NOT a genuine OA repository as the content there is not 'author self-archived' but drawn from a database. Does that really matter as long as I as a user can access the full papers? What is your take on 'not being a genuine OA repository'? As for me, as long as a repository provides the full texts of papers, users need not worry about how they came into the repository in the first place. Yes, it would be ideal if authors self-archive. Unfortunately, even more than two decades after Harnad's call to researchers of the world to self-archive, if many scientists in India (and also elsewhere) do not bother to self-archive in institutional repositories, then an intermediary (say a librarian) has to do the archiving. Such librarians should be recognized and that is what we at the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development did in your case several years ago.

Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658