Re: [LIS-Forum] OA repositories in India

Great work Dr Francis! It is unfortunate that self-archiving is almost non-existent. I believe that librarians need to train users to do that, only because most users are not even aware of the possibility. This leads me to what Dr Arun says: Such librarians should be recognized and that is what we at the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development did ......... While I have not *worked* *in a library* for years, I believe I am not wrong when I say: - Librarians need to do lots of training - They need to be recognized for efforts like the IISc archives. While the institutions might internally recognize them, the awareness of such activities needs much wider circulation, so that other institutions involve their libraries in a similar fashion. I do not see much of this. What can we do to increase these aspects? Vasumathi Sriganesh QMed Knowledge Foundation A-3, Shubham Center, Cardinal Gracious Road Chakala, Andheri East, Mumbai 400099, India Tel: 91-22-40054474 Mob: +919867292230 Email: vasu@qmed.ngo Web:www.qmed.ngo ; www.qmedcourses.in MMC Speaker Code - MMC/MASS/00030/2016 Member: Academy of Health Professions Educators On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 11:40 AM Francis Jayakanth wrote:

Sir, As I previously stated, approximately 90% of IISc papers have been uploaded to the repository, with nearly 80% of those containing full texts. The library does most of the uploading. Self-archiving is almost non-existent.

A Request a copy button is displayed next to any full text file that is not publically available. Those who are interested can get a copy of the paper using that button. Almost every day, the library receives many similar requests.

With regards, Francis ________________________________ From: Subbiah Arunachalam Sent: 23 May 2022 23:46 To: LIS-Forum Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] OA repositories in India

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On Mon, May 23, 2022 at 9:56 PM Francis Jayakanth mailto:francis@iisc.ac.in> 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.inhttp://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