On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, M. Paul Pandian wrote:
Hi,
I was looking for a source that may list all the institutional repositories across the world including India. I could not find one. If there is one, please do let me know.
There is a registry of open-access ePrint archives at http://archives.eprints.org/ This registry lists 451 archives spread across the world, as of today. Its quite likely that there many more repositories, but aren't listed in the registry mentioned above as yet.
We witness quite a few institutional repositories across the globe including India in the last few years. However, the number of articles archived are not very encouraging particularly in India. This is one problem. The other problem is that there is no comprehesive listing of archives that exist today. Even if there is one, searching across archives is another issue.
Setting up an Institutional Repositories (IR) is no longer an hindrance. The two very popular software to set up an IR are EPrints.org (www.eprints.org) and Dspace (www.dspace.org). The installation of the latest versions of these two packages have become relatively easier compared to their earlier versions. We at NCSI are in the process of setting up wiki pages for the benefit of fellow professional. These pages, among other things, has a step by step installation procedure to set up the latest version of EPrints.org software. It can be accessed at: http://144.16.72.147/pmwiki/Main/SettingUpAnEPrintsArchive Mr. Pandian's observation that the rate of growth of IRs is much to be desired is very true. This observation holds good not only for the few IRs that have come up in our country but also to the IRs across the world. As I said earlier, setting up IRs is no longer an issue. Sustaining them in the long run and ensuring that the students and researchers make it a point to put a copy of their publications on their respective IRs, are the biggest challenges that lies ahead after setting up an IR. All the popular software meant for maintaining IRs are oai-compliant, which means that metadata from such IRs can be harvested automatically by the oai-based service providers. OAIster, http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ and ARC, http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ are examples of oai-based service providers. These service providers harvest metadata from the registered oai-compliant data providers and provide value added services like searching and browsing on the harvested data. So, Searching across the IRs is not an issue. - Francis NCSI, IISc, Bg
In order to promote the OA, we may have to do the following:
1. Promoting the concept of OA and its benefits in our own organisation ( - aggressively being carried out by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and others so that more archives can be setup. More people must join them).
2. Populating the archives that are already setup -- is a very difficult task. There needs to be continous efforts in pursuading the research and academic community for this.
3. A Common aggregated database of all the archives that will harvest metadata from the individual archives and provide a common search interface. May be the individual archive can register with this common aggregated database with harvesting details. This will also enhance the reach out of OA articles.
Just a thougt.
Thanks.
M. Paul Pandian ========================================================================= Scientific Officer (Library) | The Institute of Mathematical Sciences | 4th Cross Road | Cable: MATSCIENCE Central Institutes of Technology Campus| Phone: +91-44-2254 1856 Tharamani | Fax: +91-44-2254 1586 CHENNAI (Madras) | E-mail: pandian@imsc.res.in TAMILNADU - 600 113, INDIA | URL:http://www.imsc.res.in/library/Index.php =========================================================================