Dear Dr. Prathap, My reply to your queries follow. Hope it clarifies your doubt. Regards, - Francis NCSI, IISc Bangalore -12 On Thu, 25 Nov 2010, Dr.D.P Prathap wrote:

dear colleagues

Please clarify....

In an Institutional Repository, publications of the Institute are made available in full-text for free access by any one, of course full-text is subject to publiser's embargo period.

Ideally, the full-texts (PDFs) uploaded to the institutional repositories (IRs) should be the final accepted versions of the research papers. However, the general experiences of IR administrators is that the authors do not submit the copies of their final accepted versions of their papers to the maintainers of the IRs unless it has been mandated by the institutions. This is true even with ePrints@IISc (eprints.iisc.ernet.in), the IR of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) being mainteined by the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI). ePrints@IISc is the country's first IR and also one amongst the world's earliest ones. To date, the total record count of our IR is 24,000+ of which more than 80% of the records have the corresponding full-texts. The majority of the full-texts in our IR are the publishers' versions as we do not have a mechanism in place yet to get the final accepted versions of the papers. The access to the full-texts are restricted to the registered users only and the registration itself is restricted to the internal users of IISc. This way, we are ensuring that there is no violation of copyrights that the authors are likely to have transferred to the publishers. Publishers of open-access journals allow the publishers' versions of PDFs to be included in the IRs. Such articles should be made available open-access even from the IRs. The details related to the publishers' policies towards the inclusion of their PDFs in the IRs can be seen at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PDFandIR.html

With the copyright held by the publishers for the artilces for ever, I would like to know what type of agreement between the publisher and the authors of the Institute enable the full-text Institutional Repository accessable by anybody.

There is an urgent need to educate the authors not to transfer the exclusive rights to the publishers. Instead they could make use of the Author Addendum (AA)to secure author rights as the author of a research article. For more information on AA, visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml

What is the difference between "request a copy" form for an article under Embargo period AND making it available in full-text in IR itself.

Request A Copy is a feature supported by the underlying IR software which helps in making use of reprint requests. As said above, access to the publishers' versions of the PDFs in the IRs should be limited to the internal users of the respective institutions. For outsiders, if the IR software supports the 'request a copy' feature, it should be enabled and such requests could be honoured for research and educational purposes only.

Sincerely Technical officer (Library) Sugarcane Breeding Institute

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