Friends: I see many postings in this (eGovIndia) list on open source software, but hardly any on open access to scientific and scholarly literature. As you may be aware, most research in India, be it in universities and other higher educational institutions or in research laboratories, is funded by the Government. It is only logical that publicly funded research should be made available to everyone. Unfortunately, most Indian researchers WANT to publish in journals published by COMMERCIAL publishers operating out of the western countries. And many of them succeed in getting their papers accepted by these foreign (commercial) journals. What is more, Indian authors surrender their copyright to these journals. Effectively our government (and Indian taxpayers) are funding research whose results are under copyright of commercial publishers in the West! These publishers sell their journals at enormous subscription prices, of the order of 2-20 thousand dollars a year. And Indian libraries, at least some of them, subscribe to these expensive journals. Of course there is an alternative. The government and funding agencies can adopt a policy whereby results of all publicly funded research would be required to be published in open access journals (no subscription for the electronic version) and be deposited in interoperable open access archives. There are a few thousand such open access journals and about 500 such archives around the world (as of now). All the journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and Current Science Association are open access journals. MedKnow Publications of Bombay also publishes several open access journals (in the area of medicine). There are also a few Indian archives. The most well known is the Eprints archive at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A good example of an Indian central archive (where any researcher can deposit his/her paper) is OpenMED of NIC. Members of this list should lend their support to the setting up of many more interoperable institutional archives in India and to persuade journal publishers in India, both in the government and in the private sector, to make their journals OA journals. The advantages of open access are many and have been well documented. If need be can write about them some other time. Subbiah Arunachalam