Dear Friends Reading the current debate on Open Access Archive and the views put forth by Mr. Arunachalam and Dr. Tapaswi I am also tempted to put forth my opinion worth few peanuts. I am also of strong opinion that research findings be made freely available to every one and everywhere for the benefit of science and society. There have been studies, which suggests that there is a strong correlation between the presence of an article in public domain and its high use. The present impact factor for journals has got its own limitations (the journals, which have high impact factors, may have very few core articles which are continuously cited increasing their impact factor. A journal may also receive high impact factor because it may be having highly controversial article cited by many just to refute its findings). It is also a fact that more people read article than cite them. So one can now calculate impact factors for each article, which in true sense would be giving the real worth of an article at two levels. Number of times it is downloaded (for being read) and number of citations it is receiving. Moreover publishing in Open Archive reduces the length of time between article submission and its publication. In addition a lot of valuable information in the form of thesis, dissertations, conference proceedings, seminars etc an also be made available. As far as what we (LIS Professionals) can do as well as others (like scientists, researchers, scholars, institutions) I suggest you seeing the following site. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml One can also see presentation made by Prof Jean-Claude Guedon in urging librarians to through all their weight behind Open Archiving at the following site http://www.arl.org/scomm/guedonpr.shtml We are today in a transition period and in few years form now I believe every thing is going to be in open archive. It of course is going to have its own implications in terms of how we are going to handle such an information explosion. But since librarians are the ones who act as a bridge between information and researchers we have to take initiatives. It is ultimately we have to make the information available to them. One can see a series of debates started way back in 2001 and published in nature journal at the following site for having a good insight. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access Happy reading Warm regards Syed Afsar Ali Bukhari Librarian Shantha Biotechnics Pvt Ltd Medchal Hyderabad E-mail:- bukhari_786@rediffmail.com quickinfo@rediffmail.com ___________________________________________________ Click below to experience Sooraj R Barjatya's latest offering 'Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon' starring Hrithik, Abhishek & Kareena http://www.mpkdh.com