The time when the scholarly community was at at the mercy of publishers of scholarly journals to give their reserches and findings a wide circulation is soon coming to an end. The revolution in the field of IT and communication technology has liberated the world of scholarship from the clutches of profit oriented publishers who were bent on restricting the usage of the research data on various pretext. Moreover, being bogged down with an uncertain future on account of decreasing availabilty of schorly journals every year because of the esclating cost of printed journals, the scholarly world must address itself to a new mechanism of redressal. What is required is a paradidigm shift at the part of the scholars as well as the information managers. The access denial and hence the impact denial can be overcome if we embrace the liberating concept of "OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE" (OAI). Information centres have to look at them no more as stand alone collectors of printed version rather they have to develop themselves as global sharing digital repositories. OAI aims to facilitate the efficent dissemination of scholarly content through the creation of e-print archives.Thus the libraries and information centres are now-a-days increasingly developing into Instituitional Repositories (IR). Another and a very significant rational behind OAI is that the research outputs of all publicly funded research programmes should be freely accessible to be shared among the academic community so that other researchers at other universities and research institutions world wide can use, built-upon and cite those findings in their own reseaches and applications. This bring us to the requirement for an "Institutional Repository" (IR). The IR actually works like a digital clearing house of the intellectual output of an institution/ a University in digital form. The principal difference from a convential library is that in an IR our main focus is on the internally generated research ouputs whether peer reviewed (either preprint or postprint version) or rejected. Moreover, the onus for depositing the reseach materials etc is on the faculty members. However, the logic behind an IR is the similar to that of a traditional library- conservation, preservation, dissemination and impact. Self-Archiving refers to depositing digital documents in a publicly accessible website; preferably, an OAI compliant archive. Depositing involves a simple web interface where depoistors copy/paste in the metadata and then attaches the text-document. The full text document may be in different formats and locations , but if we use the same metadata tags they become 'interoperable'. These metadata can be harvested and all the documents can thus be jointly searched and retrieved as if they were all in one global collection, accessible to everyone. In nutshell, the reward of self-archiving in terms of visibility, accessibility and impact is great. Note: The above piece is being circulated with a view to generate interest among the scholarly community and the administrators of Academic institutions as well as the Information centres towards usefulness of digitization, the need for Self Archiving and building of Instituional Repositories of digitised materials and finally embrace the philosophy of Open Access. With best regards. Dr. T. SHAHAB Central Library, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.