Friends: The Australian Government has allocated a huge sum for Australian universities to build their own institutional open access archives (similar to the EPrints archive of IISc, B'lore). Please see the report appended below. When will we in India do such a thing and mandate setting up of OA archives at all major research-performing universities and laboratories? Four or five years ago Current Science carried a short (less than 2 pages) article that clearly showed that China was racing ahead of India in number of papers published as seen not only from the Web of Science but also from MatsciNet and Chemical Abstracts. Many Indian science managers either didn't take note of it or ignored it. A few months ago the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister made a big case on the very same point and the Indian press covered it for several days. I hope in the case of open access archiving such a thing will not happen. And the science managers will look at what is said and if it is valid rather than who keeps saying it! Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] -----------------------

From Peter Suber's blog

Australian govt funds OA repositories Julie Bishop, Australia's Minister for Education, Science and Training, has allocated $25.5 million to build OA repositories at Australian universities as part of the country's new Research Quality Framework (RQF). Here's the key part of today's press release: $25.5 million - Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories programme - to assist with the establishment of university digital data storage systems that will allow research outputs to be submitted for RQF assessment. This programme builds on the Australian Government’s $35 million investment in the research and development of data repository technology, funded as part of Backing Australia’s Ability. ___________________________________________________________ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html