Dear Prof. Harnad
It is over a year back, in October 2002, that we set up the eprint archives
of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India
(
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/) using eprints.org software. From the project
RoMEO we have also extracted and provided information on our archive website
details of publishers who permit pre-print archiving and those who also
allow post-print archiving.
We are proud that IISc eprint archive is the first of its kind to be set up
in India and has been considered exemplary for setting up similar archives
by other academic institutions in the country, including the Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs). The archive is also registered in ARC
harvesting service. We have also interfaced our archive with Greenstone
digital library software to support full text searching (not supported by
current version of eprint.org software).
However, self-archiving so far has been extremely sporadic - till today we
have only about 70 papers submitted to the archive. I should admit that on
our part, we have not promoted the archive vigorously (except for the
initial announcement and a poster we brought out sometime back).
We intend to go on a promotional drive and we are quite confident of
convincing significant number of our researchers (if not all!) the benefits
of self-archiving, through promotional seminars and individual contacts.
Apart from these, we also plan the following:
1. Set up a mechanism to systematically scan e-journals and bibliographic
databases to identify new IISc papers and then contact the authors
requesting them to self-archive their papers (or better still, add the
metadata ourselves and then contact the researcher for pre-print/ post-print
copy depending on publisher). In case the full paper cannot be archived for
any reason, store only the metadata and link to the publisher's site for the
full text.
In fact, we have made slight change in our installation of eprints.org
software to support this feature.
2. Enable web search engines to index contents of the archive by generating
and storing html page versions of bibliographic details, on the lines of
'DP9' system developed at Old Dominion University.
3. Track 'clicks' and downloads of papers from the archive and generate
statistics in support of improved access and visibility.
I believe eprints.org software does not support this feature. We have to
find a way to do this - we consider this important.
4. Register with multiple OAI service providers to improve identification
and access probability.
I welcome comments and suggestions about these plans and also other means of
improving deposition and visibility of the archive content.
There is another interesting issue. Some researchers in our institute (e.g.
physics and chemistry) ask the question - why the need for archiving in
institutional archive if they are already depositing in domain archives like
arxiv? How do we address this?
I wish you and your colleagues a Very Happy New Year.
Regards
Raja
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Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
Associate Chairman Tel: +91-80-3600271, 3601427
National Centre for Science Fax: +91-80-3601426, 3600683
Information (NCSI) E-Mail: raja_at_ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
Indian Institute of Science URL:
http://144.16.72.189/raja/
BANGALORE-560012 (India)
-------------------------------------------------------------
SciGate:
http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/
The IISc Science Information Portal
Received on Thu Jan 01 2004 - 04:57:24 GMT