Here is a brief and useful report on OA progress in India:
Can Open Access offer science where no one is left behind?
http://blog.apc.org/en/index.shtml?x=5039925
Comments on the report:
I suspect that the reason my much-admired friend Subbiah Arunachalam "praises the NIT-R
(National Institute of Technology) at Rourkela for having the 'best open archive' "
http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/
is that NIT-R is the only Indian archive (and one of only 7 research institution archive and 5
research funders worldwide) to have mandated OA self-archiving as a matter of official policy:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
This mandate will no doubt soon increase NIT's self-archiving rate. But at the moment, it must
be said that NIT-R is still only 9th among India's 22 OA Archives. So India's 'best open
archive' in terms of current size (though not current policy!) is still Indian Institute of
Science (IIS), with over 5000 self-archived articles (compared to NIT-R's < 500), mostly thanks
to the IIS's late librarian and ardent OA advocate, TB Rajeshekar.
http://archives.eprints.org/?country=in&version=&type=&order=recordcount&submit=Filter
NIT-R will no doubt overtake IIS (unless IIS too adopts a mandate!); and of course the right way
to compare archives is in terms of the proportion of their own annual research article output
that they contain, rather than in terms of their absolute number of articles.
Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Received on Wed Sep 13 2006 - 01:01:31 BST