Dear Stevan and friends:
NIT-R will never overtake IISc for the simple resaon
it is essentially an undergraduate engineering college
with a small Masters and doctoral programme!
IISc is a behomoth with mostly doctoral programmes in
a variety of science and engineering fields with a
history of 75 years.
Mr Muthu Madhan, the NIT-R librarian, was an assistant
librarian at MSSRF till a few years ago, and he
attended one of the two three-day workshops on OA
(with emphasis on EPrints) conducted by Leslie Carr,
Leslie Chan, D K Sahu and TB Rajashekar. He was one of
the first to set up an archive. We must also recognise
the director of NIT-R who could immediately see the
value of OA and persuaded his faculty to agree to a
policy of mandating OA for faculty and student
research publications.
Best wishes.
Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]
--- Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:
> 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/
>
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Received on Wed Sep 13 2006 - 10:15:24 BST