Open Access and
Institutional Repositories
One-day Workshop-cum-Seminar
A Report
Venue: INSA, New Delhi
Date: 13 May 2004
Indian National Science Academy
Bahadurshah Zafar Marg, New Delhi
Overview
A colossal amount of scientific data is generated every year with scientists round the world publishing their work in scholarly journals of repute. It is estimated that more than a million scientific papers are published annually by over 20,000 journals. Annual subscriptions for some of these can go up to $20,000. These costs are daunting enough for well-endowed institutions in developed countries, not to mention those in developing countries.
It is for this reason that open access publishing has been gathering momentum in recent years. There is a global debate whether the outcome of projects supported by public funds in the form of data or information should be freely available to the general public or not always. Several scientists are of the view that since much scientific research is government funded, the public needs to be given open access to the results of these researches. On the contrary, the public ends up paying twice, first for the research and then for getting access to the results of the research.
The developed world is also occupied with the issues of open access. Several important international meetings have been organized in Europe and other countries. Several initiatives that call for open access like Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Public Library of Science (PloS) and the like are out there.
Similar initiatives are now being taken up in India also. There is a view gaining ground that in order to promote the visibility and accessibility to the work of Indian scientists on one hand and generate a national resource-base of R&D on the other, the open access movement needs to be strengthened at the national level. This view was reflected at a one-day workshop-cum-seminar on `Open Access and Institutional Repositories’ held in New Delhi on 13 May 2004. The workshop was organized by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) with a view to initiate the process of developing a cadre of open access experts in Indian higher educational institutions and government laboratories.
The workshop was attended by over 100 participants including users, creators, disseminators and archivers. The participants were from various institutions like CSIR, DBT, DST, IIT, ICMR, ICAR, DSIR, IIPA, TERI, TISSR Mumbai, Thapar Institute of Engineeing and Technology, NIC, NCERT, NIEPA, NII, Nuclear Science Centre, IIMC, ISI, ICRA, CSL, Delhi University, IGNOU, Jamia Milia Islamia, JNU, ICSSR, ICCR, IGNCA, NCAER, Parliament Library, UGC, DELNET, National Archives, National Museum, WHO - Health InterNetwork-Indian Project, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & IT and others.
The workshop was coordinated by Prof. Sudhir K. Sopory, ICGEB, New Delhi and Vice President, INSA and Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi, Informatics Centre, INSA, New Delhi.
Welcoming the speakers and participants, Prof. Sopory briefly outlined the purpose of the workshop which was to sensitize and further stimulate discussion within the research community, with the librarians and with the publishers on how to proceed as rapidly as possible on this very important issue of providing open access to primary scientific literature. He cited a few declarations in this regard such as the Budapest Declaration, the Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration to which INSA is also a signatory. Prof. Sopory also remarked that the Oxford University Press would also be soon announcing its policy on open access.
He expressed happiness that digitization activities and electronic publishing were picking up momentum in the country also, wherein several organizations like INSA, New Delhi, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and others had already put up their publications on the web for free and unrestricted access. It may be appropriate at this point of time to further boost up such activities by addressing various issues for creation of digital content and promoting e-publishing culture thereby strengthening the national resource base of e-prints being brought out by various organizations for which INSA as one of the leading scientific bodies took up the lead by organizing the workshop. Such an initiative would facilitate institutions and organizations plan and create institutional archives for open access and promote the cause of BOAI and other such initiatives to a great extent, he said.
Dr Mashelkar was of the view that if we agree that we have to create information-based open societies then the fundamental is that open access to scientific knowledge is an essential right that is to be respected. We must also look at open access to scientific knowledge as an expression of worldwide scientific solidarity. He emphasized that for sustainable development global inclusion rather than exclusion had to be the ultimate goal. For that inclusion again one must have access to scientific knowledge.
The confluence of escalating publishers’ prices, restricted library budgets and new electronic communication technologies are now creating the right environment in how we share the information, he said. Dr Mashelkar said that since the 1990s with the introduction of the Internet and online journals in the accessibility was greatly improved. And with licenses and consortia deals the downward trend in readers has now been reversed for the first time in many years. That is what CSIR has done by forming a consortium with Elsevier with more than 1000 journals being made available to scientists in its labs.
But the fundamental problem still exists, he said. The rate of increase in cost for electronic access continues to outstrip the increase in budgets for many libraries. So we risk falling foul of the same problem. The number of readers will again decline. He reeled out statistics to show that the problem was not confined to India but was a global one. The average cost of periodicals in North America rose by 226% between 1986-2000 whereas consumer price index rose by only 57%; library spending on journals rose by only 192%.
Making a case for institutional repositories, Dr Mashelkar said that these repositories should be cumulative and perpetual ensuring ongoing access to the material within them. They should also be built to common international standards to ensure that the material can be searched and retrieved. Benefits of these repositories will be numerous both to the individuals as well as the institutions. Most importantly they will ensure the long-term preservation of academic output and increase the visibility. But the only thing lacking would be peer review that serves the reader as a mark of quality. This is one function of traditional journals that institutional repositories do not fulfill. Dr Mashelkar suggested that Institutions may evolve their own mechanism for this. But there are fears that this could not be a substitute for an independent international peer review. He stressed that there is a need to address this issue. One solution could be for institutional repositories to ally themselves with peer-reviewed journals.
Moving on to open access, Dr Mashelkar said that widespread open access could make it easier to avoid duplication of research efforts, resulting time and fund waste, increase public accountability of science, make analysis of results easier, speed up understanding of outstanding scientific questions, enable building of databases and also take science out of its ivory tower.
Dr Mashelkar was of the view that while in the earlier traditional model charges for publication of scientific literature were passed on to readers, now benefits to the author grow with the number of readers who can access the published work. So charging for access is no longer economically necessary. Citing the case of midwives who earn a living without claiming ownership, Dr Mashelkar said that publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research, a midwives’ fee so to say, for their role in orchestrating peer review, editing and disseminating the results, but they should not be given the baby to own and control. So by paying the publisher for each article at the time of publication instead of allowing them to own the article and charge access the doors to online libraries could be open to everyone, he said.
In his view an open access system for scientific publishing will not entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors; the government and private institutions that finance the research already pay most of the cost of scientific publication indirectly. The same institutions could accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments to restricted access journals and instead pay for open access journals.
Different kinds of solutions were thought about to overcome these difficulties such as the library network wherein one library borrowed from the other what it did not have. Another was the establishment of institutes like the International Institute of Theoretical Physics in Trieste. It had a well-stocked library where many scientists from India went to spend time.
In the digital age things became easier because much information was available on the Internet. But now there were other issues. First was the issue of connectivity. Secondly, did the web contain the information that one wanted? Dr Ramamurthy said that the existence of computers and connectivity does not guarantee the availability of the content of the type that we want. Thirdly, since the content generation was a distributed activity, there was no standardization of data. There was also no quality assurance mechanism. When one looks at an article in Physical Review or Nature it is agreed that there would be a certain degree of authenticity. Unfortunately, in the web this is still to evolve in a big way. We still have to evolve some methods of review, some methods of quality assurance in the web. The fourth issue is of archiving. If the rate of generation of data proceeds at the present rate, and one doesn’t ask questions like for how long a particular data is relevant, then there would come a stage when we would be spending all the time sifting through the data, it would be like searching for a small needle in a haystack, said Dr Ramamurthy. So archiving needs to proceed in a logical manner otherwise we would drown in unwanted and useless information.
Then there were other issues that have still not been addressed like copyrights, royalties and all. Finally of course is the operational cost. Everything costs money and that includes putting the content in a place and making it available. The operational costs have to be such that it is not only affordable but also there should be some way of subsidizing it for those who cannot afford. Today the rich-poor divide has become the digital divide and needs to be addressed.
Dr Ramamurthy then went on to talk about the help provided to various agencies in this direction by the Department of Science and Technology. For instance, providing help to universities and institutions to improve their connectivity. Secondly, increasing the number of electronic subscriptions in libraries. Dr Ramamurthy also said that DST would like to put as many books as possible on the web, mostly in English but also other languages, including the Indian languages. They would like to make these accessible to as many institutions as possible. To start with all books would be put on the web on which copyright has ceased and then new authors would be approached for permission to put their work on the web.
Dr Ramamurthy also gave an insight into the Fund for Infrastructure Improvement program wherein the possibility of making available Web of Science to a large number of departments and universities funded by the DST has been explored.
Moving on to open access, Dr Ramamurthy said that generation of content was an issue. However, every scientist is a generator of content. So self-generation of contents for open access is an issue which needs to be addressed and mechanism needs to be worked out. Besides, costs have to be worked out which are reasonable, which are equitable.
Finally, Dr Ramamurthy ensured that DST would be willing to do whatever it can to provide help to the scientific community in improving access to information.
In the interactive session that followed, Dr Usha Mujoo Munshi referred to the evaluation sheet distributed to the participants where most of them responded positively to the statement that funding bodies like DST or CSIR or UGC should have central repositories. In this context, she put a question to the panel as to what should be the role of the regulatory bodies in facilitating development of digital repositories. Dr Ramamurthy responded that he would not call such departments regulatory rather they should be referred to as facilitating departments. He said to begin with at least information generated as a result of public funding should be put in a place that is accessible to everyone. It may be called a pilot-scale operation that should go beyond DST supported programs or UGC supported programs. He was hopeful that by the end of the workshop some such pilot programs would be ready, which could be implemented by DST.
Prof. Chan commented that his purpose of being at the workshop was to stress on the fact that the purpose of institutional repository is gathering primary scientific research output of scientists belonging to an institution. Right now this is being published in peer review publications and the role of the institution is to gather all these intellectual outputs in one place so that the institution has a way of taking stock and showcasing the research and making this research accessible to other scientists who want to use it. He said that there could be other secondary databases and publications that may also be put in the repository as part of the enrichment.
Dr Munshi suggested that if all funding agencies make it mandatory that all research taking place in an institution should be archived. This would be helpful for other researchers too who could get an idea of the results of particular experiments. Dr Ramamurthy responded that this could not be an exercise in isolation. If all institutions do this, of course there is no problem and they also are exchangeable, he said. But if only one institution does it, it doesn’t take you far and more importantly if you are already limited to only reviewed journal results they are already in the journals. So if you make journals accessible you have made this possible except that we can showcase the institutional strength by doing this. But Dr Ramamurthy emphasized that these are problems that go beyond one institution, one funding agency and even one country.
Dr. S Varadarajan , formerly, Secretary, DSIR and President, INSA wanted to know whether there was any move to ask scientists to pay a charge for getting their papers published. Secondly, he also had serious worries about the quality of Indian PhDs.
Dr Ramamurthy said that publication charges could be built into project support. But he said that this was an old controversy. Earlier also there were discussions like the one on Pramana. One of the arguments was that if we have our own journal, that is as good as any other journal, then we don’t pay publication charges to anybody else. But then, citing his own example, Dr Ramamurthy said that he published for ten years only in Pramana but was not considered for NAL academies because they said that there were no articles in foreign journals. Dr Ramamurthy said that value system also contributes to this and the value system is not dictated by the department but by the scientific community. He said that we must have a strategy that requires that the information be put on public domain, it is easily accessible and should be equitably distributed.
As for the number of PhDs, Dr Ramamurthy said that this will increase, it will never decrease. But the only problem is that the thesis is not in public domain because of which there is no quality assurance. If only it is in public domain then a bad thesis will reflect on the university, on the candidate, on the guide who has supported it and may be even on the examiners. I will be ten times more careful reading such a lousy thesis, said Dr Ramamurthy. So public domain knowledge helps in several ways, one of them is quality assurance in a different way, he said.
One of the participants said that in case of digital libraries content is a major aspect but equally important is the retrieval aspect. But there was still confusion among the various digital libraries about which software to use, why should we use, who will be accessed, how he will be accessed, whether he will be available for consultancy or not. He asked whether DST could take some steps so that some common interface could be developed, which could be used by libraries and could be modified and edited whenever required and also training could be provided. Dr Ramamurthy responded that he would not like to address the problem of technology for connectivity. But he was all for DST support if there was a specific technology that needed to be developed. But at the same time DST would not like to have ten solutions being developed at ten different places, he said. There must be a certain amount of uniformity. Whatever we develop should not only be useful in India but it should also be consistent with what is being done elsewhere because this is a global issue, it is not just an Indian problem.
Referring to open access one participant said that the question is to what extent we can make external information available. When we talk about institutional repositories we have to think in terms of what will be the achievements of Indian science because it is available in such a wide format through different kinds of publications. We must be able to identify that through some kind of peer review system and make repositories of those things only. However, Dr Ramamurthy responded that there was nothing like Indian science. Secondly, open access did not mean access to what Indian colleagues have done; it is access to the international scene because that is how one could become competitive. Besides, when we are demanding open access, we must also be ready to give open access. Therefore, open access should not be addressed as an Indian problem, he said. It should be addressed as a problem of the scientific community.
He informed about an interesting species-linking tool recently developed by a group wherein if one is reading a Bioline article, and the name of a species appears in the article, you click on the species, and it will simultaneously search 15-20 open source databases including a number of genome databases. This is an example of how if one makes open access possible people with creativity can create new value-added services by taking advantage of the basic data.
Prof. Chan informed that as part of a recent project they were trying to find out whether researchers in parts of the developing world tend to cite publications from their part of the world or from other regions. Preliminary studies in the medical area show that many medical practitioners tend to cite more of the research from their own area because they are more relevant to them. What this means is that before making available journals on open access relevance to the users needs to be factored in.
Prof. Chan informed that in Bioline journals are being put on the OAI compliant server. Even Google now searches through the OAI server. He cited the example of a researcher from India whose paper was hosted by Bioline and which is now the most cited article in that area; there was even a proposal to translate it into Russian. This was a wonderful example of what open access could do for your research impact simply by increasing the access, he said.
He also cited the example of Dr Sahu’s Journal of Post Graduate Medicine (JPGM), which has been made open access and multiple access. This has not only increased the visibility of papers published but there has also been a steady rise in the number of submission of articles. So even while maintaining the same rejection rate Dr Sahu has been able to improve the quality of the papers and thus the quality of the journal too. As a result the citation index is also increasing. Besides, now even people from outside India such as UK, USA, Canada and Australia are publishing in JPGM. So now this journal is no longer considered a local journal.
Prof. Chan also referred to the oft-repeated argument of people who say that if everything is made open access why would people bother subscribing. He remarked that a number of publishers have in fact found that open access has no effect on subscriptions. Physicists have been making their papers open access for 12 years now and none of the physics journals have gone out of business. Even other journals with open access still manage to maintain high levels of subscriptions.
Prof. Chan said that the more OAI compliant data is out there the more your research would become part of the international knowledgebase. Such journals would no longer be isolated and considered local, they would be in the international database and if one publishes there the chances of citations increase manifold.
However, Prof. Chan lamented that right now only about 5% journals that are peer reviewed are open access. The way to free the 95% is through institutional self-archiving. He said that they had been trying to talk to scientific bodies like the INSA that institutional self-archiving should be made a part of the conditions of funding so that researchers have a means to put their research online.
Publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, he said. To do so institutions need to set up repositories, even funding agencies need to set up repositories because they could be the central archive for the smaller institutions. He suggested that INSA could set up a repository where the output from smaller scientific agencies could be deposited, shared and made visible.
According to Prof. Chan, in open access copyright is not really an issue. Because scientists have been putting their papers online since the day the web was invented. Physicists have been putting their preprint and post-print archives online for 12 years at Cornell University. Already 83% of the journals, including all Elsevier journals, are allowing self-archiving by the authors in their institutions. That number has gone up from 56% last year to 83%, in a couple of years it could be 100%. According to Prof. Chan, the publishers have no legal or moral ground to prevent authors from putting their own article on their own institutional server.
He suggested that one could even put up the pre-print on the institutional archive. After peer review if there are changes an addendum showing all the changes could be added. One would be perfectly legal to do so. This strategy could help the institution fill up the archives quickly. Prof. Chan cited a survey by the Open Society Institute where a number of authors were asked whether they would self-archive and 69% of them said they would willingly self-archive if asked to do so by their employers.
The next speaker, Dr. ARD Prasad, DRTC, ISI, Bangalore, gave a practical demonstration on open source software for digital repositories. Dr. Prasad informed that they had developed testbeds for many digital library software like Greenstone Digital Library software, Fedora, DSpace, etc.
Dr Prasad dealt at length on the Dspace digital library software by means of which digital content in any format could be uploaded directly by authors. This is not the case with some of the digital library software like Greenstone where all the publications are put in one directory and a collection is built up.
Dr Prasad said that the possible content of a digital repository could be preprints, articles, post prints, technical reports, conference papers, thesis dissertations, data slides, statistical data, geospace data, any kind of data that can be digitized could be put into a digital repository. Even images, audio files, and video files could also be put into the digital library. But the only thing one should be careful about is that one should not use proprietary data. For instance, if someone uploads a document in MSWord, then the person accessing it would not be able to view the data if MSWord is not available at his end. Therefore, instead of proprietary standards it is better to put the document in an open standard.
Dr Prasad informed that the main model of a Dspace digital library was creating communities, which could be disciplines, departments, etc. Under each community collections are created. For example, if the digital library has history as a community, under that there could be publications, Power Point presentation, manuscripts or thesis on history as different collections. Then the actual items are the digital objects. So each item can have any number of files. For example, if it is a thesis having ten chapters, each chapter is a separate file.
One of the greatest advantages of this particular software is that it keeps track of the person who uploaded the publication. Besides, since it has a modular architecture and it is open source software, one can change the software or modify it to suit one’s needs or add additional features.
In this context, Dr Prasad referred to an interesting concept called `open url’, which has been developed by Tim Berners Lee, the author of WWW who also introduced the concept of semantic web to make the web more meaningful. Often at the end of documents there are references. One way is to note down the reference, search in Google and get the documents. But if one has an SFX server and the ground work for open URL, one can integrate the digital library and `open URL server in such a way that, if say of the 30 references you have subscriptions to ten of those journals, then if you press directly on those references you are taken to the journal site and the document is opened. Dr Prasad informed that open URL is also going to play a big role in the near future and Dspace allows integration of open URL servers with the digital library software.
At the end of his lecture, to a query regarding proprietary standards, Dr Prasad clarified that in proprietary standards even if one wants to develop software for a proprietary standard one has to pay royalty to the company. So that is why people today advocate the use of open standards such as JPEG and XML. If one uses proprietary software for the digital library and if in the future Adobe or Microsoft closes down then though you may have the file you may not be able to read the data. So digital preservation using the right format is very important. The best is to put everything in plain text. Dr Prasad stressed on the need to have interoperability across time. He said the basic principle of open standards is availability for all to read and implement. The customer should not be locked to any one particular vendor or group.
Dr Prasad was also strongly against any discrimination against any country. For example, about two years back IE browser and Netscape browser used to say that only US users can use 128-encryption mode.
However, although Dr Prasad called himself a staunch believer in open access, sometimes when the data is highly classified the access has to be restricted. He cited the examples of Vikram Sarabhai Space Research Centre and Satyam Computers, which have highly classified data. Through Dspace system one could also implement a lot of restricted access as well.
Dr Prasad was of the view that some of the copyright laws are unjustified, they hamper the open access movement because they are completely biased towards the publishing industry, not the authors or the users. Today publishers are offering consortia because they also realize that unless they encourage that they cannot get the old customers back into their fold.
Further, Dr Prasad wanted institutes and learned bodies to publish journals and also encourage researchers to publish in open access. He said that he was all for a knowledge society but this could be possible only if, just like universal education, there was universal access to scientific information.
Dr Ranjan Dwivedi who chaired the session, in his roundup of Dr Prasad’s lecture, raised a few important issues that he felt needed to be addressed in light of open access. When authors upload information, they do so taking into account their perception, but from the point of view of users is there an assessment of
what is needed for the user. Whatever is uploaded should respond to the user’s needs. Another issue is that of access. You develop different archives but where is the access? How many medical colleges are there where the libraries have a lab where students can access information? How much emphasis there is currently to train people in searching and using information?
Panel Discussion
Towards the end of the workshop, a panel discussion was organized. The panelists were users, creators, disseminators, regulators who dwelt on various issues of open access and development of institutional repositories.
Prof. H.P. Dikshit, Vice-Chancellor, IGNOU, who moderated and initiated the panel discussion, in his opening remarks said there is a great variation in the level of access between the scientists in premier institutes and those who are scattered around. Some of our excellent institutes are situated in less developed and less accessible places like the Centre for Advanced Studies and Department of Special Assistance. The connectivity there is very poor.
Prof. Dikshit pointed out another area of concern where institutes located close to one another were subscribing to the same journals in print. He gave the example of IIT, Chennai, Anna University, and MatScience, Madras, all in the neighbourhood of half a kilometer. He asked the panelists to focus on solutions to such issues during the discussions.
The first panelist Dr. Om Vikas, Senior Director, Department of Information Technology, MC&IT highlighted issues concerning developing digital repositories in India and possible ways to address these issues at the national level. Dr Vikas touched upon the fact that knowledge has to be made available keeping in mind the interests of mankind. But he also lamented the fact that the digital divide between the developed countries and the developing countries was vast because of low affordability in the developing countries. Focus there is access to information not sharing of information whereas here we are talking about digital unite, sharing the knowledge. He also said that when we talk of scientific information it is not necessary that it should be in English, it could be in local languages also.
Dr Om Vikas highlighted some of the digital library initiatives in US and UK such as the University to Library program at Carnegie-Mellon University in which India is also participating. In Europe five working groups have been formed to explore issues like interoperability, metadata, IPR, resource index, and multilingual information access, which are going to be of relevance to our country. In Asia, especially in Taiwan, China, New Zealand, and India a number of initiatives have been taken, such as digital museum and historical documents digitization. He talked about a program initiated by his Department called the `Digital Library of India’ under which 20 digital library scanning centers have been supported. These centers facilitate digitization of data and also surfing, accessing, and printing of documents of choice. Another experiment was the Mobile Digital Library, which essentially involved taking the content to the remote villages.
Dr Vikas outlined some of the issues that need to be taken into account while digitizing multilingual access and navigation, translation assistance, quality assurance, privacy, authenticity and copyright issues. He suggested that the copyright period which is 60 years should be reduced to 25 years. Then there is also a need to debate models like the author-charge model. A digital library act is also necessary in this context.
Much work needs to be done in multilingual access in the Indian context, said Dr Vikas, since we now have 22 constitutionally recognized languages. He referred to a program called the Technology Development of Indian Languages, wherein different centers have been set up for the promotion of content creation. Major achievements include support systems for online translation from English to Hindi. OCRs are also available for several languages and also continuous speech recognition.
This was followed by a presentation by Shri Pawan Agarwal, Financial Adviser, UGC who talked about the role of regulatory bodies in facilitating development of digital repositories. He said that people have now started talking about knowledge as a currency in the new economy. But it should be realized that if we put economic value to knowledge it basically slows down the process of innovation and knowledge exchange. The barriers that it creates act against the interests of the less developed countries.
So the role of regulatory bodies in facilitating development of digital repositories is to create a balance. Because if we do not have an IPR regime in place then researchers and scientists will not have the incentive to innovate. The balance has to be created by putting an IPR regime in place and also by equitable sharing of knowledge. It is for this reason, he informed, that UGC Infonet and Indest have been initiated to ensure that the poorly resourced nations also get the benefit of scholarly publishing.
He talked about the Higher Education Information Project of the UGC which involves using IT for management and coordination of the heterogeneous group of organizations related to higher education. He said there was a need to put together an information system wherein all such organizations work together to achieve larger national objectives. And one of the objectives is also creating research-based repositories for use by researchers.
Mr Agarwal was keen that whatever is published in India reaches a larger academic research community. To achieve this he informed that thought is being given to putting together a regulatory framework wherein it could be made obligatory for educational institutions to submit to a central repository some metadata of dissertations produced there. Over a period of time this could be made more comprehensive. He said that universities were being encouraged to promote electronic submission of doctoral thesis in universities. They were also being advised and assisted in creating local repositories, where if a standard format is used over a period of time, they could be combined and a central repository be created.
Prof. Leslie Chan gave a brief reference to OAI and its relations with commercial publishing. OAI, the Open Archive Initiative is a metadata exchange protocol for harvesting data and minimum standard for putting in metadata. OAI allows databases to exchange information about what is there in the databases. It is a very important interoperability standard as more archives and more digital library services are being created. As more people adopt the OAI compliant protocol that means more and more data will be interoperable.
However, Prof. Chan asserted that OAI is not synonymous with open access. You could be a commercial provider who wants to make data available and be exposed to OAI services but your full text could be behind a pay subscription. You could expose the metadata and be harvested by OAI services. But it is not by itself mandatory that because you use OAI you have to be open access. He said that many major commercial publishers have made their databases OAI compliant. He also informed that Elsevier was developing a very powerful search engine called Scorpus, which is totally OAI compliant.
Prof. Chan enumerated several advantages of making data available. He said that when you set up an institutional repository you become a provider. Then there are many people creating different types of tools like citation linking, one could be involved in that too. He said that unless databases are open these innovative services cannot be developed. Prof. Chan said that some people ask why should they give their data for commercial services to make money from. But this is nothing new, he said. Scientists have been giving articles to publishers and they have been making money by selling their journals to libraries. Besides, there is nothing wrong in people earning from existing resources. Just like free open software we hope that as more free scientific information is made available it could lead to development of other alternative services to now existing commercial publishers. We are not against business, Prof. Chan said, we want responsible businesses who are responsive to the needs of the scientists.
This was followed by a brief insight into the Indian National Digital Library on Engineering, Science and Technology (Indest) by Dr Jagdish Arora. He informed that there are many beneficiary organizations and that any educational institution can join. ISRO also might be joining soon. The subscription cost comes from the government and there are about 4,000 journals from about 20 publishers.
Dr Arora said that the role of Indest would be to act as a central coordination agency for open source initiatives, providing a coordination structure for cooperation of institutions, organizational concepts for funding local or regional initiatives, define special interest in working groups, organize workshops for participating institutions, and cooperate with other Indian initiatives. One benefit that Dr Arora perceived would be that institutions will finally have a commitment to develop their own archives. It could also serve as a research tool for those who are analyzing the output of research done at various institutes.
Dr Usha Mujoo Munshi presented the various initiatives taken by INSA in generating repositories. She said that the main role of INSA is to print or publish technical and scientific literature. A couple of years ago it had been deliberated how a body like the INSA could create a pool of resources and set the ball rolling for other institutions to follow. There was an awareness of the fact that Indian content lacked visibility and that digitization would improve visibility by providing global access. This would not only project national or local resource base on the global platform but also preserve the valuable resources for posterity.
INSA has since worked with single-minded devotion in this direction. It is also a signatory to the Berlin Declaration. It has intensified digital archive activities by initiating projects for scholarly science journals, fellowship records and other INSA publications. The aim is to improve the process of scientific communications by applying new technologies, provide support for the concept of free access to scientific knowledge and build a national resource base.
Dr Munshi informed that INSA took the initiative of publishing its journals online for global access. To convert all its journals right from Volume I onwards from print to digital, the entire volumes of contents have since been digitized and
made available online for free and unrestricted access. The IT infrastructure that is servers and the entire campus wide networking for communication of the data has also been put in place simultaneously. Training programs have been organized at IAS, Bangalore and SERC, Bangalore. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research under its erstwhile NISSAT program supported the project for digitizing and web hosting of INSA journals.
Several other issues related to conversion of print to digital were also deliberated upon, such as organization of the data, what software to use, what retrievable interface should be there, how to go for the retro conversion and what should be the expected output-the deliverables. Although it was a two-year project, INSA completed it in much ahead of the scheduled target time.
Dr Munshi then went on to give a demonstration of the project and gave an insight into its salient features. She informed that INSA was pursuing a broader goal of ensuring global access and was also trying to reach out to other societies.
A feedback analysis about the expectations and requirements of the participants based on two evaluation forms was also presented by Dr Usha Mujoo Munshi. While one pertained to the utility of such workshops or seminars, the other dealt with specific inputs for implementation of open access and institutional repositories.
Based on inputs from participants, the following conclusions could be drawn:
Towards the end of the panel discussion there was a very interactive question-answer session where several suggestions were also given by participants. Among the first such suggestion was the creation of web tutorials on the development of digital institutional repositories which could be used as a forum where people could post their problems too. It could also include deliberations of workshops such as the present. Dr Chan agreed that the suggestion was indeed a good one. But he informed that some detailed material is already out there and that they were in discussion with a funding agency to fund 10 projects. Any organization could apply for this money and what they get is a free server, totally installed software and one year of free support in exchange for their commitment to fill the repository with content.
Dr Prasad was of the view that many of the lessons developed by the faculty in the UGC classroom-teaching program may be made available to the digital libraries. To which Mr Pawan Agarwal responded that already an initiative had been taken in the ministry focusing on curriculum for undergraduate engineering programs. IITs and IISc, Bangalore had been asked to put together their quality faculty for this job. But he cautioned that developing learning material, which is web-based, is not an easy task and is too costly as well.
Dr Dikshit concurred with Mr Agarwal saying that research had shown that it was easy to do this for learners, but for extended courseware lot of costs are involved. Besides, if just the software is given without any print material then that does not really help. He informed that to develop software IGNOU was setting up an Inter University consortium where agencies are helped to develop their own CD. This way the costs get shared.
To a question by Prof. Chan regarding IGNOU’s policy of asking the faculty to self archive their publications, Dr Dikshit replied that archives were already there. But course material is not open, it costs a lot, it is sold abroad and in India, he said. However, he informed that IGNOU had put two journals on web for free access.
Mr Pawan Agarwal was of the view that we need to start building a consensus on the issue of open access, follow it up with an advisory and then move on to making it mandatory. But then merely having a policy is not enough, the university also needs to have infrastructure. Mr Agarwal informed that UGC was also focusing on funding ICT infrastructure.