Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, March 25, 2007

OA repositories in India

Fayaz Ahmed and Rafiq Rather, Open Access Digital Repositories: An Indian Scenario, KnowGenesis: International Journal for Technical Communication, 2, 1 (2007).  The article is free to read but only for registered users, and registration requires the user to agree to email alerts for new issues.  Here's a free online copy of the abstract for unregistered users:

Open access digital repositories give barrier-free access to literature for study and research to users worldwide. They solve the pricing and permission crises for scholarly materials. This paper deals with open access digital repositories in India. The results of the study reveal that the repositories contain both published and unpublished documents, like seminar proceedings, conference papers, theses, dissertations, research reports, books, and so on. The results also point out that open access digital repositories in India are mostly subject specific and commonly use open source information repository software like DSpace, Greenstone Digital Library Software, and GNU EPrints. It is observed that generally the open access digital repositories use OAI-PMH (protocol for metadata harvesting), so that they can be accessed using search tools such as Web search engines, whereas a few don't use it but provide direct access to their documents through their websites.