Institutional Repositories : A Perspective for the Indian Universities

Abstract

The world is witnessing a sea change in the area of scholarly communication. Perhaps the control over scholarly communication has started a gradual shifting from commercial publishers to academic organizations and many author initiatives in the area of Open Access (OA). Open Access is perhaps opening up the major barriers that higher education institutes and libraries face specially when it comes to escalating journal prices and shrinking budgets. Institutional Repositories (IRs) are one of the two most powerful tool to empower and strengthen open access movement. Universities and other academic institutions of the developed countries are already reaping the rich benefits of institutional repositories. The technology is free, the software is available free of cost and the universities are also having the necessary infrastructure for implementing IRs at their premises. The only required link which is missing is the awareness and willingness. To make IRs a success awareness is also needed regarding advantages of self-archiving and publishers’ policies regarding self-archiving. It’s high time that Indian universities should take a decision and a strong commitment to develop IRs and convince the faculty members and research scholars to deposit papers in the digital archive. IRs may also contain learning objects in digital formats thus facilitating IT enabled pedagogy in the Indian universities.