Open Access and Institutional Repositories complement each other. They are carefully built databases that open the gates of knowledge for academics, researchers and students....Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR) have gained prominence in this sphere since 2004. It is estimated that in the next 10 years almost all the academic institutions are likely to be running an IR. Library and Information Science professionals have often requested MALA [Madras Library Association] to conduct a training programme to help build an IR.
The Computer Society of India (CSI) recently came forward to collaborate in this endeavour, drawing upon the skills of software professionals engaged in similar activities. MALA and CSI took the process forward with a three-day workshop on 'Open Access and IR' to familiarise, train and equip professionals, using the Dspace platform....OA and IR are not synonyms, though the underlying philosophies are common. An IR is a set of services that an institution offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It emphasises organisational commitment to the stewardship of digital materials, including long-term preservation, organisation, access and distribution. IR also represents e-prints archives, as digital archives of the research output created by faculty, scholars and students and make it accessible to end-users on the Internet....By facilitating interoperability, the Open Archives movement has accelerated the deconstruction of the traditional scholarly publishing model and increased the potential for institutional repositories....Significantly, [DSpace] also seeks to build a repository system that can support a federation of institutional repositories. In other words, DSpace is a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organisation's research data. To support this goal, the DSpace project is exploring related issues including access control, rights management, versioning, retrieval, faculty receptivity, community feedback and flexible publishing capabilities....M.G. Sreekumar, Librarian, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, and his team, supported by K.T. Anuradha of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, guided the [Madras] workshop. The beneficiaries were the 45 principal stakeholders of IR, including librarians, information, computer and software professionals from colleges, universities, R and D laboratories, CSIR units, corporate sector, hospitals such as Apollo and Sankara Nethralaya, Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University, teaching faculty in the disciplines, business firms, publishing sector and the media. The participants got an overview of the role of subject descriptors (metadata) in describing digital objects for the IRs. The Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard, recommended by the WWW Consortium (W3C) for describing web objects and metadata standards such as `METS' and `MODS' were explained. Participants included Prof. Nirmala Prasad, principal, MOP Vaishnav College, H.R. Mohan, chairman, Division VIII, and Chennai Chapter, CSI, Prof. S. Narayanan, Dean, Academic and Chair-Library Committee, IIT-Madras, Prof. S. Parthasarathy, senior member, MALA, and R. Seshadri and R. Samyuktha, vice-presidents, MALA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/09/2006 10:04:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
