Open access: The sorry state of Indian repositories - The Hindu
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-03
Summary:
"India may not have a national open access policy in place, but the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), The Department of Science & Technology (DST), the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), The University Grants Commission (UGC) have open access policies that clearly mandate researchers to deposit their papers in institutional repositories. National institutes such as the IITs and IISc, too, have repositories and similar mandates.
Yet, of the 69 Indian repositories listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) and Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), only 12 added 'at least one item during a month' during the period July 2016 to June 2016. Seventeen repositories did not add even a single item during the course of the year of study, while 40 were 'irregular' in adding items to the repositories, says a correspondence published in Current Science.
Worse, some of them are not repositories in the strict sense — they do not host research papers, pre-prints or post-prints. Instead, they have theses, dissertations, book chapters, patents, annual reports, technical reports and research proposals to name a few."