[BOAI] OA at Madurai Kamaraj University on the anvil

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Subbiah Arunachalam.  --Peter Suber.]


PRESS RELEASE

MKU to go for Open Access Mandate

Open access repository for public funded research has been increasingly 
popular to the extent that 19th Oct 2009 -  23rd Oct 2009 was celebrated 
world over as Open Access Week 
(<http://www.openaccessweek.org/>www.openaccessweek.org). The OA week 
creates a key opportunity for the higher education community and the 
general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access 
and use of content.

Open Access Repositories are part of the Open Access movement which puts
peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet, making 
it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing 
restrictions. This removes the barriers to serious research. Moreover, the 
benefits of publicly funded research are made available to the larger 
community and do not become the property of publishing companies.

What is Open Access Archive or Repository?

Peter Suber, a long time advocate of Open Access, has written that 
extensively on Open Access 
(<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm) 
OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make 
their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed 
preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to 
institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such 
as physics and economics. Authors may archive their preprints without 
anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors 
to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata 
harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are 
interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which 
archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now 
open-source software, such as e-prints, dspace etc for building and 
maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it.

It has been established that open access repositories increased the 
visibility of the research, the scientist and the institution. Studies have 
shown that mandatory policies are only effective in making researchers OA 
compliant. Many leading Universities such as MIT, research funding agencies 
such as NIH have gone in for the open access mandatory policy. The ideal 
gold open access where publishing houses come forward to make their 
contents OA is a long way off.

At MKU

Open Access Repositories have been gaining ground in India. Prof. Subbiah 
Arunachalam, a well known Information scientist, has been advocating Open 
Access Repositories for a long time. Institutions such as the Indian 
Institute of Science, Bangalore,  National Institute of Technology, 
Rourkela have opened open access repositories.

At Madurai Kamaraj University, an Open Access Repository 
(<http://eprints.bicmku.in/>http://eprints.bicmku.in ) using E-prints has 
been initiated at a School level and will be expanded to the whole 
University as part of its open access initiatives.

As indicated by the Vice-Chancellor of MKU, the University plans to go for 
a green open access policy 
(<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/>http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/). 
This will mandate its faculty to deposit their publicly funded research 
publications including student thesis, dissertations, faculty seminar 
presentations, journal publications into the open access repository.
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