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<font size=3>[Forwarding from Subbiah Arunachalam. --Peter
Suber.]<br><br>
<br>
<b>PRESS RELEASE<br><br>
MKU to go for Open Access Mandate <br><br>
</b>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
(<a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/">www.openaccessweek.org</a>).
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. <br><br>
Open Access Repositories are part of the Open Access movement which
puts<br>
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.<br><br>
<b>What is Open Access Archive or Repository?<br><br>
</b>Peter Suber, a long time advocate of Open Access, has written that
extensively on Open Access
(<a href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm">
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm</a>) 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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>At MKU<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
<b>At Madurai Kamaraj University, an Open Access Repository
(<a href="http://eprints.bicmku.in/">http://eprints.bicmku.in</a> ) 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.<br><br>
As indicated by the Vice-Chancellor of MKU, the University plans to go
for a green open access policy
(<a href="http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/">
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/</a>). 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. </b>
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