Institutional Repositories; Open Access Digital Repositories; Academic Institutional Repositories; DSpace; E-Print- ArchiveRecent development in information and communication and web technologies has changed the landscape of information handling activities. These technologies provide a simple, web-based mechanism for researchers to deposit (‘self-archive’) and access their research publications via digital repositories.  In this paper we describe the genesis, objective, methodology, contents, advantages, software usages, growth and development of institutional repositories in India

Jain, Sanjeev Kumar

Shrivastava, Anurag

English

Librarians' Digital Library

1 
 
Academic Institutional Repositories in India: Global Visibility for 
an Institution's Scholarly Communication 
 
Sanjeev Kumar Jain* and Anurag Shrivastava** 
 
 
*LIBRARY ASSISTANT,  
National Institute of Fashion Technology, Rae Bareli (U.P.)  
Email:sanjeevmlis@gmail.com 
** RESEARCH SCHOLAR,  
Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow (U.P.)  
Email: anuragmlis@gmail.com 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
 
Recent development in information and communication and web technologies has changed 
the landscape of information handling activities. These technologies provide a simple, web-
based mechanism for researchers to deposit (‘self-archive’) and access their research 
publications via digital repositories.  In this paper we describe the genesis, objective, 
methodology, contents, advantages, software usages, growth and development of 
institutional repositories in India. 
 
Keywords:  Institutional Repositories; Open Access Digital Repositories Academic 
Institutional Repositories; DSpace; E-Print- Achieve 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2 
 
INTRODUCTION 
Development in information and communication and web technologies has changes the way of information 
production, acquisition and its dissemination. Information revolution and ever increasing demand for exact and 
consolidated information and old method followed by the libraries are being replaced by such new technologies 
these days. These technologies revolutionize the library service system by digital information collection, 
repackaging and online distribution. It is not only simply complementing the need of a conventional library service 
system, rather it has opened a most convenient, rational and a democratic platform for the academicians to 
contribute and share their intellectual research output through an institutional repository among the peers within 
the host organization and the outside without having any kind of hassle from the publishing houses.   
ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES: GENESIS 
Disappointment and inability created by the closed access to scholarly literature and the anomalies in journal 
publishing paradigm in the areas of pricing, access, copyright and host of other monopolies paved the way for 
open access initiatives. The core essence of open access initiatives is to “make research articles in all academic 
fields freely available on the internet” notable among these initiatives are the working models of open access 
journals and institutional repositories. These initiatives were directed to rescue the obliterated research world 
with the sole aim to provide a complimentary role by reforming the current scholarly communication impasse and 
to re-assert control over scholarship by the academia and to provide increased and uniform visibility of its 
researchers. While the open access journal models were experimented in the publisher and organizational level, 
institutional repositories were experimented by the educational institutions and more notably the universities. 
Universities with its numerous intellectual activities in its scientific and scholarly arena and the most affected party 
in the closed and profit oriented publishing scenario grabbed this opportunity to build the repositories and 
eventually succeeded in its endeavor. With the mandate to bring together and preserve the intellectual output of 
individual institutions many universities came forward to experiment this new flame.  In these experiments, unlike 
the traditional expectations of resistance from the publishing monopolies, the strong resistance came from within 
the institution’s faculties, mainly because of its inexperience with the open archiving and open access concepts 
and the further copyright commitments with the publishers. While the academia feared over the uncertainty of 
intellectual theft, the administrators feared the exposure of their institution’s intellectual scarcity. With its initial 
resistance from the conservatives, slowly the academia learnt the benefits of Open Access and many came forward 
to publish their works in their institution’s servers. This marked the significant success of the Institutional 
Repository model of scholarly publishing towards creating a world of free and open access scholarly society 
[1]
.  
 
CHANGING SCENARIO OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION 
3 
 
There are three models in scholarly communication which the world has generally accepted, viz., i) the traditional 
paper based journal publishing process which has a track record of over 300 years ii) E-publishing on commercial 
basis and iii) the Open Access mode of publishing. The developments in IT and internet have contributed 
considerably to shrink the supply chain of information and it is indeed a welcome change. For the information 
industry, the supply chain extends from the source of information to the point of usage. The traditional journals in 
paper format took 36-52 weeks for journals to publish. Surprisingly enough, in this total cycle time of 1 year the 
value addition (generation, review, correction and printing) takes place in not more than 2-3 weeks, indicating a 
huge wastage of time and money contributed mostly by non-value adding links. In this context, the advent of the 
E-publishing has really been a boost to the scholarly publishing domain, bringing down the publishing time frame 
to a remarkable 3-4 weeks. A noticeable departure from the traditional systems here is that the printing is delinked 
from the publishing process. It is important to note here that the much appreciated and respected scholarly value 
systems are not compromised even by a single degree in relation to quality checks in the new process. In fact it 
improves and strengthens them with its inherent advantages of being online with respect to processes and 
procedures. The third category is the growing sets of open access publishing and scholarly archive initiatives, which 
are the offshoots of the novel open access movement, catching up globally. Authors are now able to publish their 
findings at an astoundingly fast pace such as 10-15 minutes or even at a lesser time 
[2]
. The relative features and 
merits of the three systems are illustrated in the following figure (Fig. 1) 
 
 
  
       Traditional Model 
 (52 Weeks) 
 Upcoming Model 
(3-4 Weeks) 
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 1- Traditional and Upcoming Scholarly Communication Model 
 
 
 
Authors 
Readers 
Editors Peer review 
process 
Primary 
Publishers 
Library Distributors Secondary 
Publishers 
 
E-Publishing 
 E-print -
Achieve 
4 
 
ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES 
Academic institutional repositories consist of formal organized collection of digital contents to provide services to 
faculty, researchers and administrators who want to archive research, historic and creative materials. The open 
access and open archives movement, the need for changes in scholarly communication to remove barriers to 
access and the increasing awareness that universities and research institutions are losing valuable digital and print 
materials have begun driving the establishment of institutional repositories. While the main purposes of academic 
institutional repositories are to bring together and preserve the intellectual output of laboratory, department, 
university or other entity, the incentives and commitments to change the process of scholarly communication have 
also begun serving as strong motivators. Computers have been ubiquitous on campuses since the late 1980s. 
Students and faculty are comfortable with the power of online communication. Faculty teachers and researchers 
want to archive their own materials and have them available on personal or institutional web sites, these articles 
along with the development of the internet and more powerful search engines, have enabled people to think in 
practical terms about the establishment of central facilities for storing, archiving, preserving and making scholarly 
and artistic materials available. Repositories may be limited to one field, one department, one institution or a 
consortium of several institutions. Collaboration through a consortium reduces costs for each member through 
resource sharing while expanding access to digital materials 
[3]
. For universities repositories are marketing tools 
communicating capabilities and quality by showcasing faculty and student research, public service projects and 
other activities and collections.  
OBJECTIVES:  
The four main objectives for having an academic institutional repository are: 
1. To create global visibility for an institution's scholarship; 
2. To collect content in a single location; 
3. To provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it; 
4. To store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost 
("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports). 
METHODOLOGY: 
Academic institutional repositories in India have been selected from the secondary sources, metadata harvesting 
services, directories etc. The data related to the academic institutional repositories have been collected from their 
respective institutions’ websites and other secondary sources. Case study method is also followed for this study. 
These data is analyzed based on certain parameters, such as number of documents, software used, growth of 
collection etc.  
5 
 
CONTENTS OF AN ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY 
Repositories may include a variety of information produced by faculty, researchers and administrators of the 
institution like preprints of articles or research reports submitted for publication. The text of journal articles 
accepted for publication technical reports, white papers, research data, theses, dissertations, work in progress, 
important print and image collections, teaching and learning materials and materials documenting the history of 
the institution 
[4]
. An institutional repository may contain work of which copyright is owned by the author or 
institution or for which permission has been obtained to include the work in the repository. 
ADVANTAGES:  
Academic institutional repositories have many benefits such as; 
 
1. Organizational support for faculty seeking innovative approaches to research dissemination. 
2. Demonstrate the quality, and scientific, social and economic relevance of an institution's research. 
3. Increase the institution’s visibility, status and public value.  
4. Improved research knowledge management. 
 
SOFTWARE FOR ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY 
 
There are many world renowned open source software used to create repositories are EPrints, DSpace, FEDORA, 
CDSware etc. They are issued either under GNU public license or the BSD license and can be downloaded from 
their own sites or open source software directories such as SourceForge. Each of the software has a host of 
features, unique facilities and excellent capabilities, which the users could explore and experiment. 
ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES IN INDIA:  GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT 
The growth of records in Indian archives since inception is represented in the following graph taken from the 
Registry of Open Archives Repositories at the University of Southampton courtesy of Tim Brody. Only those 
archives whose data are harvestable by Celestial are included. Celestial harvests metadata from repositories 
supporting the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The number of metadata 
records may not reflect the number of full-text publicly accessible documents. (Date accessed on; January 02, 
2008).  
6 
 
 
Fig 2 Growth & Development of Repositories in India 
 
Conclusion:  
Previous research shows that repository facilitates more timely and open access to research and scholarship and 
they maximized the potential research impact of achieved publications.   It is also playing an important role in 
preservation and making accessible, academic digital object, datasets and analytical tools that exist outside 
traditional scholarly communication system. Open access to Indian research is still in its infancy. A few of India’s 
premier institutions, particularly in the science and technology area are providing open access to their research 
publications. In these repositories access to retrospective material appears to be substantial both in terms of 
research articles and theses with less access to preprints and current publications.  
 
[1] Paul, John and K, Abdul. “Institutional Repositories: Time for African universities to consolidate 
the digital divide”. http://www.ascleiden.nl/Pdf/elecpublconfanbu.pdf; (accessed  December 
20, 2007) 

[2] Sreekumar, M.G. et al. “Institutional repositories for knowledge management in academic and 
research institutions.” (Paper Presented in International Conference on Semantic Web and 
Digital Libraries, Bangalore, India, Feb 21-23, 2007) 
 
[3] Drake, Miriam A. 2004. “Institutional Repositories: Hidden Treasures”. Searcher 12(5). 
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may04/drake.shtml.(accessed  December 20, 2007). 
7 
 
[4] Hirwade, Mangla and Hirwade, Anil. “Institutional repositories: challenges and opportunities 
for LIS professionals in digital age.” Library Herald 44 (2006):146-157 
[5] Registry of Open Access Repositories. http://trac.eprints.org/projects/iar/wiki/Missing 
(accessed  January 02 2008) 
 
Annexure-I 
 
SELECTED ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES IN INDIA 
 
Sl. 
No. 
Repositories Host Institution URL Types of 
Documents 
No of Items 
as on 
01.01.2008 
Subjects Coverage Software 
used 
1 Catalysis Database National Centre 
for Catalysis 
Research, Chennai 
http://203.199.21
3.48/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses 
1061 Chemistry & 
Chemical 
Technology 
GNU-EPrints 
2 DEC-Repository Delhi College of 
Engineering, Delhi 
http://202.141.12
.109/dspace 
Publications; 
Unpublished; 
Learning Objects 
326 Science General; 
Technology General 
Dspace 
3 Digital Library  Indian Statistical 
Institute, 
Bangalore  
http://library.isiba
ng.ac.in:8080/dsp
ace/ 
Publications 191 Mathematics and 
Statistics 
Dspace 
4 Digital Repository 
Service 
National Institute 
of Oceanography, 
Goa 
http://drs.nio.org
/drs/index.jsp 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses 
637 Science General; 
Arts and 
Humanities; 
Technology General 
DSpace 
5 DSpace@ ICFAI 
Business School 
ICFAI, Hyderabad http://202.131.96
.59:8080/dspace/ 
Published, 
Conference 
Papers,Cases 
studies 
197 Mathematics ; 
Business and 
Economics; LIS; 
Management  
Dspace 
 
 
 
 
6 Dspace @IIMK 
 
IIM, Kozhikode http://dspace.iim
k.ac.in/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses; 
Unpublished 
411 Business and 
Economics 
Dspace 
 
 
 
 
7 Dspace @ NCL National Chemical 
Laboratory, Pune 
http://dspace.ncl.
res.in/dspace/ 
Theses; 
Unpublished; 
Patents 
407 Chemistry and 
Chemical 
Technology 
Dspace 
8 Dspace@NCRA National Centre 
for Radio 
Astrophysics 
http://ncralib.ncr
a.tifr.res.in:8080/
dspace/ 
 
Publications; 
Theses; 
Unpublished; 
Learning Objects; 
Multimedia 
243 Physics and 
Astronomy 
Dspace 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
9 DSpace at 
Vidyanidhi 
University of 
Mysore 
http://dspace.vidy
anidhi.org.in:8080
/dspace/ 
Theses 4858 Multidisciplinary  Dspace 
10 Dspace@NITR NIT, Rourkela http://dspace.nitr
kl.ac.in/dspace/ 
Publications; 
Preprints; 
Conferences 
541 Chemistry & 
Chemical 
Technology; 
Mechanical 
Engineering & 
Materials; Physics 
and Astronomy 
Dspace 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
8 
 
11 Dspace@TU Thapar University, 
Patiala 
http://dspace.tiet.
ac.in/dspace/ 
Postprints; 
Conferences; 
Theses 
382 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
12 DU Eprint Archive University of Delhi http://eprints.du.
ac.in/ 
Preprints; 
Conferences; 
Books; Patents 
159 Multidisciplinary GNU-EPrints 
13 eGyankosh IGNOU, New Delhi http://www.egya
nkosh.ac.in/ 
Learning Objects 4699 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
14 ETD@IISc Indian Institute of 
Science, Bangalore 
http://etd.ncsi.iisc
.ernet.in/ 
Theses 282 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
15 EPrints@IITD Indian Institute of 
Technology, Delhi 
http://eprint.iitd.a
c.in/dspace/ 
Post -prints; 
Theses 
2141 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
16 DSpace@IIA Indian Institute of 
Astrophysics 
Repository 
http://prints.iiap.r
es.in/ 
Theses; 
Publications; 
Multimedia 
Objects 
1852 Physics and 
Astronomy 
DSpace 
17 IIMK Scholarship 
Repository 
IIM Kozhikode http://eprints.iim
k.ac.in/ 
 NA Multidisciplinary GNU-EPrints 
18 Librarians' Digital 
Library 
Documentation 
Research and 
Training Centre, 
Banglore 
https://drtc.isiban
g.ac.in/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses; 
Multimedia 
372 Library and 
information science 
Dspace 
19 Dspace@MDI Management 
Development 
Institute, Gurgoan 
http://dspace.mdi
.ac.in/dspace/ 
Postprints; 
Conferences; 
Books; Special 
225 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
20 NAL Institutional 
Repository 
National 
Aerospace 
Laboratories 
http://nal-
ir.nal.res.in/view/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses; 
Unpublished; 
Learning Objects; 
Multimedia; 
Patents 
2520 Mathematics and 
Statistics; 
Technology 
General; 
Mechanical 
Engineering and 
Materials 
GNU-EPrints 
21 Open MED NIC, New Delhi http://openmed.n
ic.in/ 
Publication 4141 Medical and Allied 
Sciences 
GNU-EPrints 
 
 
22 RRI Digital 
Repository 
Raman Research 
Institute, 
Bangalore 
http://dspace.rri.r
es.in/dspace/ 
Postprints; 
Unpublished; 
Learning Objects 
3248 Physics and 
Astronomy 
Dspace 
23 Dspace @inflibnet INFLIBNET, 
Ahemedabad 
http://dspace.infli
bnet.ac.in/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses; 
Unpublished; 
Learning Objects; 
Multimedia; 
Patents 
428 Multidisciplinary  Dspace 
24 OneWorld South 
Asia OAI 
OneWorld South 
Asia 
http://open.ekdu
niya.net/ 
Publications; 
Conferences; 
Theses; 
Unpublished; 
Books; Patents 
116 Computers and IT; 
Library and 
Information Science 
GNU-EPrints 
25 Digital Library Sri Venkateswara 
University, 
Tirupati 
http://202.141.11
7.109:8080/dspac
e/ 
Post prints & 
Unpublished 
1086 Multidisciplinary Dspace 
 
 
 
-o- 


Academic Institutional Repositories in India: Global Visibility for an Institution's Scholarly Communication

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Academic Institutional Repositories in India: Global Visibility for an Institution's Scholarly Communication

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