Enhancing the impact of indian scholarly communication through institutional repositories

The high quality research accompanied by innumerable scholarly communications to various national and internationals journals and conferences has put India in the forefront in the developing world and leader of South Asian countries. Unfortunately, only the elite institutions have reasonably good information provision facilities that support scholarly communications. On one hand the paucity of funds for the subscription based scholarly journals and on the other the shrinking budget discourage both the access to vast scholarly publications and publication process itself. The open access literature plays a vital role, both in terms of research communication and access, provided, of course, the benefits in terms of economic and social recognitions are assured by this system. The open access movement was triggered by the journal crisis due to exorbitant price increase of the publications. Institutional repositories represent an important OA-channel and are relatively new developments in scholarly communication process compared to open journals and subject-specific repositories. The paper presents the Indian scenario in adopting the open access and the status of the open access journals and Institutional Repositories. The authors depict the main bottlenecks for setting up of IRs in various Indian institutions and come up with appropriate suggestions