Institutional Repositories: A Case Study of Research Organizations in India

Abstract

Institutional repositories are digital collections of research articles that have been placed there by their authors. This is known as ‘self-archiving’. These repositories expose the metadata of each article in a format compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH). To access the contents of these archives, one can use Google or one of the specialized search engines for a more focused and efficient search. Institutional repositories may be multidisciplinary and located in universities or other research-based institutions, or they may be centralized and subject-based, such as the one covering certain areas of physics and related disciplines, called arXiv. Self-archiving is an international movement that is developing fast, and some grant funders are also now planning central archives to house the articles of their grant-holders. The concept of Institutional archives is gaining importance all over the world but there are some scientists in India who have negative attitude towards this concept so this study would be carried out to find out the reasons for such attitude and also the intensity of utilization of the archives.