Page 39 - Annual Report 2016_17

6. Open Access Initiatives

The current system of scholarly communication inhibits rather than promote access to scholarly

information at a time when technology can enable vast improvement in access, speed of publication
and save the cost of publication. The present model of publishing is essentially a monopoly of publishers
that is driven by the need to publish rather than the need for more information. The open access has
emerged as a promising alternative to the current model of scholarly publishing that provides free
access to scientific information to its users. The open access publishing model offers access to full-text of
journals free of charge to the user through well-organized and professionally-managed web interfaces.

The essential premise of open access movement is that the scientific community and society in general
benefits from the open exchange of ideas and information unaffected and unencumbered from the
limitations of subscription costs, licensing arrangements and copyright inherent to the traditional
model of commercial journal publishing. Open access journals and institutional repositories are two

routes of open access publishing system.

Open-access journals are considered as “golden route” for providing access to peer-reviewed journal
literature in electronic format free-of-charge without any restriction of access. Institutional repositories
considered as “green route” to open access publishing, are being set-up in research institutions with
anticipation that the faculty and researchers would submit their preprints or post-prints of articles that
are either accepted for publication or already published in traditional printed journals.

The open access initiatives at the INFLIBNET Centre are launched with an aim to spread open access

movement in universities and institutions of higher learning. The Centre continued all the initiatives that
were started in the previous years. These initiatives as described below:

6.1. Open Journal Access System (OJAS) (http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/)

Gaurav Prakash, Scientist B (CS)
Mohit Kumar, STA (CS)

The INFLIBNET Centre has installed and configured Open Journal System (OJS), open source software

for electronic publishing of the journals, to facilitate hosting of electronic version of journals into open
access mode with all processes of submission, peer-reviewing, editing, layout designing and publishing
built into it. The initiative encourages universities and institutions that are publishing journals in print
format to use the platform for hosting electronic version of their journals free-of-cost on servers at the
INFLIBNET Centre. The initiative also encourages faculty in universities to start their own open access

journals using this platform.

During the period under report, INFLIBNET Centre received six new proposals for hosting of journals on
OJAS platform, however, only one of the journal was selected for hosting on OJAS Platform.

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