Let us begin with a bit of history.
Open access did not take as long as printing took to reach the shores of India. It took more than a hundred years for the printing press to reach India in 1556, through a freak of
history, after it was invented by Gutenberg.56 And the first scientific paper in print from India was produced by Garcia de Orta, a Portuguese physician in 1563. It was on Indian plants and drugs. But, as technology progresses it has a tendency to compress telescopically the time delay for newer developments to spread, and it took just about a decade for open access to have a large following in India after it took roots in the West.
Open access in the West in the true sense began with arXiv (1991)57 and the World Wide Web, if we consider electronic interlinking of information as the enabler of open access. But the idea of open access was much older. We would think the CERN library's reprints collection, followed by the distribution of reprints (and then grey literature) by SLAC preceded arXiv. Two other early open access initiatives were the founding of the journal Psycholoquy by Stevan Harnad in 198958 and his seminal paper on scholarly skywriting in 1990.59
The idea of open access to scholarly literature is not new to India. High energy physicists around the world have been using the CERN preprint repository, the very first such facility set up in the early 1950s, which replaced the earlier system of distributing hundreds of copies of print-on-paper versions of their yet-to-be-published research
papers around the same time they would submit the paper to a journal. In the mid-1960s, Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) set up a repository for these reprints. And in 1974, the first grey literature electronic catalogue, SPIRES (Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System) was set up at SLAC. Early Indian high energy physicists, many of whom had worked in the West were using these services. Ever since Paul Ginsparg set up arXiv at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), many Indian researchers in the areas of high energy physics and condensed matter physics in the better-known institutions started depositing their preprints in arXiv and looking it up for preprints by others. They were later joined by mathematicians, computer scientists, quantum biologists, etc.
Besides, Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Matscience), Chennai, set up a mirror server for arXiv.
All this was happening as a matter of routine practice of communicating research and
physicists found arXiv a convenient way to access nascent research long before it appeared in a refereed journal. Physicists, as always, were the first to embrace such new developments. What about the others — chemists, earth scientists, life scientists, the biomedical researchers, agricultural researchers and engineers? And even among physicists, what percentage of Indian physicists deposits their preprints and searches arXiv to learn about current developments? One really does not know.
The history of open access in India can be traced through major events, some of which helped raise awareness and implementation and the others had policy implications. The open access movement in India started with a few individuals who were influenced by the work of a few eminent open access champions. Initial efforts took place at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), NCSI-IISc, Bangalore, Mysore University, and Documentation Research Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore (DRTC-ISI). While efforts at Mysore University, influenced by Ed Fox of Virginia Tech, focused on building repository for electronic theses and dissertations [See Box 1, Vidyanidhi (Electronic Theses and Dissertations].
Box 1, Vidhanidhi (Electronic Theses and Dissertations)
Vidyanidhi Digital Library60, one of the earliest Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiatives in India, has been online since 2002. It began as a pilot study in 2000 with sponsorship from the then National Information System for Science and Technology (NISSAT), Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India. Vidyanidhi expanded into a national initiative with support from the Ford Foundation in 2003. Today, it is one of the largest repositories with nearly 12,000 full text and more than 1, 30,000 metadata records of Indian theses.
After a discussion with Prof. Ed Fox, Prof. Shalini Urs of the University of Mysore submitted a project proposal to NISSAT in 1999. In 1999 she presented a concept note on the role of ETDs in India at the UNESCO Workshop on an international project of electronic dissemination of theses and dissertations.61 UNESCO in its support for ETDs sanctioned a project to collaboratively write an International Guide for ETDs.62
The Vidyanidhi pilot studied the feasibility of ETDs in India and a report was submitted to NISSAT in 2002.The pilot study examined the PhD workflows of more than 70 universities; practices of writing and archiving electronic doctoral theses; and the technological requirements of an eTheses repository. The continuation and expansion of Vidyanidhi was possible due to the munificent grants by the Ford Foundation in 2003 and 2005. The main mission (in addition to building an open access repository) of Vidyanidhi under the Ford Foundation support was to lead the advocacy of and spur the ETD movement in India.
Vidyanidhi began its advocacy for ETD movement in India by
organizing a high level meeting of Vice Chancellors
and chaired by Prof. Arun Nigavekar, the then Chairman of University Grants Commission (UGC), in May 2004 to campaign for and enlist the support of universities to join the
movement and also to initiate the national policy for ETDs in India. These efforts resulted in the constitution of an UGC expert committee and subsequently UGC (Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format) Regulations, 2005. Vidyanidhi also initiated university level ETD policies in several universities such as Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jadavpur University, University of Calcutta, and others. To create the needed momentum for ETD movement in India, a small team of six professionals from potential partnering institutions attended the international ETD 2004 Conference held in Lexington, USA. The Ford Foundation supported this initiative. 
Partnering with the National Social Science Documentation Centre (NASSDOC), Indian Council of Social Science Research, Jamia Millia Islamia University; University of Hyderabad, Vidyanidhi has been able to build of a collection of nearly 12,000 full text theses. Vidyanidhi deploys a hybrid platform with the full text repository built on DSpace, and the metadata repository in Microsoft platform. Vidyanidhi is also one of the early Unicode compliant multilingual databases with Kannada and Hindi search capabilities and automatic transliteration features.63 The repository has also served as a test bed for many research studies including development of ontology based semantic web systems.64
Prof. Shalini Urs
Executive Director
International School of Information Management
University of Mysore
Mysore 570 006
Email: shalini (at) isim.ac.in, shalini (at) vidyanidhi.org.in
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efforts at NCSI and DRTC, where they had regular advanced training programs with special emphasis on computer applications in libraries, addressed understanding
construction of repositories and training people in building and maintaining institutional repositories. Efforts at MSSRF led by an editor-turned information scientist focused on policy related issues, advocacy and training.
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