Established in 1909, the Indian Institute of Science76 has grown into a premier institution of research and advanced instruction. Currently there are more than forty departments, centres and units staffed by 2,000 active researchers working in almost all frontier areas of science and technology. It has a high international standing. The Institute has one of the best computing, networking, and experimental facilities for research in the country.
In the last 100 years, the Institute's faculty and students have published around 35,000 papers, as seen from the Web of Science.77 In recent years, IISc has been publishing more than 1,500 research articles annually in almost all frontier areas of science and technology. Most of these research articles are being published in subscription-based international journals. Fellow researchers in the country and across the world may or may not have access to these research publications depending on whether their libraries have subscription to the journals in which these articles are being published.
Although we have access to many online scholarly resources, including leading bibliographic and citation databases, data sets and more than 9, 000 electronic journals, our faculty and students do not get all the information they need.
We at IISc realized the problem of the inadequacies of the traditional system of scholarly communication and were keen to overcome them. One of the trainees of the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), a unit of IISc, had carried out a project entitled “Archiving of Scientific Literature – Experience with EPrints.org software” in 2001, and had successfully implemented EPrints.org78 software to create an open-access repository of research publications. When in March 2002, thanks to an initiative taken by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam the Indian Academy of Sciences hosted two three-day workshops on electronic publishing at IISc, Dr T B Rajasekhar of NCSI took an active part and spoke about metadata. By 2002, the NCSI had a group led by Dr. Rajasekhar which was well aware of developments in open access journals and repositories and their advantages and the EPrints@IISc repository was set up in November/December 2002. It was the country’s first and one of the world’s earliest institutional repositories (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). The team that accomplished this comprised Dr. T.B. Rajashekar, Mr. Francis Jayakanth and Mr. Madhuresh Singhal. As for as the software option was concerned, in 2002 there weren’t many options, GNU EPrints.org was perhaps the only FOSS software meant for managing IRs.
In 2003, UNESCO invited Dr Rajasekhar to speak on open access initiatives in India.79
For the ePrints@IISc repository, GNU EPrints.org software80 is being used right from the beginning and it is serving the needs of our institutional repository very well. To date, more than 26,000 publications of IISc have been uploaded into the repository of which, more than 75 per cent of uploads have the corresponding full-texts. Figure 1 shows the screenshot of ePrints@IISc homepage. 
Initially, several technical value additions were incorporated in the repository. These include customization of the homepage, displaying of record count in the homepage, displaying of recent additions to the repository in the homepage, scripts for importing records from Web of Sciences, arXiv.org and Engineering Village database, scripts for generating browse views for the ‘keywords’ metadata field, customizing the ‘generate_views’ script for generating alphabetical listing of author names, scripts for generating usage statistics, etc. Most of the said customizations have been incorporated in the later versions of GNU EPrints.org software.
For the last 10 years, the average upload rate is about 85 per cent. Sadly, self-archiving is almost nil. All the uploading is done at NCSI. Another problem concerns uploading legacy papers; uniquely identifying the author names is still a problem. We have not found a solution for this issue yet. There are issues with the usage reporting package as well. We are not making any attempt to find solution for the above issues. Hopefully, the newer versions of GNU EPrints will take care of these issues. Future plans for the repository include adherence to the SWORD protocol and installation and configuration of MePrints to build a user profile system.
NCSI is also maintaining the Institute's theses and dissertations repository,81 metadata harvesting service for the OAI-compliant institutional repositories in India,82 and the science information portal.83
Francis Jayakanth
National Centre for Science Information
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore
Email: franc@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
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