Grant Amount: US$ 28,000

Keywords: OPEN ACCESS, PUBLISHING, KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, INDIA

Geographic coverage: India

Objective

The objective of this project is to improve accessibility to scientific literature published in Indian journals by introducing an indexing system.

Research context

This project aims to improve accessibility to research and scientific literature published in Indian journals by introducing an indexing system with the ability to generate metadata for each article. This collaborative project builds on the Public Knowledge Project's (PKP) Open Journals Systems (OJS), which manages and publishes peer-reviewed journals. The proposed system is self-sustaining under the existing infrastructure for Indian scientific journals and academic publishing. The project contributes to the research capacities of India as well as other nations in the process of utilizing new technologies to improve their knowledge infrastructure.

Target beneficiaries

This project benefits Indian researchers and journal publishers through improved visibility and impact of their work locally and globally, creating opportunities to expand contacts and undertake collaborative research, and by facilitating the launch of online journals in topical research areas.

Outputs

• Web accessible indexing and search system for Indian Academy of Sciences journals;
• Web accessible indexing portal for Open Archives Initiative compliant Indian journals;
• Online journal publishing system for Journals of the Indian Institute of Science;
• Enhancements to PKP OJS and Harvester system software; and
• A national level workshop on open access journal publishing and indexing.

Research results and outcomes

This project is still underway and has requested an extension. The central issue the project addresses is that although a number of Indian journals have adopted Open Access publishing, most of them are not compliant to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the emerging standard for indexing or searching online research databases and archives. The aim of the project is to set up prototype journal websites using PKP’s OJS. So far the project has developed web accessible indexing, search and publishing systems prototypes for 13 existing journals.

These have been demonstrated to editors of various journals to showcase the advantages of good metadata and how to use the Journal Management System. The key benefits are that the system simplifies publisher’s work, improves content indexing and enhances web presence by making the information easier to access by search engines. Several publishers have taken the initiative to install and start experimenting with the Journal Management System. The project acknowledges that publishing office staff requires training, guidance and assistance from the project team to understand the system interfaces and use them.

Through interaction with editors of journals and participants of the workshop, the project identified several features to improve OJS. Some of these are specifically beneficial to Indian publishers and some may be useful to publishers worldwide. These include a Hindi language interface, latex code to render special characters like mathematical and astronomical symbols commonly found in physical sciences research literature, and a subject classification scheme for documents in particular domains such as the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme numbers. The project intends to add these features to the OJS software during the extension period of the project.

The project conducted a workshop on 10-11 February 2006 for which it received about 60 applications for participation. Due to limitations in resources, however, only 20 participants could be accommodated. All the training material and reports of the workshop is available online at the workshop website (http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ojs-workshop). To facilitate discussion amongst the workshop participants a mailing list to discuss issues in Indian journal publishing has been started. (http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/oajp). The project plans to conduct another workshop to popularize the concept of publishing using standard protocols and open access.

The PKP is committed to produce upgrades for OJS that support publishing efforts in India. It will also continue to work with the National Centre for Science Information to ensure that indexing modules and other components of the systems developed collaboratively continue to benefit from the international community’s contribution to the PKP’s free and open source projects. In this way the results contribute not only to the research capacities of India, but also to other nations in the process of using new technologies to improve their knowledge infrastructure.

Duration

Start Date: October 2004
End Date: March 2006
Total Duration: 18 Months

Contact information
Prof. N.V. Joshi, Chairman
National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore 560012, India
Telephone: +91 80 2360 0271, +91 80 2293 2511 / 2654 / 2655
Fax: +91 80 2360 1426 / 0683
Email: sjpi@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in, chairman@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

Website: http://144.16.72.144/

Reference websites

http://sjpi.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
http://www.openarchives.org/
http://pkp.sfu.ca/
http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ojs-workshop/
http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/oajp/