Scholarly communication in a digital world: The role of the digital repository at the Raman Research Institute

Abstract

Information and communication technologies have changed the landscape of information handling activities. The proliferation of electronic resources and a paradigm shift from print to electronic format of journals, has led to another crisis due to the escalating costs of electronic resources, dwindling library budgets and cuts in journal subscriptions. Libraries have tried to overcome this situation by a dual approach, viz. consortia deals on one hand for access to more information with optimal payment and open access scholarly publishing and communication on a worldwide basis on the other hand. In the last few years, the Open Access Movement has been gaining momentum and many journal publishers are also supporting this cause. With the availability of open source software for creating repositories, many institutes have established institutional repositories in support of open access. Realizing the importance and the benefits of such a repository at the institute level, RRI Library has set up the RRI Digital Repository. In this paper, we describe the growth and evolution of the repository, the problems encountered, the solutions explored, the strategies formulated to add relevant content and finally lessons learnt while executing the project.