institutions, which produce research work, could potentially convert their data into online accessible material. Many of these institutions, and also several professional societies, publish science journals. Tools like the Open Journal Systems¹ could help many of these journals to come online in an open-access environment.

Technical reports produced by many R&D projects, laboratories, and other institutions would also be candidates for providing open access. Theses and dissertations at universities, conferences, research papers—whether preprints or postprints, unpublished research findings, data, or standards are candidates for open-access publishing in India and in other countries.

The following examples of open-access initiatives in India are drawn from scholarly science journals, theses, institutional archives, books, data and open access at the metadata level, and open access at portal and gateway services.

One example is the Indian Academy of Sciences, established in 1934. The Indian Academy of Sciences is one of three science academies in India. Apart from various other activities it publishes 11 science journals reporting research work both in India and outside. These journals, mainly in print, are freely accessible on the Web.² The Indian Academy of Sciences is currently digitizing all the archival issues and expects to post them online very soon. The managing editor of these journals noted that offering these journals on the Web has increased subscriptions to the print journals from foreign countries, because more researchers and libraries outside India are learning about them.

The Indian National Science Academy publishes journals, proceedings, and monographs and provides these online.³ Vidyanidhi, meaning the “treasure of knowledge” in Sanskrit, is another open-access initiative that is trying to digitize and host theses and dissertations. It operates from the University of Mysore and is part of the global electronic thesis and dissertation initiative.⁴ The Vidyanidhi project is also developing workflows and definitions and addresses multilingual support issues. Other institutions are putting their theses online as well, including the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

The E-print archives of the Indian Institute of Science⁵ is an online digital repository of research papers, both preprints and postprints, technical reports, unpublished findings, and journal articles of the faculty. It was set up using eprint.org open-source software, and is registered in the e-prints registry. Eprints@iisc is now part of the worldwide institutional e-print archives. The E-prints archives allow the faculty and students to submit their publications electronically to the campus network. Although depositing is not allowed from outside the campus, access is allowed from anywhere on the Internet. The eprints@iisc Web site also supports metadata for browsing and searching. It is also integrated with the Greenstone Digital Library software, which enables full-text searching of the e-prints.

The Universal Library is another interesting project. It is funded by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India and is hosted by the Indian Institute of Science in collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.⁶ The goal of this project is to provide a free, searchable collection of 1 million books that are no longer copyrighted. The collection is also expected to act as a test bed for research in language processing, indexing, and retrieval.

There are some examples of initiatives that provide open access to data as well. The National Chemical Laboratory is a national research lab in India that provides free access to their data, including data from the National Collection of Industrial Micro-organisms and the National Centre for Biodiversity Informatics.⁷ There are also open-access initiatives at the metadata level. INDMED, at the National Informatics Centre in Delhi, is a bibliographic database of Indian biomedical literature and indexes 75 Indian journals.⁸ There is also a backup

Front Matter (R1-R12)

Introduction 1 Welcome by CODATA President (1-4)

2 Introduction by Symposium Chair (5-6)

3 UNESCO s Approach to Open-Access and Public-Domain Information (7-9)

4 Science Communication and Public Policy (10-14)

Session 1: Legal, Economic, and Technological Framework for Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science 5 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (15-18)

6 Overview of Legal Aspects in the European Union (19-23)

7 Database Protection in Countries of the South (24-28)

8 Economic Overview of Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Scientific and Technical Information (29-32)

9 Scientific Research, Information Flows, and the Impact of Database Protection on Developing Countries (33-40)

10 Information Technology and Data in the Context of Developing Countries (41-44)

Session 2: Data and Information in the Public Health Sector 11 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (45-48)

12 The Ptolemy Project: Delivering Electronic Health Information in East Africa (49-54)

13 Health Information for Disaster Preparedness in Latin America (55-57)

14 Bioline International and the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine: A Collaborative Model of Open-Access Publishing (58-62)

Session 3: Data and Information in the Environmental Sector 15 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (63-65)

16 Geospatial Information for Development (66-68)

17 Borders in Cyberspace: Conflicting Government Information Policies and Their Economic Impacts (69-73)

18 Recent Developments in Environmental Data Access Policies in the Peoples Republic of China (74-76)

Session 4: Basic Sciences and Higher Education19 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (77-80)

20 Information Needs for Basic Research: An African Perspective (81-84)

21 International Transfer of Information in the Physical Sciences (85-90)

22 Access to Scientific Information: The Ukrainian Research and Academic Network (91-94)

Session 5: Innovative Models for Public-Domain Production of and Open Access to Scientific and Technical Data and Information 23 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (95-97)

24 A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data: International Considerations (98-102)

25 The Open-Source Paradigm and the Production of Scientific Information: A Future Vision and Implications for Developing Countries (103-109)

26 New and Changing Scientific Publication Practices Due to Open-Access Publication Initiatives (110-113)

27 Overview of Open-Access and Public-Commons Initiatives in the United States (114-118)

Session 6: Examples of New Initiatives in Developing Countries 28 Introductory Remarks by Session Chair (119-121)

29 Overview of Initiatives in the Developing World (122-126)

30 Open-Source Geographic Information Systems Software: Myths and Realities (127-133)

31 Open-Access Research and the Public Domain in South African Universities: The Public Knowledge Project s Open Journal Systems (134-145)

32 The Public Knowledge Project s Open Journal Systems (146-149)

33 Metadata Clearinghouse and Open Access to Geographic Data in Namibia (150-153)

34 Open-Access Initiatives in India (154-157)

35 Closing Remarks by Symposium Chair (158-160)

Appendix A: Symposium Agenda (161-166)

Appendix B: Biographical Summaries of Symposium Speakers and Steering Committee Members (167-175)

Appendix C: Symposium Attendees (176-181)

Appendix D: Acronyms and Initialisms (182-183)