National Informatics Centre had established a subject repository in May 2005. It is meant for Medical and Allied Sciences and named as OpenMED@NIC . It has MeSH® based subject categorization and this makes it one of its own kind. Taking OpenMED@NIC as a case – this paper discusses key issues in establishing and maintaining an open access repository. Librarians and information science professionals can play active role in providing access and exposure to quality research and academic content generated in their institutions. Mature and standard open sources softwares are now available for setting up repositories. Libraries can install one of these on existing institutional or library servers to setup repositories. However to ensure better access and faster response time dedicated hardware and reliable connectivity would be required. Librarians and information science professional can play important role in exposing intellectual content produced by their organizations. They can take of various roles like – generating awareness among staff, researchers and students about benefits of self arching in institutional or subject repositories; training them in uploading their articles and other documents in such repositories; acting as meta-data editors and repositories managers. Establishing a repository, administrating and inviting authors to deposit their articles and other works in it is golden opportunity available to librarians and information science professionals. This opportunity should be grabbed with open hands.

1. Sukhdev Singh, Naina Pandita and Shefali S. Dash. Opportunities and Challenges of Establishing Open Access Repositories: A case study of OpenMED@NIC This presentation was made at a Seminar “Trends and Strategic Issues for Libraries in the Global Information Society”, organized by Department of Library and Information Science, Panjab University, Chandigarh (India), March 18-19, 2008. To convey the ideas expressed in the article, a compilation of images has been done from various Internet sources. We thank and acknowledge respective image owners for this academic communication .

2. http://openmed.nic.in

18. http://www.questionbox.org/

21. Are we still relevant?

25. BOOKS ARE FOR USE

26. REMOVE ALL BARRIERS TO KNOWLEDGE

28. Newton, “ If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants ”

29. 12 – 18 Months Research Impact

30. 12 – 18 Months Research Impact

31. http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/home/regain_control.html

33. Open Access (OA) means free and online access to scholarly literature that can be freely disseminated further with proper author attribution. It brings down barriers to scientific communication by using Internet

35. 12 – 18 Months Research Impact

36. Current Journal Tally: 92% of journals have already given their official green light to self archiving FULL-GREEN = Postprint 79% PALE-GREEN = Preprint 13% GRAY = neither yet 8% Publishers to date: 110 Journals processed so far: 8950 http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

37. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

38. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

39. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

40. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

41. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

42. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

43. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

44. Key Considerations for setting up a Repository

45. Software for Repositories

46. Open Society Institute (2004) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

47. Registry of Open Access Repositories http://roar.eprints.org on 7th February 2008

48. http://www.eprints.org/software/ http://www.dspace.org/

49. Development and Deployment of OpenMED@NIC

54. 2004 Prototyping Old Retired P-II 2.3.4

55. 23,000 Terms

56. 23,000 Terms A01:Body Regions:subjects:0 A01.047:Abdomen:A01:1 A01.176:Back:A01:1 A01.236:Breast:A01:1 A01.378:Extremities:A01:1 A01.456:Head:A01:1 A01.598:Neck:A01:1 A01.673:Pelvis:A01:1

57. OAI-PMH

59. Dual Processors RS2 (1 U) with 4 GB RAM Production Server RedHat Advanced Server (AS 3)

61. Released May 2005

62. Present Status

69. Awareness is Required Deploying and maintaining a repository is much easier as compared to attracting articles in it.

70. Repositories and Libraries

71. THANK YOU