CSIR's Infrastructure Virtualization

The Problem: Scientific papers have been published in journals which are owned by commercial publishers or professional societies. In both cases, copyright is held by the respective publishers. As a result, such papers cannot be freely distributed and are not accessible to the interested researchers. Publishers are now charging $20-30/paper. Even publishing costs are paid by the institutions that provide the research and more research-intensive institutions pay more. This is not affordable to researchers from developing countries.

The Solution: CSIR adopted an Open Access Mandate so that research papers published from all CSIR Labs and supported by a grant from CSIR will be made Open Access. This means anyone with internet connectivity will be able to find publications of CSIR on the world wide web. To fulfil this mandate, the nominated project was conceptualized.

The Result: The cost per paper deposited in an institutional repository is virtually zero, yet this represents the institution's contribution to globally distributed access-provision and archiving. Also, as researchers have immediate access to all the findings they need, research can advance more effectively and society as a whole benefits from it.