Project Leader: Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
Recipient Insitution: National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science
Amount: USD 28,000
Duration: 18 Months
Commencement Date: April 2004

* Project Proposal

Access to research and scholarship is one of the critical development issues in overcoming the often-noted "knowledge gap." While the digital divide is being addressed at a number of levels with the spread of infrastructure, there needs to follow with no less concern the development of systems that increase the global circulation of knowledge, and that contribute to the development of local and national research capacities. Critical to the development of those capacities is the accessibility of research and scholarship. This proposed project is intended to improve the accessibility of scientific literature published in Indian journals by introducing an indexing system. This collaboration builds on the development of the UBC Public Knowledge Project's Open Journals Systems (OJS) which manages and publishes peer-reviewed journals. One feature of OJS is its ability to generate metadata for each article, with assistance from the author at the point of submitting the article for review. The funding for this project would serve as seed support for the development, assessment, refinement and demonstration of systems that, once put in place, would be self-sustaining under the existing infrastructure support for Indian scientific journals and academic publishing. The results would, in this way, contribute not only to the research capacities of India, but to other nations in the process of utilizing new technologies to improve their knowledge infrastructure.