Open access initiatives and institutional repositories: Sri Lankan scenario

Abstract

The paper investigates the open access initiatives in terms of open access publishing and institutional repositories for scholarly communication in Sri Lanka. Relevant data from Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR and Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) were analyzed to study the status of open access in Sri Lanka. Further, websites of all established institutional repositories (IR) of Sri Lanka were explored to gather the relevant data. Semi-structured interviews with Librarian of National Science Foundation and the staff involved in the development of many IRs and digitization projects were also carried out. Findings show that many libraries in Sri Lanka have established institutional repositories. The recently created national open access policy is under review. Different universities and special libraries such as science and technology libraries were granted financial and technical support by the NSF for digitizing their rare contents. However, all digitized contents have not been uploaded yet. There are 60 locally published journals available online through SLJOL, but only 10 journals have been listed in DOAJ. Though there are 23 institutional repositories in Sri Lanka, only seven repositories are registered in OpenDOAR.