Outcomes from our third Librarian Appreciation Day
More than 100 librarians from over 85 leading research institutes, central and state universities, private universities and corporate houses joined us for our third Librarian Appreciation Day in Jaipur, India. Here’s a summary of what happened.
The agenda was made up of presentations and discussions led by key people in the community and focused on the developments and initiatives that are taking place.
The event gave us the opportunity to exchange ideas and best practices with the most influential leaders in the Indian librarian community. The discussions and sessions throughout the day were productive and highly collaborative.
Matt Straiges, Head of Academic Sales
The open access discussion
One of our main topics was open access – how it is being implemented in India and the challenges librarians and authors are facing with regards to open access publishing.
Open access is still very new for Indian authors. From our discussions it is clear there are very mixed opinions. Because there is a lack of policies on open access and clarity on funding it is challenging for authors to implement open access. Despite this, the discussions showed there is an interest in publishing open access.
Appa Rao Patra, Sales Manager – India and Middle East
It was interesting to hear that the challenges, questions and requests we heard from our community in India are very similar to the other countries we work with. The two biggest discussion points where around funding for open access publishing and concern around predatory journals and the impact this has on scholarly publishing.
At the Royal Society of Chemistry, we support open access models and our fundamental goal is to advance the chemical sciences, through the effective dissemination of high quality research content. All articles we publish, regardless of being open access or not, go through a rigorous peer review to ensure we maintain high quality across everything we publish.
We’re looking forward to working closely with our Indian community to identify solutions to help them move to Open Access publishing, mitigating some of the challenges faced around funding.
Sybille Geisenheyner, Sales Manager
Acknowledgements and awards
We also used the day as an opportunity to celebrate with our community.
We discussed journal usage trends over the last few years and recognised those institutions who have had the highest number of downloads of our content and who have published the most articles in chemistry.
It also gave us the opportunity to recognise individual contributions with our new Librarian Choice Awards. Our community nominated and then went on to vote for the following individuals:
Librarians Choice Award for Lifetime Achievement
Awarded to Professor Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET
Professor Jagdish Arora studied at the University of Rajasthan and the University of Delhi before achieving his PhD in Library Science from the University of Rajasthan.
He has had a successful career working as a librarian across a number of institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Since 2007 he has taken the role as Director of the Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET), Gandhinagar.
Librarians Choice Award for Dynamic Librarian
Awarded to Professor Ramesh C Gaur, University Librarian, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Professor Ramesh C Gaur studied at Jamia Milia Islamia University before achieving his PhD from the Ambedkar University, Agra.
His career has seen him work as Chief Librarian at IMT, Ghaziabad where he successfully led the automation and transformation of the library into a state-of-the-art establishment as well as several other roles before joining Jawaharlal Nehru University as the University Librarian.