Open Information Policy for Student Research in Law Universities

Abstract:     
This paper examines the need for and feasibility of adopting an Open Information Policy for student-research in the National Law Universities in India.

India is currently in the midst of a communications revolution. Current statistics reveal that as many as 40 to 60 million Indians are active users of the Internet. Viewed as a percentage of the population this is a meagre 4 to 6 per cent. However, this is close to the total number of university graduates in India (48.7 million), and is adding users at a much higher rate than the number of new graduates every year (2.5 million). One of the possibilities that this per-capita increase in access to ICT promises is to place tools of self-learning at the disposal of scores of Indians who have been edged out of the formal channels by the highly competitive education system.This paper sees legal research by students in publicly funded universities as a valuable education resource in this context.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 92

Keywords: Open Access, India, Law, legal, research, scholarship, ICT, digital divide, repositories, digital libraries

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