I broadly agreed with his views and I posted a comment which I am reproducing here. Primarily, there are differences between different disciplines. The quotes below are from the interview.

If I publish a paper in Nature, for example, it can be made freely available in my institute's repository after six months. Some journals let archived papers be made available immediately.

... and again later ...

But many publishers have no problem with the open archives approach, even if some still require a delay.

In our discussions with Elsevier we were assured that the policy of that publisher is to allow authors to use institutional repositories at any time (but see the caveats below).

One issue that is yet to be resolved, however, is copyright. I argue that we should be permitted to put in the repository the full text article as it appears in a journal.

There is a difference between "full text" and "as it appears in the journal". If the journal has put in any effort at all into re-formatting your text/images in order to get it to conform with their journal standard, then the copyright for that re-formatting work (usually a combination of manual labour and software) belongs to the journal.

For example, Elsevier insists that you do not put the PDF (or other) image file of the exact form of the journal publication in your institute repository.

I personally find this quite acceptable since papers in the Mathematical Sciences are perfectly readable in the form in which the authors submit them to the journal. However, re-creating a distributable PDF or other online form of one's paper may be far more difficult in other disciplines --- I have no idea.

For this, countries such as India should have a law specifying that the copyright for articles published with publicly-funded research always vests with the authors and their institutions.

One need not wait for copyright law to change. The directors of each of the research institutes can insist that every paper sent for publication should be made available in the form of a research report with the institute library. By extension, the electronic form of this report would be in the institutional repository. One way to ensure compliance is to only allow reports that are available in the institute library to be used for evaluation (for promotions and the like).

The scientists would then refrain from giving up all copyright to their publishers. In my (limited) experience, publishers will not object to authors retaining the right to make copies as long as such copies are not independently sold.

Unfortunately, scientists as "the silent compliant mob" does not fit with my experience. In all matters which relate to science administration (and publications are at the centre of that), scientists are by-and-large "status quo"-ists. It will need a strong push from those at the top of the ladder to change the status quo. Professor P. Balaram is certainly one of those at "the top of the ladder" so I would like to see more action to match his words!

Update: Fixed the URL thanks to Abhishek Dasgupta. Also clarified the last sentence.

Nutan and Kinjal also worked on this package for incorporation into the IMSc systems. We ended up re-doing their work and David Tarrant's for a number of reasons which I may write about later. Let me instead document how we got the e-print server working.

First of all we created a vserver using the stock Debian kernel and utilities. On this vserver Ravi installed the Debian package created by Tarrant and got it to co-operate with the rest of the system.

The first problem was that we were unable to deposit anything into the archive! It turned out that the way in which the software checks for free space uses system calls which are disabled under a vserver. For the moment we are thus forced to set enable_df=0 and run without these checks.

The second problem was that all our web services are run through a common front-end server. The e-prints server was to be run as one of the back-end servers and it did seem that configuring it as such was going to be hard. In the end, it turned out to be rather easy. The only settings we required were as follows.

In the file $ARCHIVETOP/cfg/cfg.d/10_core.pl we put the host entry as www.imsc.res.in; in 20_baseurls.pl in the same directory we put the base path as eprints. This allowed us to map www.imsc.res.in/eprints to the internal server using apache2's reverse proxy rules.

Unfortunately, this was not quite enough since the base path was not used in $ARCHIVETOP/cfg/lang/en/static/index.xpage. But we only need to configure that file and the branding.pl file and we were off!

That left the task of registering the server with the OAI. This brought up another problem. We had used the HTTPS protocol on the front-end since the site requires password-based logins. It turns out that the OAI's registration page does not accept HTTPS URLs!

So we will need some more fine tuning at a later stage. For now, people are submitting some doucments and one that picks up we can be motivated to work some more!

The "encouragement" given to IMSc members to publish in some kind of open access or low-cost format will be toothless if we do not clearly indicate that location of publication will not be the dominant factor in the decision making process.

Most (high cost) journals see their major selling point in today's world is that that they provide citation and impact factors[1]. We have to take the down the value of these factors by a couple of notches.

1. The publications of the IMSc form the recognisable core of its output and this is recorded by our annual report.

2. This output (which may be considered as an appendix to the annual report) should be available to anyone who requests any part of it.¹

3. Since the work being talked about is being published in other fora we cannot really claim that the work is "secret".

4. We need to ensure long-term availability of the work from a location that can be identified with the IMSc. Traditionally it could have been the IMSc library alone; nowadays the IMSc web site would be equally important.

5. None of this precludes the publication of the work in any other form or medium so that no freedom of the author(s) is being encroached upon.

So what is being asked for is:

1. Every publication of the IMSc should be available in definitive form from a URL of the form

   http://www.imsc.res.in/eprints/....
   
   

2. The author(s) of such a publication will give IMSc a license in perpetuity to make this data available freely (as in mufta or without cost).

1. IMSc requires its members to make available their work (when it reaches definitive form) on the IMSc website; this website will remain open access.

2. IMSc encourages its members to post their work in definitive form on an open access web space of high visibility (eg. the arXiv). This is because the world at large may not be aware of the IMSc website.

3. IMSc encourages its members to publish their work in open access/ low-cost journals.

4. IMSc encourages its members to help in the creation, edit- ing and refereeing of open access/ low-cost journals.

5. IMSc emphasizes content over location when evaluating publications for purposes of hiring/promotions.

Let us see how well we can follow them!