 In a post made in 2003, Stevan Harnad, another Open Access advocate, called Arunachalam "India's and the Developing World's great advocate for open access".Arunachalam had then been named as Co-Director of the CogPrints Archive.Arunachalam has said that his "interest in promoting Open Access specifically started around 1996, when I began working as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai".