Subhajit Panda ¹

Affiliations
1 Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab – 140413, IN

Abstract

There are two general strategies for achieving Open Access (OA) to scholarly communication, the gold road and the green road. The largest and authoritative gold road OA database is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexing all the standard OA journals meeting the DOAJ criteria of inclusion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of Indian publications to the global OA movement. The analysis of the present study was done based on a total dataset of 289 research publications of Indian OA journal as imported from the DOAJ database. The findings of the study reveal that Indian OA journals account for only 2% of the total coverage of DOAJ. Among them, journals in the field of Medicine alone account for 79% and approximately 73% of journals are published in both print & electronic medium with PDF as the preferred file format, DOI as preferred permanent article identifier and English as the preferred language of publication. Almost 89% of Indian OA journals provide full-text crawl permission, while 75% of them provide download statistics. All the Indian journals covered under DOAJ are peer-reviewed and out of them, most of the journals (76%) are double-blind peer-reviewed. Indian OA publications with CC BY-NC-SA license cover the highest percentage (75%) and 206 journals (71%) do not charge APC. In majority of Indian OA journals (89%), the author doesn’t hold either the copyright or publishing rights without restrictions from the journal publishers. It is important to note that only two journals (~1%) satisfied the requirements of DOAJ Seal.

Keywords

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Indian Contribution to OA, Open Access, Open Access Journals, Open Access Movement, BOAI.

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Subhajit Panda ¹, Navkiran Kaur ²

Affiliations
1 Assistant Librarian, Chandigarh University, Gharuan, Gharuan – 140413, Punjab, IN
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Punjabi University, Patiala – 147002, Punjab, IN

Abstract

Over the last few decades, scholarly communication is changing with the use of social media serving as an effective medium. Several new factors have emerged in the context of social media activity to accelerate the shift. The current research relied on the ResearchGate platform, an Academic Social Networking Site (ASNS), meant for scientists and scholars enabling them to share, communicate, collaborate, connect and get updated with the feeds and scholarly information. The study focused on the top 15 cited Indian researchers and their research performance on ResearchGate. The research data was collected manually and analysed using several altmetric parameters available on ResearchGate to evaluate the performance of the targeted researchers. For statistical correlation analysis, the researcher relied on JASP statistical analysis software (v. 0.16.0.0). The study findings reveal that Sujit K Bhattacharya has the maximum citations (17210) among Indian researchers on ResearchGate, accompanied by the maximum number of publications (505), the highest value of h-index (70) and Research Interests (8991). The majority of the contributions from the targeted researchers are research articles (71.95%) and 49.10% are available in full text. Researcher S G Deshmukh has asked the maximum number of questions (22), and also provide a significant number of answers (314). The publications of researcher K. M. Singh (Res. 15) received a maximum number of Read (529397), and recommendations (3179). The RG Score of S G Deshmukh is the highest (57.00) among all of the targeted researchers. Pearson’s Correlations Test among five interconnected variables calculated that among 7 different types of correlation formation, “Citations - Res. Int.” (0.920), “Publications - Res. Int.” (0.865), “RG Score - Res. Int.” (0.773), and “Publications - RG Score” (0.765) pairs possess highly positive correlation linkage. The core context of this study is helpful for the representation of India in terms of top-cited researchers and their research performance on ResearchGate. The study also promotes young researchers to disseminate their research over such ASNS platforms to increase visibility and research impact.

Keywords

Academic Scholarly Networking Sites, Altmetrics, ResearchGate, Research Impact, Scholarly Communication, Top Cited Indian Researchers.

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