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Table 3. Top five journals by highest increase/decrease in IF nal Episodes increased by 1.263, i.e.
almost 65%.
Journal Difference from 2014
In terms of growth in IF, 59 journals
Increase showed positive growth between 1.38%
Episodes 1.263 and 530%, while 45 journals had nega-
IETE Technical Review 0.416 tive growth between 70% and 0.69%
Energy for Sustainable Development 0.386 (top five journals in each case are pro-
Indian Journal of Experimental Biology 0.33 vided in Table 4). The IF of Range Man-
Range Management and Agroforestry 0.329 agement and Agroforestry increased
Decrease
from 0.062 in 2014 to 0.329 in 2015,
Journal of Food Science and Technology-Mysore 0.962
almost five times.
Journal of Biosciences 0.645
Contributions to Indian Sociology 0.641 Among the 107 journals, only nine
Conservation and Society 0.613 received more than 2000 citations in
Annals of Thoracic Medicine 0.568 2015 (Table 5). Current Science was the
top-ranked Indian journal 1 with IF
1999 = 0.567. Even though the journal
Table 4. Top five journals by highest and lowest IF growth received the highest number of citations
Journal Growth in percentage from 2014 (n = 8289) in 2015, it is ranked 21st
among Indian journals in terms of IF (IF
Positive growth 2015 = 0.967). This can be attributed to
Range Management and Agroforestry 530.64 the fact that Current Science focuses
Himalayan Geology 366.67 only on publications related to India or
Journal of the Anatomical Society of India 247.62
Indian science 2 and 85% of publications
Journal of Agrometeorology 148.96
Indian Journal of Gender Studies 131
were contributed by Indian authors dur-
Negative growth ing 20052014 (ref. 3).
Journal of Camel Practice and Research 70 Compared to the earlier study1, the
Contributions to Indian Sociology 69.90 number of Indian journals in SCIE has
Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 53.73 been doubled from 47 (0.84%) in 1999 to
Indian Journal of Cancer 46.13 100 (1.14%) in 2015. The present study
Journal of Food Science and Technology-Mysore 43.67 provides a clear picture on the perform-
ance of Indian journals and may be use-
Table 5. Top Indian journals (C 2015 2000) ful to decision-makers of the concerned
journals.
Journal No. of citations

Current Science 8289


Indian Journal of Medical Research 4522 1. Jain, N. C., Curr. Sci., 2000, 79(11), 1513
Bulletin of Materials Science 3264 1514.
Indian Journal of Experimental Biology 2872 2. Ifremova, O., Das, D. and Kozak, M., Curr.
Journal of Food Science and Technology-Mysore 2849 Sci., 2016, 110(8), 14141418.
Journal of Biosciences 2353 3. Parameswaran, R., Am. Int. J. Res. Hum.,
Indian Journal of Pediatrics 2172 Arts Soc. Sci., 2015, 12(2), 179182.
Indian Journal of Chemistry, Section B 2112
Indian Pediatrics 2085 BAKTHAVACHALAM ELANGO

IFET College of Engineering,


45 journals (top five journals in each journal, i.e. Indian Journal of Orthopae- Villupuram 605 108, India
case are provided in Table 3). Only one dics had the same IF. The IF of the jour- e-mail: elangokb@yahoo.com

Open access repositories in India: a lost opportunity?


In the last week of May 2016, the Euro- Netherlands has negotiated agreements some noted open access evangelists are
pean Union ministers of science, innova- with major publishers including Elsevier of the view that this road taken to open
tion, trade, and industry in a meeting to make all Dutch scientific publications access by negotiating deals with publish-
agreed that by 2020 all scientific papers available in open access domain 2. Both ers that involves paying article process-
should be freely available 1. And in early these important developments aim at bar- ing charges (APCs) is only flipping
2016, it was reported that a consortium rier-free access to scholarly information the payment model. These advocates
of higher education institutions in the and have been generally welcomed. But of open access believe that Green

210 CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 112, NO. 2, 25 JANUARY 2017


CORRESPONDENCE
Table 1. Status of Indian open access repositories

Repository status No. of repositories

At least one item added every month 12


Not a single item added during the 12-month period 17
Irregularly adding items 40
No. of items added in a month
>100 19
>50 < 100 7
<50 43
Platform
DSpace 46
Eprints 22
Others 1

Table 2. Number of items added during the year in Indian open access repositories

No. of items
added
Open access (during the
respository Organization (in India) URL year)* Type of items

ShodhGanga: A Information and Library http://shodhganga. 53,495 Theses and dissertations


Reservoir of Indian Network Center inflibnet.ac.in/
theses (INFLIBNET)
KrishiKosh Indian Council for http://krishikosh.egranth. 3955 Books, research papers and
Agricultural Research ac.in/ Articles, theses, reports,
(ICAR), New Delhi journals, proceedings,
multimedia documents, etc.
DSpace@GIPE Gokhale Institute of http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/ 3535 Annual reports, books, journal
(DSpace@Gokhale Politics and Economics xmlui/community-list articles, photographs, Ph D
Institute of Politics and (GIPE), Pune theses, videos, project
Economics) reports, GIPE publications
Institutional Repository Indian Institute of http://vslir.iimahd.ernet. 3085 Annual reports, conference
@VSL Management, in:8080/xmlui/ proceedings, faculty
Ahmedabad collections, theses and
dissertations, research
paper and articles,
multimedia documents
KrishiPrabha ICAR, New Delhi http://14.139.232.167: 2536 Doctoral theses/dissertations
8080/equestthesis/
NOPR (NISCAIR Online National Institute of http://nopr.niscair.res. 2471 Journals
Periodical Repository) Science Communication in/
and Information
Resources (NISCAIR)
Open Access Repository Indian Institute of Science http://eprints.iisc.ernet. 1824 Preprints, post-prints and
of IISc Research (IISc), Bengaluru in/ other scholarly publications
Publications
(ePrints@iisc)
ShodhGangotri: INFLIBNET Centre, http://shodhgangotri. 1371 Synopses/research proposals
Repository of Indian Gandhinagar inflibnet.ac.in/ of Ph D
Research in Progress
NEHU Digital Repository North-Eastern Hill http://dspace.nehu.ac. 1280 Theses and dissertations,
University, Nehu, in/jspui/ journals, etc.
Shillong, Meghalaya
Dspace at IIT Bombay Indian Institute of http://dspace.library. 1076 Full-text of book chapters,
(DSpace@IITB) Technology, iitb.ac.in/jspui/ conference/proceeding
Bombay (IITB) papers, technical reports,
journal pre-prints and
post-prints, working papers,
Patents, annual reports,
etc.

CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 112, NO. 2, 25 JANUARY 2017 211


CORRESPONDENCE
open access that requires research output added atleast one item during a month. repositories have not caught on in India
to be deposited in institutional reposito- And there were 17 repositories that did yet. It is about time we do whatever it
ries should be the path to open access as not add even a single item during the 12- takes to get authors to deposit their re-
against the Dutch initiative of going with month period. The rest of the 40 were search papers in open access repositories.
the Gold OA (APC model). irregular in adding items to their IRs. Or it would remain a lost opportunity to
In India, the umbrella institutions such The most active institutional repository provide barrier free access to our schol-
as CSIR, DBT, DST and ICAR have was ShodhGanga@INFLIBNET Centre, arly information.
open access policies that clearly mandate which added the most number of 53,495
depositing research papers in institu- items during the year. ShodhGanga is a
tional repositories. Higher education in- theses repository. And a majority of the
1. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/
stitutions such as IITs, IISc and many repositories were created by the DSpace dramatic-statement-european-leaders-call-
universities have also set up institutional open source software. immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers
repositories. There are a number of stud- Table 2 gives the repositories that 2. Butler, D., Nature, 2016, 529, 13;
ies that have analysed the Indian institu- added at least one thousand items during doi:10.1038/529013a
tional repositories. These studies give the the 12-month period. As can be seen, 3. http://www.opendoar.org/
number of items in the repositories at the some of the repositories are not truly IRs 4. http://roar.eprints.org/
time of study. We wanted to look at how that host research papers, pre-prints or 5. Muthu, M., Kimidi, S. S., Gunasekaran, S.
often are Indian open access repositories post-prints. Some of them are theses and and Arunachalam, S., Curr. Sci. (in press);
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/forth-
updated with new items. dissertations (ShodhGanga), journals
coming/18652.docx
Between the Directory of Open Access platform (NOPR) and so on.
Repositories (DOAR) 3 and Registry of Clearly, Open access institutional
Open Access Repositories (ROAR) 4, repositories are lagging despite the avail- VIJENDRA KUMAR*
there are 69 open access repositories ability of mandates and policies. Res- G. M AHESH
from India listed in them. During the one earchers and scientists continue to
year period, July 2015June 2016, we surrender complete copyright to journals National Science Library,
visited each of the repository websites on and are not seemingly enthusiastic about CSIR-National Institute of Science
the last date of each month and noted the depositing pre-prints or post-prints in in- Communication and Information
number of items in the repository. stitutional repositories. Increasingly they Resources,
Table 1 gives some key statistical data prefer to publish in APC-based open 14, Satsang Vihar Marg,
about the open access repositories. Out access journals 5. Even after more than a New Delhi 110 067, India
of 69 repositories, just 12 repositories decade of being around, open access *e-mail: vijendrakumar@live.com

212 CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 112, NO. 2, 25 JANUARY 2017
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