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The case of significant variations in gold–green and black open access: evidence from Indian research output

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Abstract

Open Access has emerged as an important movement worldwide during the last decade. There are several initiatives now that persuade researchers to publish in open access journals and to archive their pre- or post-print versions of papers in repositories. Institutions and funding agencies are also promoting ways to make research outputs available as open access. This paper looks at open access levels and patterns in research output from India by computationally analyzing research publication data obtained from Web of Science for India for the last 5 years (2014–2018). The corresponding data from other connected platforms—Unpaywall and Sci-Hub—are also obtained and analyzed. The results obtained show that about 24% of research output from India, during last 5 years, is available in legal forms of open access as compared to world average of about 30%. More articles are available in gold open access as compared to green and bronze. On the contrary, more than 90% of the research output from India is available for free download in Sci-Hub. We also found disciplinary differentiation in open access, but surprisingly these patterns are different for gold–green and black open access forms. Sci-Hub appears to be complementing the legal gold–green open access for less covered disciplines in them. The central institutional repositories in India are found to have low volume of research papers deposited.

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Notes

  1. www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org. Accessed on 25th June 2019.

  2. Directory of open access (2018) Open access Repositories Operational Statues https://doaj.org.

  3. https://arxiv.org/. Accessed on 25th June 2019.

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiative#cite_note-google.se-3. Accessed on 25th June 2019.

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Statement_on_Open_Access_Publishing. Accessed on 25th June 2019.

  6. https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration. Accessed on 25th June 2019.

  7. Indian Academy of Sciences https://www.ias.ac.in/. Accessed on 20th August 2019.

  8. National Knowledge Commission. (2009). National Knowledge Commission. Report to the Nation 2006–2009. http://14.139.60.153/bitstream/123456789/112/1/National%20Knowledge%20Commission-Report%202006-2009%20.pdf. Accessed on 20th Aug. 2019.

  9. http://www.csir.res.in. Accessed on 20th Aug. 2019.

  10. DBT and DST Open Access Policy Policy on open access to DBT and DST funded research http://www.dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/APPROVED%20OPEN%20ACCESS%20POLICY-DBT%26DST%2812.12.2014%29_1.pdf. Accessed on 20-08-2019.

  11. http://www.csircentral.net/mandate.pdf.

  12. https://icar.org.in/hi/node/5542.

  13. http://openaccessindia.org/delhi-declaration-on-open-access/.

  14. https://indiarxiv.org/.

  15. http://www.sciencecentral.in/.

  16. http://csircentral.net/.

  17. https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the enabling support provided by the DST-NSTMIS funded project ‘Design of a Computational Framework for Discipline-wise and Thematic Mapping of Research Performance of Indian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)’, bearing Grant No. DST/NSTMIS/05/04/2019-20, for this work.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 221005, India

    Vivek Kumar Singh & Satya Swarup Srichandan

  2. Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi, 110021, India

    Rajesh Piryani

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Singh, V.K., Piryani, R. & Srichandan, S.S. The case of significant variations in gold–green and black open access: evidence from Indian research output. Scientometrics 124, 515–531 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03472-y

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