Research Impact of the Open Access Journals-An Analytical Study

Abstract:  Scholarly Communication is increasingly adopting the niche publishing model in the developing countries which have already gained a lot of momentum in the developed world i.e. Open Access (OA) Publishing. The main purpose of this article is to evaluate the research impact of the OA journals published from India and indexed in SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SJR) database. The 56 OA journals published in all disciplines from India and which are indexed in SJR from 2007 to 2016 are taken up for the research study. Journal quality indicators such as SJR, Total Cites (3 years), Cites/Doc (2 years) and International Collaboration were analyzed for the secondary data collected from SJR for the period 2007 to 2011 and compared with data for the period 2012 to 2016 with a time interval of 5 years. The research study showed that there is extremely statistical significance for the journal quality indicators analyzed using paired t-test statistical tool. Further, this study showed that the OA journals have a research impact which is continuously improving in all the disciplines and OA movement is establishing its footsteps in India and is responsible for qualitative intellectual output. The findings of this study can help academicians, scholars, and researchers of all disciplines in India to publish with and to read the knowledge disseminated through the OA scholarly journals. This study demonstrates the quality of the OA journals which has been proven on the universally accepted journal quality indicators using statistical analysis.