Current Status of Open Access Journals in India: A Bird’s Eye View: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

Abstract:  The present study aims to determine the current status of open access journals published in India in terms of numbers, yearly growth, funding organizations, major subject area, indexing, and abstracting status, publication charges, and open access licensing models of such journals. The study used the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as the source database and retrieved the bibliographic records of selected 306 Open Access (OA) journals published in India from 2003 to May 20, 2021. Further, the study referred to other web sources such as Web of Science, and Scopus to examine the indexing status of 306 open access journals and Journal Citation Report (JCR) database was referred to know the impact factor (IF) status of these journals. As per DOAJ database records, India ranks 16th as an OA journal publishing country across the globe. The yearly growth of open access journals in India was found to be 22.36%. Among these 306 open access journals, about 44.11% of journals are indexed in Scopus, 34.96% of journals are indexed in Web of Science, and 7.18% of journals with impact factor (IF) are indexed in JCR. Almost 74% of open access journals published in India do not charge Article Processing Charges (APC). The quality and quantity of OA journals published in India will surely attract authors, researchers, and academicians to rethink open access journals and their extensive use will boost the impact of research in India.