MedKnow publications

A number of journals from India are published by the learned societies or their editors without the involvement of commercial publishers. MedKnow publications is a for-profit open access journal publisher providing services to more than 35 journals. Sahoo (2006) provide the features of MedKnow publications which maintains an independent website for each of its journals which provide full text of articles without any access restriction. The full text is available in HTML and PDF. The web site use open URL standard, making linking easier and Dublin Core Metadata. Websites provide interactive features such as ability to add comments on published articles, usage statistics and translation into eight foreign languages. Links are given to Pubmed and databases such as DSMZ and Species 2000. MedKnow has put in place an online manuscript submission and peer review system through which over 10,000 manuscripts have been processed by 2006. After becoming online the visibility and reach of the journals has increased greatly. The projected impact factor of JPGM has increased from 0.25 in the year 2000 to 0.99 in 2005 and a continuous growth has been seen in manuscript submission an article download also.   

Sahu, DK (2006). Journal publishing in the developing world: MedKnow publications as a model. INASP Newsletter, Spring, pp 7-8.

Open access to scientific publications

Bjork (2004) share the experience of last ten years in open access scholarly communication. Despite widespread agreement among academies that OA would be the optimal distribution mode for publicly financed research results; such channels still constitute only a marginal phenomenon in global scholarly communication system. There are many barriers which hindering a rapid proliferation of open access. The discussion is structured according to the main OA channels; peer reviewed journals for primary publishing, subject-specific and institutional repositories for secondary parallel publishing. It also discusses the types of barriers, which can be classified as consisting of the legal framework, the information technology infrastructure, business models, indexing services and standards, the academic reward system, marketing and critical mass.

Bjork, BC (2004). Open access to scientific publications- an analysis of the barriers to change?. Information Research, 9 (2). Retrieved on April 4, 2010 from http://inforamationr.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html.

Interactive open access publishing

Poschl (2010) argued that the advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the benefits and viability of this approach are clearly demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and a growing number of sister journals launched by the publisher Copernicus and the European Geosciences Union. These journals are practicing a two-stage process of publication and peer review combined with interactive public discussion, which effectively resolves the dilemma between rapid scientific exchange and through quality assurance. The same or similar concepts have recently also been adopted in other disciplines, including the life sciences and economics. The principles, key aspects and achievements of interactive open access publishing (top quality and impact, efficient self-regulation and low rejection rates, little waste and low cost) are outlined and discussed.

Poschl, U (2010). Interactive open access publishing and public peer review: The effectiveness of transparency and self-regulation in scientific quality assurance. INternation federation of Library Associations and Institutions 36 (1) pp 40-46. Retrieved on November 29, 2010 from http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/publications/ ifla-journals/fila-journals-36-1_2010.PDF. DOI: 10.1177/0340035209359573.

An often-cited reason authors make their articles openly accessible is to maximize the impact of their research. OA article is more likely to be used and cited than one published commercially. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has the greatest possible research impact (citation impact). In May 2005, 16 major Dutch universities cooperatively launched DAREnet, the digital Academic Repositories, making over 47,000 research papers available online. By the 2009, the repository holds in excess of 69,000 articles. In April 2006 European Commission recommended that research funding agencies should establish a European policy mandating published article arising from EC funded research to be available after a given time period in OA archives. Libraries and librarians are also among the most vocal and active OA advocates. Many library associations have either signed major OA declarations or created their own (Irivwieri, 2009).

Irivwieri, JW (2009). Research into open access science publishing. Library Hi-Tech News 3 (4), pp 16-18.

ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin.

In Germany, university libraries have the duty to collect the dissertations from their own students and the German National Library is obliged by law to collect all paper based German dissertations. In addition to this there was a project entitled ‘Dissertation Online’ which finished in 2001 and attempted to make available the dissertations online. By 2003, there were 10,173 electronic dissertations in Germany. A student in Germany can publish in most universities electronically. In average, 16% of the students publish electronically and in some particular universities it is upto 25%. Electronic publishing gives a chance of higher quality and quantity of retrieval. One of the biggest problems of electronic publishing is long term archiving of documents. Other problems faced by Humboldt University were i) storage media: there were no experience about the long term, and what is the right media, tape or CD-ROM or any other? ii) the file format: the recommended format were XML or SGML but there were not enough tools to convert to XML from other formats like MS-Word, Word Perfect, LateX or StarOffice. 

Schirmbacher, P (2003). Electronic theses and dissertations and the necessity of a new culture of electronic publishing: ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin. Retrieved July 21, 2010 from http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/conferences/etd2003/schirmbacher-peter/PDF/index.pdf.

open access journal initiatives in India

Sawant’s study in 2009 revealed that there were 178 open access journals available online in India. Almost 50 percent of the online journals from India are open access. Out of 178 journals there were 17 social science and 161 science and technology journals. Most of the journals were published or funded by government agencies such as ICAR, ICMR, academies such as IASc, INSA, learned societies, associations, commercial publishers and even editors. About 64 percent journals are published or hosted by MedKnow and Medlars Centre. All journals are peer reviewed, indexed and abstracted in premier indexing and abstracting services such as Index Medicus, Chemical Abstract Service, SCIRUS, SCOPUS, EMBASE etc. Most of them are also linked from DOAJ, PubMed and OJ Gate. Online full text availability of the journals varies and their archives were mostly available from 1998 onwards. All the journals are available online and 163 journals published as hybrid journals. There were only three journals which ask authors to pay for publishing.

Sawant, S (2009). The current scenario of open access journal initiatives in India. Collection Building, 28 (4), pp 159-163. DOI: 10.1108/01604950910999819.

Case study of Sankya: an open journal

The Indian statistical Institute publishes Sankya- the Indian Journal of Statistics, one of the oldest statistical journals of the world, started producing the electronic version and provided link to old volumes from 1999 onwards. The archives provide full text of articles from 1999 onwards. The Sankya will be published electronically and in print by Springer from 2010. The journal will include Cross Reference Linking, alert services, and OnlineFirst, a feature by which articles are published online before they appear in print. Springer will also implement the online author submission system, editorial manager, the system will be in use by authors and it allows the peer-review process to be handled faster. Manuscripts will be processed through it resulting in the speedy publication of the article. The archives of the Sankya are accessible free through the internet. Presently archives of Sankya for the year 1999 to 2007 (full text) is available online. For the period 1933-1998 only abstract/summary are available online free of cost and linked to Mathematical Reviews for viewing full text.

Khatri, NK (2009). E-Journal publishing in India: A case study of Indian Statistical institute publication: Sankya- the Indian journals of statistics. Proceedings of International Conference on Academic Libraries,  New Delhi, pp 386-398.

OA Publishing: Authors attitude

Two main ways in which authors can provide open access to their work are i) by publishing in open access journals and ii) by depositing their articles in e-print archives (self-archiving). A survey among 154 OA authors and 160 Non-OA authors ware conducted in UK by Swan and Brown in 2004 to learn more about authors’ attitude towards OA publishing. Over 90% OA authors publish in this way because of the principle of free access. They also associate other values with publishing in OA journals such as: to be faster than traditional journals, to have a larger readership and consequently to be cited more frequently and to have high prestige and quality than traditional journals. The main reason for not publishing NOA authors worked in OA journals is that they are unfamiliar with any suitable open access journals in their field. While over 40% of OA authors think that publishing their work in open access journals may limits its impact, a far greater proportion, 74% of NOA authors share this view. The majority (66% of OA authors and 71% of NOA authors) think that when ‘a fee must be paid it should come from their research grant. Over all 71% of OA authors said they would be more likely to choose to publish in an open access journal again after their experience.

Read in detail from:

Swan, A., Brown, S. (2004). Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing, 17, pp 219-224.

Librarians and libraries supporting Open Access publishing

This article examines the role of libraries and librarians in developing and supporting open access publishing initiatives and services in higher education. It reflect the experiences of three librarians involved in the open access movement at their libraries, within Canadian Library Association, and as creators, managers, and editors in two open access journals in the field of library and information studies; Evidence-based library and information practice published form University of Alberta; and Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research hosted by the university of Guelph. Open access publishing is the best option to tackle the price hike of journals in the libraries. There was a dramatic growth by 180% in serial unit cost and 321% in serial expenditure in the past 20 years. Many universities in Canada support their scientist and researchers by allocating Open Access Authors Fund to publish their research output. University of Calgary uses its library budget for this purpose. Similar funds are in place in research libraries in US and Europe. There are 11 academic library publishing services in Canada and it was expected that over 50 journal should either be created or migrated to online with the assistance of university libraries using OJS or Erudit, journal management software.  

For more detail read:

Richard, J., Koufogiannakis, D., & Ryan, P (2009). Librarians and libraries supporting Open Access publishing. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39 (3) pp 33-48.

E-Publishing Initiatives in India

Abraham, T and Minj, S (2007) provide a report about the Scientific Journal Publishing in India (SJPI) project which promotes electronic publishing of scholarly journals. It covers briefly the objectives, implementation and outcomes of the project. The SJPI project was based at National Centre for Science Information at IISc, in Bangalore, India, carried out during Oct. 2004 – March 2007. The project was wet up in two phases – in the first phase, set up a prototype journal indexing and management systems for a sample of Indian journals. In the second phase the project aimed to help Indian journals to go online and to develop a Hindi language interface for Open Journal System (OJI) open source software for online management and publishing of journals with OAI-PMH compliance, developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The outcomes of the project was installing and configuring OJS for 11 journals from Indian Academy of Science, and one each from SRELS and IISc, Bangalore and developed a Hindi language interface for OJS. The project installed PKP Harvester under the title ‘SJPI Cross Journals Search Service’ to harvest data from all of the thirteen prototype journals.

Read More at:

Abraham, T., & Minj, S. (2007). Scientific Journal Publishing in India: Promoting electronic publishing of scholarly Journals in India. The First Monday, 12 (10). Doi: http://firstmonday.org/thbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1954/1831.

Open Access Publishing

Water (2008) put into notice the financial constraints face by the universities in promoting the open access publishing. In many fields funding at both the university and foundations or government agency level is much more fragmentary and partial; the idea that foundations and universities can or should mandate open access publishing there for run up de minimis  limitations. It may be in the public interest to mandate open access, but it may equally be a failure of public trust if such a mandate is not balanced  by  consideration of a requirement for sustainability so that the content and the publishers endures if the academy is unwilling or unable to think carefully about possible downstream. Consequences of open access publishing and ways to steer clean of undesirable consequences than the mantra about journal publishing - that the academy gives away its products only to  buy them back at exorbitant prices will surely return to haunt the academy in an even scarier garb than before, and prove to be even more financially debilitating.

Read more at: 

Water, D. (2008 Winter). Open Access Publishing and the Emerging Infrastructure for 21^st centrurey scholarship. The journal of Electronic Publishing. II (1).

Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0011.106