Publication Awareness and Preferences of Indian Science Authors: An Evaluative Study

Library Herald

Year : 2024, Volume : 62, Issue : 4

First page : (612) Last page : (622)

Print ISSN : 0024-2292. Online ISSN : 0976-2469.

Article DOI : 10.5958/0976-2469.2024.00043.0

Publication Awareness and Preferences of Indian Science Authors: An Evaluative Study

Amit Kumar Verma1, Sharad Kumar Sonkar2, Uttkarsh3, Prachi Srivastava4

1 Research Scholar, Department of Library and Information Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India

2 Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India

3 Research Scholar, Department of Library and Information Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India

4 Semi Professional Assistant, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, Punjab, India

Abstract

The principal emphasis of the scholars has always been to disseminate their discoveries globally within the scientific community, permitting others to study the findings and implement in accordance to the requirements. Scientific publications always play a decisive role to uplift the social advancement through knowledge and innovation. Through the decades of the advent of internet, there is always a successful attempt to outreach towards the wider audiences, open access scholarly publication which makes research publications freely available to the public. It also provides assistance to the authors in increasing the visibility of their research results and receive more citations. This study also evaluated the awareness and preferences of authors of Indian science regarding open access scholarly communication. The survey targeted Indian authors, who had published open access research articles in the Science Citation Index - Expansion of Web of Science. A total of 37,215 authors were included in the survey to assess their awareness. The study’s conclusions express that 420 (61.67%) who responded were extremely aware of open access scholarly communication, where 482 (70.78%) of the respondents became aware through surfing the Internet. 404 (59.32%) respondents were aware of the open access model. The awareness of various characteristics of open access publications increases with snowballing experience yet it was found that 247 (36.27%) of the respondents prefer to publish in the conventional or subscription-based mode publication.

Keywords

Open access; Open access scholarly publication; Open access initiatives; Open access models; Web of Science