Quality improvement and quantity enhancement of Indian LIS journals

Journals are the main vehicles for disseminating research publications and one can gauge the standard of research in the country through its publications. India has a growing population of researchers and academics who want to publish and search for easy outlets guaranteeing quick publication. Indian journals as a whole and LIS journals in particular fail miserably when it comes to maintaining quality. There should be a first received first reviewed and first published policy to be adopted by Indian LIS journals. Indian journal editors need to be more communicative with authors and they should adopt the best practices followed by the international journal editors. Indian LIS researchers have few journals and conference proceedings to publish their papers on the one hand and there is a need to publish more papers for professional progress. This has become important especially in the aftermath of the Academic Performance Indicators (APIs) introduced by the UGC after the VI Central Pay Revision where 55% of API scores can be claimed through publications. Through consortia based access, LIS researchers are exposed to what is being studied in the advanced countries. Thus more number of papers by LIS researchers from India are appearing in international journals. There are also many papers getting wasted in conference proceedings and festschrift volumes and editor interest driven book chapters. Such publications never have a wider reach and suffer from poor bibliographic control. Authors and researchers need to conserve their research output by opting for its wider dissemination and better visibility by opting to publish in quality journals and they can strengthen Indian journals only by publishing their best papers in these journals.