Open Access Journal Publishing in the Agricultural Sciences

A survey was conducted on scholarly research communication and the prospects of Open Access (OA) to the scholarly research dissemination in India by Open Knowledge Society (OKS). The India's National Agricultural Research System (NARS) has been choosen as a case study for exploring the possibility of OA in publishing agricultural research. With over 90 Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes and 42 agricultural universities, established by respective states at State level across the country, the Indian NARS, is one of the largest NARS of the world. The ICAR is the apex organization of Indian NARS coordinating the agricultural research and education of the country. The agriculture research output mainly comes from publicly funded projects, and many of the research centers and universities publish research journals (peer-reviewed) and magazines even in local languages apart from English. Beside, there are many professional societies in agriculture and related sciences publishing peer reviewed journals. However, majority of these journals are traditional print journals and thus are less visible to the outside world. In the country, the researchers cannot have the access to the published literature without the subscription to those journals and many of the libraries do not subscribe all the journals. From India, only four journals in the area of agriculture and animal sciences found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Hence, it is felt that there is a tremendous potential for the research output to be made available to World with the OKS intervention and with the help of Open Journal System (OJS) software. OKS would like to bring this point forward and hope it can bring some change and create awareness about OA publishing in Agricultural research in India. The survey revealed that there are more than 100 journals which are being published in India on agricultural research by the universities, research centers and professional societies. However these publishers are not aware of the goodness of online open access publications. There is a need for creating awareness among the authors and publishers to embrace the latest Internet technologies for publication of research journals by persuasion campaigns. OKS is keen to promote Open Access Publishing (OAP) using OJS by helping institutions to setup their journals and also build an indexing system for Indian agricultural journals. The result would definitely help Indian researchers and the end user farmer community and also help other developing countries to improve their knowledge.