Online Scholarly Publishing in India: Initiatives and Practices

Dr. Naushad Ali PM

&

Mohamed Musthafa. K

Abstract

Electronic publishing has gained momentum during the last two decades around the world. I­n India electronic scholarly publishing started in late 1990s. Some academic and research institutions as well as commercial publishers started publishing research online. Indian Academy of Sciences, INSA, Indian Medlars Centre, MedKnow Publishers, Indianjournal.com, and Kamla Raj Enterprises were first to start e-publishing in the country. Later on many higher education institutions like IISc and research organizations such as DRDO started online scholarly publishing. E-journal, open archives and institutional repositories are popularly being used to put the intellectual output online in the academic institutions.  More than 50% of online journals published in India are open access. DOAJ has listed 373 journals from India, most of them are related to bio-medical subjects. DOAR listed 76 Indian institutional repositories (IR) and 53 IRs under 46 organizations in OpenROAR. Lack of training and lack of awareness about the e-publishing technologies are some of the obstacles to start online publishing in many institutes.  This paper studies various initiatives as well as experiences of different agencies in electronic publishing in India. Questionnaire and interview methods have been used to conduct the study.

Keywords: Electronic publishing, online publishing, academy, research, India

Published in KELPRO Bulletin, 19 June 2012