Open Access Journals Initiatives in India

As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention”, the academic community has found an answer to the scholarly communication crisis in the form of open access. It can bring a revolutionary change in the traditional scenario of scholarly communications where everything was in control of the publishers and the authors' were deprived of their basic rights. The libraries were loosing their purchasing power as the publishers had raised subscription charges steeply. The worst sufferers being the readers who were unable to access the knowledge they needed. With the advent of open access, the grim situation has gradually started to improve as more and more scholarly works in the form of journal articles, open courseware, theses and dissertations, conference papers, presentations, reports, etc. are freely available online. A number of initiatives are being undertaken by various academic institutions, discipline oriented research organizations, learned societies, governments of various countries and many international LIS associations like IFLA, ALA, SPARC, etc. These initiatives have also led to an impact on the commercial publishers to think alternative publishing model to help the authors who want their scholarly work to be in public domain without harming their commercial interests. The authors are now getting the freedom to publish in open access journals and/or submit their works in the open access institutional repositories. If the author's organization does not have an institutional repository, they can deposit the article in a disciplinary archive. But these initiatives are not sufficient to bail out the budget starving libraries. Hence, more efforts have to be made to create free and conducive environment encouraging knowledge creation, rapid dissemination and maximum sharing leading to advancement of global knowledge and ultimate progress of the world