Awareness and Attitude towards Open Access in India's National Agricultural Research System

Open Access movement is gathering momentum in NARS. While some of the institutes have established institutional repositories, there is no mandatory deposit of research outputs policy in NARS. In this paper, we present the results of a survey that was carried out to study attitude and awareness about open access among the NARS researchers in India using questions from the American Society for Information Science and Technology's survey on 'Scholarly Publishing'. The results showed that nearly 50% of the researchers were not aware of what is open access; however, when explained, 62% of them responded that they would deposit post-prints in repositories but not preprints and datasets. Thirty-two percent had strongly agreed that with open access, the quality would improve and 42% agreed that it would be easier to get hold of papers. This shows that with the increased open access advocacy and establishment repositories would solve the accessibility issues in NARS.https://works.bepress.com/sridhar_gutam/58