The Status and Patterns of Open Access in Research Output of Most Productive Indian Institutions

Open Access is emerging as an important movement worldwide since last few years, triggered mainly by the high subscription cost of pay walled journals that create barriers in universal dissemination of knowledge reported in those journals. The paywall barriers to access of knowledge has become so problematic that even institutions in the developed countries are not only cancelling subscriptions but also mandating it for their researchers to either publish in open access journals or at least deposit their research papers in Institutional Repositories. The high subscription cost of journals is a more serious issue for developing countries, as it takes away institutional resources that can be used for other productive purposes. India has taken several steps in promoting open access, including release of an open access policy by Ministry of Science and Technology, however, it is not very clear that how effective these initiatives have been. This paper intends to address this issue. It examines published output, indexed in Web of Science, from 100 most productive institutions in India and analyze how much research output coming from them are available in Open Access (OA). The paper further analyzes availability of research papers from these institutions in the popular pirate site Sci-Hub. It is interesting to observe that legal OA percentages are significantly lesser than the Sci-Hub availability for all the institutions, an indication that the existing systems for promoting open access in India are not working efficiently. At the end, the paper also presents statistics about number of papers deposited in three central institutional repositories in India. These statistics provides an indication of the extent to which these repositories have been able to promote open access in India. The paper concludes by pointing to some factors that impede Open Access in India.