Open Access Mandates and Policies Adopted by the Indian Research Organisations

An Assessment of the Status and Effectiveness of Selected Indian Research Funders

Abstract

Open access is a broad term that refers to information and knowledge that are freely available in the public domain for public use or distribution on a massive level, without the need for a subscription or access fee. The open access policies and mandates compel and encourage academics and scientists to publish their scholarly content in open access, considering it a societal duty since they receive research grants from the government. The present study evaluates the funded scholarly communication and availability of their funded research communication in OA platform from four major Indian research funders (i.e., CSIR, DBT, DST, and ICAR) that have mandated open access policies by discussing the policies induced by each organisation in last five years (2017-21) indexed in the Scopus database. The OA-funded or affiliated scientific literature is indexed to a very minimum number in comparison to total publications mainly for each funder which mostly adopted green and gold OA routes of publications. The average citation of OA-funded publications is more than non-OA-funded publications. The funder also initiates awareness campaigns and workshops on open access to encourage and motivate researchers by engraving free publications with worldwide exposure and visibility.