Gitanjali Tandon, Lalitha Poluru, Sridhar Gutam, A.K. Mishra, P.S. Pandey & H. Chandrasekharan
Abstract: This article focuses on the trends in publication, authorship pattern, availability, and accessibility of articles during 2008–2010 from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), a constituent of the National Agricultural Research System in India. The data reveal that during the period of study, researchers from IARI produced 1,833 publications, most of which were jointly authored, and that the most preferred journal for publication by researchers is the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences, which is now an Open Access journal. While publications from IARI are available to subscribers of the Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture (CeRA), public availability to IARI publications is very meager. Hence, in order to make their research output more accessible and available to a wider audience, IARI researchers should deposit their work in IARI’s Open Access repository Eprints@IARI. However, making such a deposit requires an Open Access policy, which IARI is yet to adopt.
Keywords: Agriculture; India; Mass media; Open Access; Public sector; Policies; Research communications; Technological changes; Technology; Quality
Gitanjali Tandon, Trainee, Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India. Email: gitanjali.tandon@gmail.com .
Lalitha Poluru, Librarian, Institute of Pharmacy, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, India. Email: lalitha.poluru@nirmauni.ac.in .
Sridhar Gutam, Senior Scientist, Division of Crop Production, Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture, Lucknow 226101, India. Email: gutam2000@gmail.com .
A.K. Mishra, Senior Scientist, Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India. Email: akmishra@iari.res.in .
P.S. Pandey, National Coordinator, National Agricultural Innovation Project, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi 110012, India. Email: pspandey@icar.org.in .
H. Chandrasekharan, Head and Principal Scientist, Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India. Email: head_usi@iari.res.in .
The National Agricultural Research System (NARS) in India is the world's largest network of 97 agricultural research institutes established by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) across the country and 58 agricultural universities established by the state governments in their respective states. The ICAR is an apex body of NARS, coordinating research, education, and extension agriculture including horticulture, fisheries, and animal sciences for the entire country. The research in the NARS constituents is publicly funded and is being undertaken to further food and nutrition security and sustainable livelihoods in India. Hence, the knowledge of this agricultural research should be made available for the public good. The recent developments in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have brought drastic changes to conventional communication channels of scientific communications, information sharing, and accessing behavior of the scholarly community. The ICTs have paved the way for the global Open Access (OA) movement among scholarly communities. Open Access to science and scholarship means making scholarly research articles freely available to the public online without any restrictions (Suber, 2004).
One of the mandates of ICAR is to act as a clearing house of research and general information relating to agriculture through its publications and other information that it disseminates. However, only recently did ICAR make two of its flagship journals (the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences [IJAgS] and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences [IJAnS])1 OA while two of the universities in NARS, namely Kerala Agricultural University and University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad (UASD), had already made their university research journals OA much earlier. Joining the OA movement, to showcase research outputs, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) established its institutional repository, Eprints@IARI2 and made it live on 9th November 2009. This repository is the first OA repository to be established by an institute under NARS, though the credit for the establishment of the first Open Access repository in agricultural sciences in India goes to the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)3 a constituent establishment of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)4 at Hyderabad, India. Since then, three other OA institutional repositories: Eprints@CMFRI5, Dspice@IISR6, and E-Repository@IIHR7 have been established in NARS by various ICAR institutes. In addition to these, one thematic repository, OpenAgri8; one commodity portal, RKMP9; two Electronic Theses and Dissertations viz, KrishiPrabha10 established under National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP)11 and ETD@UASD12 established by UASD have been established in NARS. All these repositories are accessible to the public whereas KrishiPrabha is only for NARS constituents under IP address authentication. The establishment of these repositories shows that efforts are being made to make quality research articles more available and openly accessible. However, NARS needs to cultivate more awareness about OA, and create the necessary infrastructure and policy support within the organization. Earlier studies, such as Guttikonda and Gutam (2009) and Abraham et. al. (2009), give some insights into the prospects of Open Access for Indian agricultural research.
This article documents the results of a study undertaken by the authors in relation to work published by IARI from 2008 to 2010. The objectives of this study were:
Established in 1905 at Pusa, Bihar, and functional since 1936 at New Delhi, the IARI is the country's premier institute under ICAR for agricultural research, education, and extension in the country. It had played a crucial role in ushering the Green Revolution in India during 1960s13 and continues to play an important role in addressing the issues related to agriculture: climate change, pests and diseases, sustainable farming, and water and land conservation. It has 20 divisions and eight regional stations under its establishment and produces voluminous research outputs that are distributed and disseminated through peer-reviewed journals, conferences, books, manuals, folders, leaflets, etc. After the establishment of Eprints@IARI, IARI's researchers started to deposit their articles into the repository.
In the area of Indian food science and technology, Vijay (2003) has reported that collaborative research is preferred to solo research. Similarly, a study by Sharma (2009) of research articles published during 1991 to 2007 by the scientists of the Central Potato Research Institute (CPRI), a constituent establishment of ICAR, revealed that the majority of scientists of CPRI preferred to publish research papers in joint authorship (82.67%). His study showed that while there appeared to be no uniform pattern in literature growth during the period of review, factors like availability of funds, scientist recruitment and availability, as well as conferences, seminars, and other targeted events had an impact over scientific productivity and output.
Dixit and Katare (2007) studied the patterns of articles published in the journal of the Indian Society of Cotton Improvement for the period 1995–2004. Patterns related to authorship, bibliographic form, citation, contributing institutions, and subjects were analyzed. Based on those details, ranking of core journals (Indian and foreign) in the field of cotton science were identified. Al-Quallaf (2009) attempted to identify and analyze the intellectual structure of pomegranate (Punica grantum L.) literature and to determine trends and patterns in specific areas in the growth of this literature, such as publication type, author productivity and patterns, subject focus, language dispersion, and characteristics of the journal literature.
According to Sarkhel and Choudhury (2010) the publication pattern indicates that Indian researchers in the agricultural field are careful to publish their research results in specialized journals, mostly of Indian origin. Muthu and Arunachalam (2011) studied papers published by Indian authors in international open access journals, and although they report that India’s contribution is modest, they nonetheless suggest that Indian researchers self-archive their research publications in Institutional Repositories, which will ensure a wider exposure to and use of their research.
We collected bibliography of all works published by IARI researchers during the years 2008, 2009, and 2010 indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database14. We created a consolidated master database by adding to this pool the publications from IARI whose titles were indexed in the Google Scholar, in CeRA15, and which were listed in IARI’s annual reports and its website. All of these publications were then checked for their availability and accessibility.
In 2008 and 2009, Arivananthan et al. (2010) conducted a benchmarking study to understand ways that CGIAR agricultural research centres make their published research outputs available and accessible. We adopted their benchmarking methodology, in which they initially compiled all the published research outputs for each of their study centres from the Centre's Performance Report. The availability and accessibility of each of the outputs was evaluated by looking for them at various databases, search engines, and Centre's websites in a way an external user would try to access the research outputs.
The definitions of “availability” and “accessibility,” which apply to Objective 5, and as reported by Arivananthan et al. (2010), which are based on CGIAR’s ICT-KM Triple-A framework16, are:
For the “availability” of research outputs (abstracts and citations), we searched Google Scholar, the IARI website and IARI Annual Reports. For “accessibility” of research outputs (full text), we searched Eprints@IARI, Google Scholar and CeRA. Note that closed access articles may show availability of abstracts for example, but not accessibility to the full text.
The study revealed that during April 2007 to March 2010, IARI produced a large amount of research output in the form of journal articles, books, and conference papers. During the IARI's annual report period (April 2009 to March 2010), IARI researchers produced 1,833 publications, out of which 563 were peer reviewed journal articles, 669 were symposia/conference papers, 24 books, 266 book chapters, and 311 popular articles (i.e., unrefereed articles written for magazines and newspapers). From the consolidated indexed publications database that was created, it was found that 274, 237, and 284 peer-reviewed articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database were published by IARI researchers in the years 2007–2008, 2008–2009, and 2009–2010 respectively. A total of 795 articles were published in 221 indexed journals in the subjects of horticulture, genetics, plant breeding, virology, and plant biochemistry and biotechnology, followed by environment, pest science, and food science.
In reviewing publication patterns, the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences (IJAgS) was found to be the most preferred and popular journal, followed by Current Science, amongst IARI researchers during the study period. A total of 96 articles were published in IJAgS and 30 articles in Current Science by IARI researchers during the period of study. The IARI researchers published their articles in a total of 221 journals during the study period. However, only 13 of these 221 journals (Table 1) were found to have published more than ten articles by IARI researchers, the rest of the studied journals publishing a range of one to nine articles.
Table 1. Most preferred journals by IARI researchers for publishing in years 2008-10|
Sl. No. |
Journal |
ISI JCR Impact Factor 2009 |
NAAS Rating 2010 |
Number of Articles |
Open Access |
|
1 |
Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences |
0.102 |
6.60 |
96 |
Yes |
|
2 |
Indian Journal of Horticulture |
0.062 |
6.40 |
43 |
No |
|
3 |
Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding |
0.000 |
5.10 |
42 |
No |
|
4 |
Indian Journal of Virology |
0.276 |
6.70 |
37 |
No |
|
5 |
Journal of Plant Biochemistry and Biotechnology |
0.323 |
6.80 |
33 |
No |
|
6 |
Current Science |
0.782 |
7.20 |
30 |
Yes |
|
7 |
Journal of Environmental Science and Health Part B-Pesticides Food Contaminants and Agricultural Wastes |
1.097 |
7.50 |
18 |
No |
|
8 |
Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology |
0.992 |
7.40 |
15 |
No |
|
9 |
Scientia Horticulturae |
1.097 |
7.50 |
15 |
No |
|
10 |
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment |
1.356 |
7.50 |
11 |
No |
|
11 |
Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems |
1.350 |
7.50 |
11 |
No |
|
12 |
Pest Management Science |
2.190 |
7.70 |
10 |
No |
|
13 |
Journal of Food Science and Technology - Mysore |
0.318 |
6.80 |
10 |
No |
When we looked at the pattern of publication with respect to the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal, it appeared that the IARI authors elected to publish their articles in journals having high IFs. The IF describes the average citations for all papers in that journal over a two-year period (Wikipedia, 2012) and also provides a gross approximation of the prestige of journals in which individuals have been published (Thomson Reuters, 2012). The IF of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years (Thomson Reuters, 2012) and for this study the IF of Thomson Reuters is consulted by referring to Thomson Reuters' Web of Science. While the IF of IJAgS was 0.088, 0.102, 0.156, and 0.170 during 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 respectively, the IF of Current Science was 0.774, 0.782, 0.897, 0.935, during the same years. It is important to note that though Current Science had a higher IF, IARI authors had published more in IJAgS. Whereas Current Science is a multidisciplinary journal, IJAgS is a very popular and widely read journal specific to agricultural sciences and published by ICAR. IJAgS is rated highly by the India's National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS)17.
In 2007, NAAS initiated a process of rating journals to bring uniformity in the evaluation of publication and for the assessment and recruitment of scientists. The pattern of publication was also examined with respect to this rating, although it should be noted that not all journals studied received a NAAS rating. The NAAS rating system has two categories, one category for journals that have a Thomson Reuters IF (which NAAS ranked from 6.0 to 10.0 based on their IF) and another category for journals that do not have an IF (ranked below 6.0 based on the information provided by the publishers in the prescribed proforma). So far, NAAS had published journal ratings in 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The most recent ratings released by NAAS, effective from 1 January 2013 and includes about 1,992 journals, take into account changes in the 2010 IF by Thomson Reuters. Every institution within the NARS networks now adopts this rating for the assessment and recruitment of scientists. When we studied the NAAS ratings for the journals, the results showed that about 570 articles published were in journals that had a NAAS rating >7.0 and 261 were published in journals with a rating <6.0. These results clearly indicate that IARI authors choose to publish in those journals that have the highest NAAS rating, and suggest that publishing in such journals is a requirement for career advancement and assessment within their field.
The majority of articles were co-authored: 428 articles (54%) listed four authors; 198 (25%) listed three authors; 137 (17%) listed two authors; and 32 (4%) were single-authored papers. The ratio of multi-authored papers to total number of authored papers (Subramanyam, 1983) was 0.95, which is an index of strong collaboration among the researchers.
The citation pattern showed that the majority of articles (67%) were not cited by journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database during the study period, and only three percent were cited more than five times. Of all the articles published during 2008–10, only one article published in Nucleic Acids Research (IF 7.479) was cited frequently – 62 times. This suggests either that the majority of papers are not valued for citing and/or that they are not reaching a larger audience. There are several reports stating that when articles are freely available, they are likely to be cited more than those that are not (MacCallum and Parthasarathy, 2006; Eysenbach, 2006, Gargouri et al., 2010). For every increase in the availability of Open Access articles, citation numbers increase by a factor of 2.348 (Jingfeng, 2011).
When availability and accessibility of IARI publications were examined for 2008–2010, of the 221 indexed journals, only 19 (9%) were open access journals indexed in DOAJ18. Additionally, 14% of the published articles could be found on Eprints@IARI. Thus, up to 23% of the published literature is available and accessible to the public.
The percentage of articles available in CeRA was 69%. This shows that a little more than 30% of the articles published were not available to the researchers in CeRA, a closed consortium model that makes articles available through subscription to NARS constituents. Through CeRA, 78% of the full texts were available online and the rest were available through a document delivery system. This means that nearly 20% of the articles from IARI were only available in print form and were not in electronic format.
These figures represent results from the years 2008–2010 only; we may presume a different picture for articles published when IARI first began. However, under the projects e-Granth19 and E-PKSAR20 of NAIP, which are encouraging back issue digitization, researchers may get some relief, as many of the old journal articles are being made available in open and electronic form.
According to information in ROAR21, Eprints@IARI was established during November 2009; however, actual article deposition started during March 2010. Neither the IARI website nor its annual reports give full details of publications and to date, only 229 publications are deposited in the repository. Of the studied publications, only 16% of articles published by IARI are Open Access, which is very low compared with other national and international institutes. Hence, in order to make their research output more accessible and available to a wider audience, IARI researchers should deposit their work in IARI’s Open Access repository Eprints@IARI. Likewise, the other researchers from other institutes of ICAR like Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI)22, Indian Institute of Spices Research (IISR)23, and Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR)24 should deposit their work in their respective institutional repositories – Eprints@CMFRI, DSpice@IISR, and E-Repository@IIHR. The institutes/universities in NARS which do not have their own official repositories may deposit their work either in the repositories like OpenAgri, RKMP, or any other publicly available repositories like OpenMED@NIC25 or Opendepot.org26. However, making such a deposit requires an Open Access policy, which is yet to be adopted by NARS institutes/universities. Even though ICAR is implementing guidelines for intellectual property management, a policy on access to research articles and data is an urgent requirement for NARS. Open Access to articles and data are essential for the advancement of science and publicly funded research should be freely available for the public good. In fact, with public availability under Open Access policy, plagiarism and unethical research practices could be curtailed. Chan et. al. (2011) claim that Open Access is sustainable, is research-driven, and builds independence and the capacity to establish a strong research base. More internally-driven deliberations on issues related to Open Access in NARS would also help in raising awareness about Open Access and, presumably, increase the availability and accessibility of NARS research.
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CCSP Press
Scholarly and Research Communication
Volume 4, Issue 2, Article ID 020156, 11 pages
Journal URL: www.src-online.ca
Received April 17, 2012, Accepted September 14, 2012, Published November 3, 2013
Tandon, Gitanjali, Lalitha Poluru, Sridhar Gutam, A.K. Mishra, P.S. Pandey, H. Chandrasekharan.
(2012). Availability and Accessibility of Research Outputs in NARS: A case study with IARI. Scholarly
and Research Communication, 4(2): 020156, 12 pp.
© 2012 Tandon, Gitanjali, Lalitha Poluru, Sridhar Gutam, A.K. Mishra, P.S. Pandey, H.
Chandrasekharan. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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