Open Access Levels and Patterns in Scholarly Articles from India

Open access (OA) has emerged as an important movement worldwide during the last decade. There are several calls now that not only persuade researchers to publish in OA journals, to archive their pre- or post-print versions of papers in repositories, but also institutions and funding agencies to promote OA of research publications. This article examines OA levels and patterns in research output by computationally analysing research publication data obtained from the Web of Science for India during the last five years (2014–2018). Results obtained show that about 24% of research output from India, during the last five years, is available in OA compared to world average of about 30%. More articles are available in gold OA compared to green and bronze OA. Furthermore, OA levels vary in different disciplines, with medical science, physics and biology having higher percentage of their articles available as OA as compared to those like arts and humanities, social science and (surprisingly) information science.