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Open access is a new scholarly publishing model that has appeared in place of the commercial publishing model. The aim of this study was to investigate the level of awareness, use and attitudes of the Indian students in higher educational institutions about scholarly open access.

Survey method was used in the study. The sample population of the study was 212 Indian students belonging to different higher educational institutions in India.

The results of the study reveal a gloomy picture about the open access (OA) awareness and use among Indian students. Unfamiliarity with the OA journals and high publication fee were the main obstacles for the students not to publish in OA journals. However, a majority of the students reported their willingness to publish in OA journals in future if the obstacles are removed. A very meager ratio of the respondents had published in OA journals so far. In addition, motivational factors for publishing in OA journals were also taken into consideration, and respondent's indicated winning research grants, great impact and higher citations as main factors to publish in OA journals.

This study is geographically limited to the students of the higher educational institutions located in India.

This study will help to understand the involvement and behavior of the Indian students toward scholarly open access. The study will also guide what measures need to be taken in the take up of open access movement.

Institutional repositories appeared to be relatively a novel term for the respondents, and in order to get the citation advantages and higher visibility, librarians can make an effort to persuade students to publish their research work in open access journals and institutional/subject repositories. The study recommends that institutions need to take appropriate measures to inform students about the importance and overall benefits associated with using of OA platforms in their scholarly work.

The current study seeks to investigate, why and how faculty members of Indian central universities are using academic social networking sites (ASNs) for research communication and information dissemination, as well as validate and update the results of previous scholarship in this area. To achieve this, the paper uses structural equation model (SEM).

A simple random sampling method was adopted. Online survey was conducted using a well-designed questionnaire circulated via email id among 3384 faculty members of Indian Central Universities. A SEM was designed and tested with International Business Machines (IBM) Amos. Apart from this, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 22 and Microsoft Excel 2010 were also used for data screening and analysis.

The study explores that most of the respondents are in favour of using the ASNs/tools for their professional activities. The study also found that a large chunk of the respondents used ASNs tools during day time. Apart from it, more number of faculty members used ASNs in research work than general purpose. No significant differences were found among the disciplines in use behaviour of ASNs in scholarly communication. Three hypotheses have been accepted while two were rejected in this study.

The study was confined to the twelve central universities, and only 312 valid responses were taken into consideration in this study.

The paper demonstrates the faculty members’ use behaviour of ASNs in their research communication. The study also contributes new knowledge to methodological discussions as it is the first known study to employ SEM to interpret scholarly use of ASNs by faculty members of Indian central universities.

The study is an endeavour to find out the preservation status of rare documents in Srinagar. The rare documents, here, mean the manuscripts and rare books, journals, reports, magazines, archival documents, etc. These resources are available in private libraries of individuals and religious institutions in Srinagar. This study aims to find these private libraries of individuals/families and religious institutions, which are unknown to the scholarly world and observe the preservation status of rare documents. The main focus is to document their present preservation status to give an opportunity to the stakeholders, particularly the government organizations, to take appropriate action before they are lost forever.

Before conducting the survey, the investigator interviewed 114 persons including literary persons, faith leaders, librarians, faculty members from various prominent institutions in Srinagar to get leads regarding the persons/families and religious institutions in possession of rare documents. The investigator gathered data through two different schedules and later analyzed the same in this study after carrying out a pilot study to make necessary changes to the schedules compiled for the study. The investigator visited personally each family/individual and religious institution to gather the data for months together.

An arduous job was carried out in which around 111 individuals/families and religious institutions were found to be having such rare resources. However, the data gathered reveals a dismal picture of private libraries and religious institutions, in possession of rare documents, as almost all caretakers/ families are devoid of any knowledge regarding the maintenance of these important sources of knowledge. Further, the traditional methods of preservation are still in vogue in some private libraries. These traditional methods have opened new areas of research while at the same time can prove detrimental to the collection if they are useless.

The study is the first of its kind in the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir i.e. Srinagar. The study gives an idea of preservation status of manuscripts and rare documents including books, magazines, journals, archival documents, etc. so that the same are taken care of for posterity. The study is an eye-opener for the policymakers, conservators, archivists and others interested in historical documents. The study will help in furthering the research process as it needs to be ascertained whether the traditional methods of preservation are fruitful. In short, the study is quite helpful in understanding the nature of collection in Srinagar so that appropriate steps are taken by all particularly the Government in J&K. The paper will surely help in the policy formulation in the future.

The purpose of this study is to review the application of social media for knowledge sharing (KS) in higher education. KS is the most crucial component in knowledge management. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are the epitome of knowledge creation and acquisition. With the advancement in technology and the embracement of social media, knowledge should be shared more freely and easily.

Using a bibliometric analysis, this study applies bibliographic coupling and co-word analysis to analyze the present and future trends on KS using social media in HEIs. 455 journal publications and 21,181 cited references were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) database.

Findings show that most themes are categorized towards academics and students. Themes related to academics are the use of social media for expertise sharing and KS's impact on university-industry networking. In contrast, themes related to students revolved around the impacts of social media and academic performance.

Implications towards major social media practices on KS are discussed.

This study provides a novel, state-of-the-art bibliometric review of knowledge sharing via social media in the higher education context.