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This study aims to analyze the adoption of open access (OA) publishing in social sciences within central universities in India, focusing on various aspects such as the growth of OA literature, the use of different OA routes and collaboration patterns in OA publications.

Ten central universities were selected based on their rankings in the National Institute Ranking Framework 2022. Data on OA publishing in social sciences were collected from the Social Science Citation Index of the Web of Science (WoS) database using the advanced search query “(CU=India OR AD=India) AND PY=(2003–2022) NOT PY=(2023).” Data analysis was conducted using MS Excel (v16.0), BibExcel (version 2017), Biblioshiny (version 4.1.2) and Google Open Refine (version 3.7).

The study found that 30.40% of total publications were OA, with BHU as leading institute in OA publishing. OA publishing in social sciences saw a consistent increase, peaking in 2022 with 209 publications. “Sustainability” and “Plos One” were among the top ten journals, with 103 and 34 OA papers, respectively. OA publications had a higher mean citation rate than closed access publications. Collaboration with seven and nine authors had higher mean citation rates, while six-author collaborations were lower. Indian researchers received the most citations collaborating with the USA, UK and Australia. The Netherlands and Saudi Arabia received the fewer citations, when collaborating with Indian authors.

The study’s main limitation is its reliance on WoS data, excluding many OA publications from smaller or specialized journals. Additionally, the focus on high-ranked central universities may not represent the entire academic landscape, as OA publishing patterns vary across other institutions and disciplines.

The study’s findings suggest that advancing OA publishing in social sciences at Indian universities requires raising awareness of OA concepts, enhancing institutional support and policies and informing researchers about funding opportunities. Emphasizing Gold OA and funding publication fees can broaden access to research. Universities with low OA ratios should adopt similar policies, mandate public research deposits and develop technical infrastructure. Encouraging multi-author collaborations can boost research impact and citation rates. Insights from the study can help institutions and policymakers shape effective OA strategies, enhancing the visibility and impact of social science research.

This is the first study analyzing the adoption of OA in the field of social sciences in high-ranked central universities in India. It has implications for promoting OA and increasing accessibility to research outputs. Universities with higher OA ratios can lead in this regard and encourage others to adopt similar practices for overall OA growth.

This study was designed to discover the readiness of the higher education commission (HEC)-recognized journals of Pakistan in terms of human, financial and technological resources, technical expertise, institutional support, availability of open access (OA) policy, availability of guidance and training, willingness, motivation and so on for OA journal publishing and to expose the challenges in OA journal publishing.

A quantitative research approach was used and a structured questionnaire was developed to meet the objectives of this study. A survey method was used to collect data from the editors of all 329 HEC-recognized journals in Pakistan.

The respondents of all the HEC-recognized journals of Pakistan are neutral and are not of the view that they have sufficient financial, human, technological/infrastructural resources and technical expertise to continue/initiate an OA journal publishing. ‘No academic reward’; and ‘no monetary reward for the editorial staff’ are both enormous challenges for OA journal publishing. The perceived challenges of OA have a negative impact on readiness for OA publishing. The readiness level of the respondents of the OA journals is higher as compared to the readiness level of the respondents of non-OA journals.

This study covered the lists of HEC-recognized journals of 2019. More studies may be conducted based on updated lists of HEC-recognized journals. Qualitative studies may also be conducted to discover the readiness of the HEC-recognized journals of Pakistan for OA journal publishing.

This study is the first comprehensive study on this phenomenon and is an effort to fill this gap to invigorate scholarly literature. It may attract the attention of policymakers, funding bodies, parent institutions of the journals and the HEC regarding the readiness of journals in terms of financial, human, technological/infrastructural resources, technical expertise of the journals and challenges of journals to prompt the OA journal publishing paradigm.

The current study examined Israeli researchers from various disciplines concerning their perceptions, attitudes and awareness of scientific publications in open access (OA) journals and repositories.

A survey instrument was developed and distributed to 202 Israeli researchers from universities, colleges and research institutions. The study used the united theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model as a tool for mapping the factors known to influence researchers to publish in OA journals and repositories.

The empirical model confirmed the mediating effect of the association between researchers’ perceptions and the actual publishing in OA, through their behavioral intentions (BI). Furthermore, the BI are mediated by researchers’ self-decision to publish in OA. More specifically, a researcher's publication level in OA depended not only on the positive attitudes (Atti), performance expectancy (PE) and social influence (SI) mediated by BI, but also on conditions that support researchers who publish in OA, and disciplinary affiliation to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) which lead the researcher to voluntarily publish in both green and gold OA.

This study contributed to the cumulative understanding of OA publishing by formulating and validating an empirical research model of acceptance and use.

The implications of the findings for scientific publication theory and practices are discussed.

The study suggests an effective framework to understand the researcher's final decision to publish in OA. This study's results are an essential step towards the cumulative understanding of OA publicity adoption and use by researchers as a global issue in general and in Israeli academic institutions in particular.

The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries.

Therefore, the authors are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, the authors adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews.

The authors found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement.

The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To the authors' knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0181

Open access (OA) is often considered as particularly beneficial to researchers in the global south. However, research into awareness of and attitudes to OA has been largely dominated by voices from the global north. A survey was conducted of 507 researchers from the developing world and connected to INASP's AuthorAID project to ascertain experiences and attitudes to OA publishing. The survey revealed problems for the researchers in gaining access to research literature in the first place. There was a very positive attitude to OA research and OA journals, but when selecting a journal in which to publish, OA was seen as a much less important criterion than factors relating to international reputation. Overall, a majority of respondents had published in an OA journal and most of these had paid an article processing charge. Knowledge and use of self-archiving via repositories varied, and only around 20% had deposited their research in an institutional repository. The study also examined attitudes to copyright, revealing most respondents had heard of Creative Commons licences and were positive about the sharing of research for educational use and dissemination, but there was unease about research being used for commercial purposes. Respondents revealed a surprisingly positive stance towards openly sharing research data, although many revealed that they would need further guidance on how to do so. The survey also revealed that the majority had received emails from so called “predatory” publishers and that a small minority had published in them.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between the access mode of research articles [Open Access (OA) and Toll-Access (TA)] and their subsequent citation counts in Biological and Physical Sciences in three Impact factor zones (High, Medium and Low).

Three subjects each from Biological Sciences (Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Genetics) and Physical Sciences (Astronomy, Oceanography and Optics) were selected for the study. A comprehensive list of journals (TA and OA) in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences was prepared by consulting Journal Citation Report’s Master Journal List (for the compilation of both Open Access and Toll Access journal list) and Directory of Open Access Journals (for the compilation of Open Access journal list). For each journal, essential details like content language, format, year of publication, access mode (Open Access or Toll Access), etc. were obtained from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory. Web of Science (WoS) was used as citations indexing tool in this study. The data set was run on the WoS to collect the citation data.

The results of the study indicate that open mode of access is not a prerequisite for higher citation boost as in the majority of the cases in this study, TA articles have garnered a greater number of citations as compared to open access articles in different Impact factor zones in Biological and Physical Sciences.

A novel approach has been adopted to understand and compare the research impact of open access (OA) and toll access (TA) journal articles in the field of Biological and Physical Sciences at three Impact factor zone levels to reveal the citation metrics encompassing three parameters, i.e. citedness, average citation count and year wise distribution of citations in select subjects of Biological and Physical Sciences.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/[DOI]/10.1108/OIR-01-2021-0029

Science policy and practice for open access (OA) books is a rapidly evolving area in the scholarly domain. However, there is much that remains unknown, including how many OA books there are and to what degree they are included in preservation coverage. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling this knowledge gap in order to advance both research and practice in the domain of OA books.

This study utilized open bibliometric data sources to aggregate a harmonized dataset of metadata records for OA books (data sources: the Directory of Open Access Books, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, Scielo Books, The Lens, and WorldCat). This dataset was then cross-matched based on unique identifiers and book titles to openly available content listings of trusted preservation services (data sources: Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS, Global LOCKSS Network, and Portico). The web domains of the OA books were determined by querying the web addresses or digital object identifiers provided in the metadata of the bibliometric database entries.

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

Data quality issues, varying definitions of OA across services and inconsistent implementation of unique identifiers were discovered as key challenges. The study includes recommendations for publishers, libraries, data providers and preservation services for improving monitoring and practices for OA book preservation.

This study provides methodological and empirical findings for advancing the practices of OA book publishing, preservation and research.

The current academic publishing model, in which researchers rely significantly on multinational publishing companies to disseminate their work, has implications for knowledge enterprise both in terms of knowledge production and distribution. This study aims to provide a critical reflection on the academic publishing model and how it works, particularly in light of the rise of open access publishing and the growing analytics focus of publishing companies and discusses the impact on knowledge equity.

This exploratory essay offers a critical analysis of the impact of the current academic publishing model on research practices. The discussion provides a foundation for the argument that knowledge equity is essential to social justice.

To effectively fulfil the transformative aims of the interdisciplinary research community within social and environmental accounting, it is imperative to establish equitable access to published research.

This essay opens space for discussion of the current publishing model, given its dominance of the knowledge enterprise. It outlines some of the implications of this model for knowledge equity and suggests strategies for fostering a more inclusive and accessible dissemination of scholarly work.

Green Public Procurement (GPP) has recently gained attention in the academic and policy arenas since climate change has uncovered the need to be addressed by both private companies and public entities. Because of this growing interest this study aims to explore the most influential journals, publishers, categories, topics and therecent trends and future research lines in GPP.

Based on the Web of Science database, 1,008 articles from 1990 to November 2023 devoted to GPP are analysed by using Bibliometrix, an R-tool to perform bibliometric analysis.

This study introduces the following findings. The most influential journals by far are Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability, differing in that the latter is open access (OA) while the former publishes through traditional subscription (TS). This result also occurs regarding the main publishers (Elsevier and MDPI).

GPP is a political commitment that contributes to improving the efficiency of the economies and that has aroused the interest of the scientific community. The paper can provide important insights for GPPs formulation in the areas of procurements and literacy.

The paper leads a debate on the opportunities or threats that the OA journals present for the dissemination of scientific knowledge of GPP, compared to TS publications in the same field.

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.