The Case of Significant Variations in Gold-Green and Black Open Access: Evidence from Indian Research Output

TL;DR

This study analyzes open access patterns in Indian research output from 2014 to 2018, revealing lower legal open access levels compared to the global average and highlighting disciplinary differences and the role of Sci-Hub.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive computational analysis of open access types and patterns in Indian research, including data from Web of Science, Unpaywall, and Sci-Hub, revealing unique disciplinary and repository insights.

Findings

24% of Indian research is legally open access, below the 30% global average.

Over 90% of Indian research articles are freely available via Sci-Hub.

Disciplinary differences exist in open access patterns, with Sci-Hub complementing legal open access.

Abstract

Open Access has emerged as an important movement worldwide during the last decade. There are several initiatives now that persuade researchers to publish in open access journals and to archive their pre- or post-print versions of papers in repositories. Institutions and funding agencies are also promoting ways to make research outputs available as open access. This paper looks at open access levels and patterns in research output from India by computationally analyzing research publication data obtained from Web of Science for India for the last five years (2014-2018). The corresponding data from other connected platforms -- Unpaywall and Sci-Hub -- are also obtained and analyzed. The results obtained show that about 24% of research output from India, during last five years, is available in legal forms of open access as compared to world average of about 30%. More articles are available in gold open access as compared to green and bronze. On the contrary, more than 90% of the research output from India is available for free download in Sci-Hub. We also found disciplinary differentiation in open access, but surprisingly these patterns are different for gold-green and black open access forms. Sci-Hub appears to be complementing the legal gold-green open access for less covered disciplines in them. The central institutional repositories in India are found to have low volume of research papers deposited.