Open Access Journals in Agriculture and Allied Sciences: A Study based on Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

This paper attempts to do a quantitative analysis of open access journals in the field of agriculture and allied sciences indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which indexes over 17,200 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all branches of knowledge published by 130 countries in 80 languages. The study revealed that out of 17,282 open access journals indexed by the DOAJ (as on 31.12.2021), 458 journals (2.65%) are publishing articles related to agriculture and allied sciences. Brazil and Indonesia are the top countries publishing higher number of OA journals in agriculture and allied sciences with 74 titles each (16.16%) followed United Kingdom with 26 titles (5.68%), Out of 458 journals, 179 journals (39.08%) are published in English language. About 62.28% (285 journals) are published in monolingual followed by bilingual (124 journals; 7.07%), trilingual (44 journals; 9.61%), quadrilingual (3 journals; 0.65%) and each journal in pentalingual and multilingual. Creative Common licensing is followed by 447 (97.60%) journals. While 230 journals (50.22%) permit the authors to hold complete copyright 228 journals (49.78%) restrict the same. Double blind peer review is followed by 243 journals (53.06%) and ‘Blind peer review’ by 115 journals (25.11%). While 272 journals (59.39%) don’t collect article processing charges (APC) from the authors, 186 journals (40.61%) collect APC. Most of the journal publishers i.e. 119 (25.98%) take 9-12 weeks for publication and 3 journals take more than 52 weeks for the same. The study revealed that 164 OA journals (35.81%) provide access to below 100 articles and only one journal provide access to more than 5000 articles

Scholarly Open Access Veterinary and Animal Science Journals indexed in the DOAJ: A Bibliometric Analysis

The objective of this study is to report the outcome of the bibliometric analysis of Open Access (OA) journals in veterinary and animal sciences (VAS) indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).The DOAJ which indexed 16,460 open access journals as on 10 June 2021, contains 335 open access veterinary and animal science journals (2.03%) and provides access to 1,63,500 articles which is about 2.63% of the total articles. Two journals were indexed in 2003 and the highest number of journals i.e. 46 (13.73%) were added during 2018. The 335 OA journals are contributed by 63 countries and the United Kingdom is the top country with 41 journals (12.24% followed by Indonesia with 35 journals (10.44%).Further, the results indicated that 223 journals are monolingual (66.57%) followed by 81 bilingual (24.17%), 25 trilingual (7.46%), 3 quadrilingual (0.90%) and 3 journals are quintilingual (0.90%). English is the predominant language with 291 journals followed by 55 Spanish, 40 Portuguese and 26 Indonesian. Article processing charge (APC) is not collected by 172 OA journals (51.34%) while 163 journals (48.66%) are collecting APC. Majority of the journals (46.01%) collect APC in US Dollars. Persistent identifier is provided by 243 journals (72.54%) for the resource while 92 journals (27.46%) do not provide PID. The DOAJ seal is awarded to 38 journals (11.34%) and the remaining 297 journals (88.66%) have not been awarded DOAJ seal so far. Majority of the journals (33.43%) contains below 100 articles and only three journals contains more than 5000 articles each

Design and Development of a MOOC on Information Handling Skills in Teaching, Learning and Research: A Case study

This paper is a case study of designing; creating and implementing a MOOC course on ‘Information Handling Skills in Teaching, Learning and Research’ at the central library, PJTSAU, Hyderabad, India funded by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research under World Bank funded project on National Agricultural Higher Education Project. The authors explain about the components of planning and designing a MOOC course with detailed information about various issues, procedures, standards, and technical aspects such as hardware and software specifications. This paper also describes the importance of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their advantages over the traditional teaching methods. It provides exhaustive details about MOOCs, their characteristics, formats, standards, technology involved including the software and hardware for creating and hosting the video lessons over the Internet. The paper also lists out various Government and private agencies involved in creating and offering MOOCs in India. This paper also provides some standard guidelines on how to execute a MOOC programme effectively