Trends in Open Access Academic Outputs of State Agricultural Universities in India: Patterns from OpenAlex

2025-03-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic, longitudinal analysis of open access (OA) scholarly output from Indian state agricultural universities (SAUs). Employing a mixed-methods approach—including OpenAlex API data harvesting, OpenRefine-based data cleaning, ArcGIS spatial visualization, and Excel-based statistical analysis—it examines 97,536 OA publications from 2014–2023 across temporal, spatial, institutional, authorial, journal-level, funding, and thematic dimensions. Results reveal Gold OA dominance (57.27%), yet 78.34% appear in low-impact journals; Tamil Nadu and Punjab SAUs lead in overall output and Green OA/funding performance, respectively. The study identifies critical structural gaps, notably misalignment between article processing charge (APC) expenditures and national OA policy objectives. These findings provide empirical evidence to refine agricultural research funding mechanisms, enhance OA quality, and inform context-sensitive, differentiated OA policy formulation for India’s agricultural higher education sector.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

Abstract

Purpose: The study examines the Open Access (OA) landscape of Indian state agricultural universities, focusing on OA growth, leading institutions, prolific authors, preferred sources, funding, APC usage, and trending topics. It aims to identify research gaps, guide future research, and support policymakers in developing effective OA policies Design/methodology/approach The experiment utilized the OpenAlex database to collect global open access (OA) publications from Indian state agricultural universities over the past ten years (2014-2023). Using the Research Organization Registry ID, 97,536 publications were extracted. Data analysis was performed with OpenRefine, and ArcGIS 10.8 and Microsoft Excel were used for visualization. Findings: The global OA research output from state agricultural universities amounted to 65,889 publications across five OA categories: Green OA (7.35%), Diamond OA (6.74%), Gold OA (57.27%), Hybrid OA (9.24%), and Bronze OA (19.41%). Notably, 78.34% of articles were published in 864 low-impact domestic journals. Tamil Nadu Agricultural University produced the most publications in Gold, Diamond, Hybrid, and Bronze OA categories, while Punjab Agricultural University excelled in Green OA and received the highest funding, incurring the most article processing charges (APCs). Collaborative research focusing on agricultural policies, rice water management, soil fertility, and crop productivity had a greater impact. Originality/value The experiment is the first effort to evaluate the OA global academic research outputs of Indian state agriculture universities. The findings offer institutions, state governments, and funding agencies the opportunity to prioritise open-access publishing to promote sustainable agricultural research. Research limitations/implications The study is limited to the publications data indexed in the OpenAlex database.

Problem

• Analyzes Open Access trends in Indian agricultural universities
• Identifies leading institutions and prolific authors in OA research
• Assesses funding and APC usage for sustainable agricultural research

Innovation

• Utilized OpenAlex database for OA publications
• Analyzed data with OpenRefine and ArcGIS
• Visualized findings using Microsoft Excel