An essential 5 point checklist before publishing your next research article

In today’s academia research publication is done for two purposes, either for career advancement or growing one’s reputation as an expert in a field. Govt of India have mandated that research publications are necessary to get a PhD, getting an appointment as a faculty in college and universities or for promotion after getting a job as a part of career advancement scheme. As publications are necessary part of academia, many cunning activities are happening in the Indian publishing industry (Read this blog post to know how the journal publishing industry works). In recent times many such news came up where researchers, scholars and professors of reputed institutions have been fallen to the trap of fake publishing. Subhra Priyadarshini  have reported in Nature Asia about India leading the race of article submission in predatory (fake) journals, Indian Express reported about how a Hyderabad based company were looting academia by publishing 177 fake journals.

This type of incidents has not only happened in India, but happened in other countries of the world too. That’s why OECD countries, European Research Foundation has their specific mandate regarding publication. Publication in this type of journals not only degrades the reputation of a researchers, but also it is a waste of time and hard work as those type of publications are of no use for career advancement or recruitment.

So here is a checklist of 5 simple points which you can do before publishing your next article in a journal-

1. Before submission of your article, search the name of the journal in Beall’s list of predatory journal .   Beall’s list is a list, that finds out the predatory (Fake) journals and their publishers name. If your choice journal name appears in the list, avoid publishing in that journal or any journal from the publisher of the journal
2. After step one, if the name is not in Beall’s list, then search the name of the journal in UGC approved journal list , Scopus indexed journal list and Web of Science indexed journal list. If your choice journal name appears in any of these list, then you can publish in the journal. Don’t forget to match the ISSN no of the journal too. If your journal name also doesn’t appear in any of these list, then permanently drop the plan to publish in that journal.
3. Beware of false Impact Factor and Indexing claim. There are only two world accepted journal indexing platform (which are also part of Times Higher Education ranking, NIRF ranking etc.) viz- Web of Science and Scopus. Don’t go for any other indexing claim. Also remember that Impact Factor is a registered entity of Web of Science and can be assigned only by Web of Science. Other platform’s Impact Factors can be regarded as fake. It is to be remembered that indexing platforms like Web of Science, Scopus have team of experts that studies a journal’s performance and then only adds them to their list. Google Scholar indexes everything from good to bad without any review and Google Scholar indexing is not counted of academic performance.
4. You don’t always need to pay for publishing in peer reviewed journal. Good journals give the author an option to make the article Open access so that the article remains free to be accessed and downloaded and the author retains the copyright in such scenarios. Pay the Article Processing Charge only when point no 2 is true for the journal.
5. Peer review is an essential part and it is a time consuming process. Good journals where article submission rate is high, peer review takes time approximately from one month to some time a year too. So avoid publishing is such journals which claims to do peer review in weeks.

Open Access Publishing: Why academia should care about it!

Open Access (OA) publishing means those scholarly publications which are available free of cost online, which can be distributed without restrictions.  According to famous OA advocator Peter Suber “Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” The conventional process of publications has limitations in terms of Access and uses. Restriction in access means they are not free; & restriction in uses means they are bounded by copyright law.  More about the conventional journal publishing industry can be read here. 

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines it as “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.”

Open Access movement started in 1991 with the establishment of arxiv.org which is a repository for preserving pre-prints of physics articles. Later it was supported by major public declarations like Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002, Bethesda statement in 2003, Berlin Declaration in 2003. Recently in February 2018, the Delhi Declaration on Open access came up with more than 120 signatories.

Why Open Access:

• The core philosophy of open access is unrestricted flow of information from source to users. For example, if the outcome of an agricultural research activity is thought to be useful for farmers, then that research should reach the farmers without any kind of price and license barrier.

• The commercial publishers hardly make any contribution in R&D activities for generating research related content published in them. It is the govt. and private institutions that make funding towards research. Now if they publish their research outcome in those journals, the institutions need to pay the publishers again for accessing their own content.

• The price of commercial journals has increased tremendously in the last decade, which have made it impossible for libraries to purchase all of them.

Means of Publishing OA contents.

OA contents can be made available via Open access journals and Open access repositories.

• Open access journals publish articles in Open access mode. It is called the “Gold” way of publishing. The contents of OA journal are always free. The contents are always peer reviewed. Sometimes authors need to pay some amount of money as Article Processing Charge(APC) for making the article open access and tis APC charge when needed can be covered under research grant. Funding of many Open access journals are backed by Govt. agencies (like CSIR, DRDO journals in India), Scholarly associations or by corporate funding (Medknow Publications Journals in India), authors need not to pay APC charge for publishing in these kind of Open access journals. Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) is a portal that lists open access journals published all over the world.

• Open access repositories are digital archives that collects and preserves Open access articles. This is called the Green way of publishing OA contents. The OA repositories do not conduct peer review themselves, but archives contents peer reviewed by others i.e. contents are preserved in repositories after publication in any other source. Now most of the commercial journals allow to archive contents published in commercial journal too if the journal permits it. But it is always advisable to read the journals policy of self-archiving. 

  

  SHERPA-RoMEO archiving colour codes

Myths about open access:

• OA contents do not have copyright: Many people think that open access contents do not have any kind of copyright. It is completely wrong. The author right is always protected by copy right in Open Access contents. It is the distribution right for the users which is more flexible for OA contents. The readers are authorized to do unlimited copies of OA contents and distribute it to others until and unless it is not meant for business. OA contents often licensed with creative commons licensing attributes.

• OA articles are not peer reviewed: Many people often mistake and compares genuine open access journals with Predatory journals. Predatory journals are those journals that publishes articles by taking money from authors without any peer review. OA journals are genuine journals that conducts peer review and follow all the ethical steps in publishing. It is for sustaining the monetary burden of publication, for which genuine OA journals not backed by any kind of external funding asks for nominal cost for publication. It is needed to be remembered that OA articles are meant to be free for the readers. PLOS One, PLOS Biology are some of world’s leading OA journals having very high impact factor.

How to find Dewey Decimal Class no (DDC) for books online?

Dewey Decimal Classification is one of the oldest library classification schemes, is used in more than 2 lakh libraries from 135 different countries (as per Wikipedia). This classification system actually helps libraries to  arrange books in a standard order which in return helps in easy retrieval of the book by any amateur library user. When the print version of the DDC, which consists of 4 volumes (Current edition is 23rd edition) costs around Rs 30000 INR, which makes it very hard for smaller libraries to buy it. And also the manual findings of the class no makes the process very time  consuming and tedious. Well there are currently numerous sources from which the reliable and accurate DDC class no can be found out with out buying the costly 4 volume DDC book and without going through the tedious classification process.
Here are some mentioned.

1. OCLC classify : It is an experimental web service sponsored by OCLC, free to be used by any user.  You can directly go to this link  and type in the ISBN or the title or author name of the book and get the DDC and LOC class no of the book.  You can actually see a break of number of libraries all over the world using a specific class no for a specific book which makes the data more authentic and reliable.

OCLC classify

2. INDcat: It is an Union catalogue of Indian libraries that have record of more than 84
lakhs books from 174 different Indian University libraries. The books can be searched by Author, Title , ISBN and the whole  cataloguing record of the book can be seen. The class no and the holding library records are also available in  the INDcat database. You just note down the class no for your required book.

INDcat

So make use of this online services and pass through the tedious classification process. HAPPY CATALOGUING 

Useful TIPS for Enhancing your Mendeley Experience!!

I have been using Mendeley since last one and half year and during this time have a total collection of more than 300 papers related to my research work. So with my experience of using Mendeley, I am sharing some tips for more user friendly use of Mendeley.

Mendeley is a reference management tool that lets you make collection and organize research papers, read them in an interactive way by taking notes and generate citation for papers in more than 2000 different citation style that Mendeley have in its collection. Currently it is owned by Elsevier, but the software’s desktop version is freely downloadable. The cloud version gives 2GB of free space. Mendeley’s cloud version gives a social network like interface where user can directly interact with other scholars, or form a group for sharing research related literature, or search the worldwide Mendeley library. Because of this SNS like feature Mendeley readership is now a part of the new trend of research evaluation known as the Altmetrics or Article Level Metrices.

So today here I am sharing some tips which can enhance your Mendeley uses experience.

1. Always sign in and keep syncing your Mendeley desktop collection to Mendeley web, you all know the obvious benefit of that.
2. Always check the details of the papers are correct or not while importing them to Mendeley. Mendeley have a very strong metadata extraction feature, by which it extract the metadata elements of a paper like authors, journal name, volume, issue etc. But some time it fails to do so. So every time you import a paper don't forget to check the details and correct them if necessary. Because this may lead to inaccurate citation and inaccurate citation may lead to plagiarism also.
3. It’s a possibility that during your research career you will come across hundreds of paper. So Manage your collection in an order which you personally can understand, after all its your own personnel digital library  One tip is you can arrange the research papers based on some folder based approach. For example if you are writing a review paper, say about the "History of Digital Library" and your review paper will cover these subheadings like Introducion, History of Digital Library, Technical feasibility and Metadata Issues. First make a Master folder and dump all the papers that you think is essential for you for the study. Then make some sub folders under the master folder and name the subfolders according to the subheadings that you are going to cover in that review paper. So here in this case the name of the subfolders will be Introduction, History of Digital Library , Technical feasibility, Metadata Issues as per your review's subheading. Then after reading the papers from the master folder you will know which paper is essential for which part, then accordingly you arrange them to the folders of your choice.                                                                                                
4. This type of arrangement will help you in more focused reading and easy arrangement of  the literature in your thesis or research paper. Also while putting citation using the word  plugin, you will find your papers more easily.
5. Make best use of the Note making facility of Mendeley for each paper. Make an abstract note using you own language for each paper. Actually you can directly make the final lines that you are going to write from that paper in your review. This will reduce the time while you will write the final paper, you just need to copy paste those notes to your paper. This also helps to kick start your research work especially if you had a long break in between your research.
6. Add your own personnel keywords to each paper, as this will help you in accurate searching of the papers of your need in your own library. Bcause the keywords you make, becomes part of the Mendeley index.

Let's celebrate this Librarians Day in a different way

S R Ranganathan, a father figure for library science or for modern day world Information Science is an inspiration for all.  A person who took up a job of revamping libraries in a time when the India's independence struggle was on high. I mean can you imagine a time when the Gandhis, the Bhagat Singhs were the face of Indian people and nobody gave a damn about the libraries. Ranganathan, as a mathematics professor could also  have a silent life of being a mathematics professor at the Madras University or he could have also joined the India's freedom struggle like many youths of his age, but he chose something he cared about which India will need after its freedom to make it a better country, an  of course that too with no expectation. He dedicated his life to something that has no ground existence that time. But his dedication leads to development of  profession which people didn't thought of. A profession which is noble, which is challenging, and of course which give you satisfaction.
But today we the library professionals think our profession as very tough, we link societies view point to our profession, we complain about limited resources, we complain about less respect to our profession and many more, in a time when information is thought of to be the fourth primery need of human survival like  Roti, Kapda or Makan. But do you really think if Ranganthan has have thought all these bulshits that time, we would have existed now. Obviously there would have been no existence of us, the library profession. Do you  think a person who did so much for the society, for the country  and for humanity, will he be happy if we celebrate his birthday by talking only about his works but not learn anything from his life. 
So let's celebrate this librarians day in a different way and learn from our Father's life which actually tells us to lead a happy life not only in our profession but also in our day to day life.

• Take up challenges: Always ready to take challenge, Don't run way from it. Face it, Fight wth it and Conquer it, like Ranganathan did. 

• Do Duty without expectation: Don't always expect some praise from others for every little work you do. Ranganathan didn't expected anything for his duties, but he is followed now all over the world, why? Because, he was dedicated. 

• Think of the Society: Always think of the society, what society needs is your need and you are the one who can fulfill it. A small work for the society makes a big impact. 

• Don't complain, you yourself is the best resource: Don't complain about limited resources you have. Ranganathan didn't had any support, but he did because he knew he can. So next time you make excuse think of Ranganathan. You have the knowledge,you have the internet. Start serving information for all.

• Communicate with people, understand others feeling: Ranganathan sai,"If you want to be a good reference librarian, you must learn to overcome not only yourshyness but also the shyness of others." Take this line in mind ALWAYS!!

•  Follow his five laws: The five laws are the best guideline for serving information, don't just remember it, but implement it in day do day life. That would be best respect for him.

So, let's celebrate this librarians day in a different way, its not only a birthday but a day to follow a saint's legacy, and his learning.