Measuring the open access friendliness of the state universities in India through data carpentry

Abstract

The present research aims to investigate the open access (OA) friendliness of the twenty-six (26) state universities that have been ranked in the National Institutional Ranking Framework’s (2021) ‘Overall Category’ (Rank Band 1: Top 100). The open-access ranking framework, as designed, is based on four major OA areas: i) proportion of OA publications by a given state university; ii) use of a license in sharing OA publications; iii) citations received by OA publications; and iv) popularity of OA publications in socio-academic web-space as indicated by altmetric attention scores.Ten years(2012–2021) primary publication data for the 26 state universities from Scopus was collected. We analyzed a total of 1,57,971 publications; 1,60,723 citations received by these publications; and altmetric attention scores received by 26,996 publications from these 26 state universities listed in the NIRF 2021 overall category. It applies an open-source data wrangling tool (OpenRefine) and a number of ODbL-based (Open Database License) data sources to gather the necessary data elements required for this large-scale study. The study finds that almost 98% of the state universities enlisted in the top 100 overall category passed the 50 marks on a 100-point scale, and the newly established state universities’ open access friendliness is greater than the older ones. The final open access friendliness ranking places King Georges Medical University at the top, with leading scores in areas I (share of OA publications) and III (OA citation share), while Panjab University has the highest value in Area II (use of license in OA publications) and Delhi Technological University has the highest value in Area IV (OA altmetric attention score).