Book Review

PANORAMA OF OPEN ACCESS: Progress, Practices and Prospect/ Edited by Ashis Biswas and Mayuri Das Biswas. New Delhi: Ess Ess Publications, 2022.

Globally, the year 2020 brought enormous changes and arduous challenges. A great deal of damage has been done to almost every aspect of our lives, including health, education, employment, the market economy, industrial and agricultural productivity, and almost every aspect of our daily lives. A growing number of hindrances in the educational system forced authorities to rethink and reconstruct the teaching methods and ways to spread knowledge. As a result, open access to information, open educational resources, prior learning assessment, open degree plans, and competency-based learning have become popular. The unforeseen pandemic has also resulted in open access (OA) solutions being more valuable and necessary to achieve equity in the nation. There is no doubt that librarians and information centres have a crucial role to play in this regard.

In these circumstances, a new book on OA entitled “PANORAMA OF OPEN ACCESS: Progress, Practices and Prospect” edited by Dr. Ashis Biswas (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-9073) and Mayuri Das Biswas has been published by Ess Ess Publications, New Delhi in 2022. The book has featured a broad range of topics such as measurement of Scholarly Communication, Open Access Publishing Models and Market, Open Access Initiatives, Publishing System and Technical Developments, Copyright protection, Information Literacy and Role of Library and Information Centres. This book is ideally designed for researchers, scientists, policymakers, librarians, publishers, academicians, and LIS students seeking current research on OA, its progress, prospects and practices prevailing in today’s technologically driven world.

The book is organized into seven subthemes (see the attached content page). Each subtheme comprises of chapters related to the concept of OA from different approaches. The introductory chapter begins with a general overview of the theme OA; its potential to direct the Information centres with a new dimension in delivering effective services through multiple sources to create a knowledgeable society. The following chapter emphasizes the philosophy behind OA movement and the prevailing nature of scholarly publishing. The third chapter compares the growth of OA journals with subscription-based journals and examines the prevalence of OA resources in different subject fields thereby attempting to improve research productivity of the scholars. The chapter which follows next quite interestingly measures the contributions of the top-ranked Indian Institute of Technologies in support of the green path of OA by using data wrangling tools. An attempt to analyze the OA movement of scholarly communication in the major Asian countries has been projected in the very next chapter. The sixth and last chapter of the second part of the book explores the quality of journals using exclusive machine learning techniques with extracted attributes from journal metadata. Part three explores the OA publishing models which have been elaborately dealt with in the seventh chapter. The eighth and last chapter of this part describes the pricing models and gives an overview of the publishing market. The following chapter highlights the initiatives and implementations adopted by Science Central under the Institutions of Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. On the other hand, a detailed comparative analysis has been projected on Open Government Data Initiatives in SAARC Countries in the next chapter. The chapter which follows this vividly projects the trends of OA publishing in India. The following is a study that reviews the prevailing Open Publishing Review systems and showcases the possible bottlenecks of traditional peer review systems in the open science movement. The last chapter of this part describes the features and functioning of AMBRA an Open Source Platform for publishing scholarly articles. The next portion of the book emphasizes the copyright protection and other legal issues of OA publishing. Finally, the last part of the book highlights the significance of OA to information in raising the information literacy graph of rural communities. It suggests a panchayat–based e-governance model especially in connection with the pressing need to provide a solution to the scientific and educational divide between the urban and rural regions. This is followed by a projection of a study that applies Linked Open Data methodology to access information and discusses its usage in the perspective of library and information centres. The concluding chapter discusses the role of Librarians to promote usage of OA. It further investigates various initiatives that a librarian can take up in promoting the OA in academic ecosystem.

It is hoped that this book would successfully help in developing a concrete concept of OA for the students of LIS and other disciplines as well as for the researchers and scholars in making the right decision regarding scholarly publication. The foreward written by Dr. Arun Kumar Chakraborty has tuned the ring of OA in the proper chord from the beginning.

The cover design, binding and printing of the book are also good. The price of the book is Rs. 1600/-.

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About the Editors

Dr. Ashis Biswas, (orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-9073) MLIS, MPHIL, PHD, Librarian, Victoria Institution (College), Kolkata is also associated with IGNOU as an Academic Counsellor since 2007. He is the Joint Editor of ‘College Libraries (WBCLA)’ (a UGC Care listed journal) and Joint Secretary of West Bengal College Librarians’ Association (WBCLA). He is a life member of BLA, IASLIC and Indian Science Congress Association. He has authored a book and several book chapters and research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and delivered 07 invited lectures as a resource person in national and international levels Webinars. His areas of interest are Open Access, Green Library, Community Information Service, Management of Library and Information Centres and LIS Education.

 Mayuri Das Biswas, MA, MLIS, MPHIL, Head Librarian, J.D. Birla Institute, Kolkata has more than 15 years of professional experience in various academic institutions. She has also served IGNOU as Academic Counsellor. She has a number of publications including book chapter, articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings to her credit. Presently, she is pursuing Ph.D. from University of Calcutta. She is also a member, Serial Division, IASLIC. Her research areas of interest include Open Access, Research Data Management, Library & Information Management and Services.