Quality improvement and quantity enhancement of Indian LIS journals

Abstract

Journals are the main vehicles for disseminating research publications and one can gauge the standard of research in thecountry through its publications. India has a growing population of researchers and academics who want to publish andsearch for easy outlets guaranteeing quick publication. Indian journals as a whole and LIS journals in particular failmiserably when it comes to maintaining quality. There should be a first received first reviewed and first published policy tobe adopted by Indian LIS journals. Indian journal editors need to be more communicative with authors and they shouldadopt the best practices followed by the international journal editors. Indian LIS researchers have few journals andconference proceedings to publish their papers on the one hand and there is a need to publish more papers for professionalprogress. This has become important especially in the aftermath of the Academic Performance Indicators (APIs) introducedby the UGC after the VI Central Pay Revision where 55% of API scores can be claimed through publications. Throughconsortia based access, LIS researchers are exposed to what is being studied in the advanced countries. Thus more numberof papers by LIS researchers from India are appearing in international journals. There are also many papers getting wasted inconference proceedings and festschrift volumes and editor interest driven book chapters. Such publications never have awider reach and suffer from poor bibliographic control. Authors and researchers need to conserve their research output byopting for its wider dissemination and better visibility by opting to publish in quality journals and they can strengthen Indianjournals only by publishing their best papers in these journals.