SAARC Countries contribution to open access publishing: A study

Open Access (OA) publication model has revolutionized the way people publish their scholarly content and access them. While the OA has benefitted the common man at large many governments are still struggling to make it mandatory to publish the public funded project outputs in OA journals. The quantum of OA publications is increasing alarmingly, as the quality of the content being published is compromised through some OA publishers. This paper analyses the OA contents that are generated from the SAARC countries. For the current study the databases like DOAJ, DOAR and Open DOAR are consulted. This study provides a detailed picture of OA repositories from SAARC region based on country, software used, content type, language, number of languages used in individual repositories etc. The open access journals are analyzed based on country of publication, publication fee charged, language of publication etc., also the growth of OA journals in the region is studied in a chronological order.