Open Access Scholarly Communication by the Faculty Members of the State Public Universities in Odisha: A Study of Relevant Issues and Challenges

The meaning of 'Open Access' is to make the research and its outputs available to the general public for reading, referring, and using free of cost with as few restrictions as possible. This means the participants or contributors of the open-access journals get a chance to target a larger mass of readers than those contributing to the fee-based journals. Like other developing countries, in India also accession and dissemination of scholarly content is a big issue. Especially in states like Odisha, which is still socially, economically, and technically developing, it is a matter of concern. Because in the universities of Odisha, presently, the students and research scholars are not being able to access recent subscriptions of scholarly content due to certain financial limitations. Thus few of the research papers from the same university, which are getting published in high-priced journals, are not available for the local students for reference. The present research work is carried out to gather information about the use of open-access scholarly communication by the faculty members of the State Public Universities in Odisha which are multidisciplinary in their scope. The relevant issues, challenges, and suggestive measures are discussed about the information collected through responses.