[LIS-Forum] Are we really publishing scholarly and peer reviewed Journals in LIS?

[Anil Singh]

When I check my e-mail account, I observe that on an average I receive
one request in a week to send a paper for a particular LIS Journal. It
seems that there is mushrooming of LIS Journals. In India it is very
easy to start a journal. Just register the Journal with RNI (Registrar
of Newspaper/Magazine in India), constitute a dummy editorial board,
get the ISSN from NISCAIR and journal is ready to be launched. In LIS
there are approximately 80 journals. There is also no restriction to
make the journal National or International, it depends on us.

After the implementation of API/PBAS by UGC for evaluation of
performance of faculty & librarians for career advancement and
recruitment, a trend has emerged in the last five years to start an
in-house journal within the organization, or by individual association
and NGOs to get articles published at any cost, simply to meet their
scores for promotion/recruitment. By December 2009, there were 7425
journals registered in India in all areas as per ISSN register whereas
this number reached 16161 in 2013.

In many Indian universities, for the selection process the journals
are classified into national & international for allotting the marks
whereas they should have been classified as "Indian" or "Foreign"
Journals. It has been seen that many times journal having word
"International" is treated as foreign publication and it got more
marks. Therefore, most of these journals started with "International
Journal of ........"


A new trend has also started to take the handling charges from the
authors who want to publish their paper/article. It seems that authors
are able to get anything published that is in type form without
refereeing or revision. Here nobody will reject the paper. Such paid
journals have become a booming business in India but this trend has
tarnished the standard of research journals in LIS. An influential
person can get his or her paper published easily, whether it has any
novelty or not. People with little experience in a editing and
reviewing become Chief Editor and Expert Referees.  There are
instances when heads of the department tend to insert their names in
most of the papers, communicated from their department.


Here, the main point is that if somebody publishes his/her paper in
LIS journals like IASLIC Bulletin, SRELS Journal of Information
Management, Annals of Library and Information Studies etc. and another
person publishes in "International Journal of XYZ" published from
India, then who will get more point as per the UGC rule. Can we
compare the standard of above mentioned journals with any other so
called International Journal published from India?


Therefore, we should have a strict code for Academic and Research
Journals and it may be prepared by ISSN giving agency i.e., NISCAIR.
It is also necessary that, while evaluating the quality of
publications, emphasis should be given to those publications which are
indexed and cited by international databases like SCOPUS, Web of
Knowledge etc.

Feedback and comments are welcome.

Anil Singh
NCERT Library
New Delhi

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