Opportunities and Challenges in Golden Open Access Publishing in Food Science and Technology

摘要

Purpose:The worldwide open access movement has impacted a paradigm shift in the scholarly communication arena. Traditional publishing model is slowly and steadily moving towards the open access (OA) model as not only non-profit publishers but also commercial publishers are adopting the OA model as a viable solution of the future. OA with its promise to transform the scholarly publishing landscape by providing free and seamless access to research articles published worldwide has significantly impressed the academia. Publishing in OA journals is considered to be the most preferred route to open access also known as the "gold road". In most cases, authors may have to pay a publication fee known as article-processing charge (APC) to get their articles published in an OA journal. The recent expansion of OA journals across scientific disciplines, geographical regions and diverse types ofpublishers has raised concern regarding the quality standards followed by the majority of them for peer-review process, e-publishing, archiving and sustainability. As such then are strong demands for building quality standards for the open access scholarly publishing. Methodology: OA journals in the area of Food Science & Technology (FST) are analysed and highlight basic criteria regarding quality evaluation. OA journals in FST were selected from various internet resources viz., Directory of OA journals (DOAJ), Beall's list, Academic Journals, Biomed Central, The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and commercial publishers and applied the Jittering criteria on the basis of their year of availability, country and ISSN to study the OA publishing trend in the FST domain. Various benchmarking standards like Impact Factor, Scimago, SNIP, ISSN, citation received for a period of previous two years, number of articles published, provision of doi, archiving policies and article processingfee were analyzed and compared.Findings: The open-access movement has opened up a wide world of opportunities to the scientists and researchers around the world to showcase their research and readers all over the world the choice of unlimited access toR&D output freely and immediately.Originality/Value: This study on OA publishing may improve the reader's perception and also the creator about OA in general and in the FST domain. This would consecutively result in extensive scattering of data and more noteworthy advances in science.