Assessing Open Access Friendliness of National Institutes of Technology (NITs) A Data Carpentry Approach

Abstract

This research study aims to measure the Open Access (OA) friendliness of National Institutes of Technology (NITs) of India that are listed in the overall category of NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework), 2021 by taking into consideration four important OA parameters – i) OA publication share; ii) OA licensing scenario; iii) citation impact of OA publications; and iv) altmetric scores of OA publications. It deals with 64,485 publications of the selected 11 NITs during the period from 2012 to 2021 (10 years), citations received by these publications (5,42,638 citations), and altmetric attention scores of the documents (5,213 publications) during the period under study. A data carpentry tool, namely OpenRefine, and open access bibliographic/citation data sources such as Unpaywall, Dimensions, and Altmetric.com have been deployed to accomplish this large-scale study for ranking NITs by their Open Access Friendliness (OAF). The OAF indicator, as applied in this study, is a distributed weightage based 100-point scale built on top of the aforesaid OA parameters. The ranking framework shows that Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat (est. in 1961) has achieved the top position with a score of 52.12 (out of 100), but in totality only 3 NITs (out of the selected 11 NITs) crossed the 50 per cent mark in the adapted OAF scale.