Formation and Open Access of Institutional Electronic Research Corners for Promotion of Communication Facilities and Quality Research

Abstract

Indian higher education institutions (HEIs) are struggling hard to get a berth among top-rated HEIs in the world. One of the important parameters that restrict our HEIs from the list of top-notch global HEIs is ‘contribution to research’. It does not mean that Indian HEIs don’t have quality researchers to produce world class research output. Had that been the case, Indian researchers doing research abroad would not have done miracles with their unique research output in varied domains. The hindrance for researchers in India could be owing to improper communication facility that fails to exchange ideas and outcomes of research among peers. Thus, the urge for formation of sound institutional electronic repositories, i.e., electronic research corners (e-research corners) has crop up. Mere formation of e-research corners won’t suffice to address the issue. Besides formation, e-research corners need to be open accessed. University Grants Commission (UGC) of India has established an Inter-University Center called Information and Library Network Center (Inflibnet), which is the best example of open access institutional repositories. While some HEIs of India do have their research corners that are accessed by only the internal stakeholders, some other HEIs don’t have any such repositories as such. On the backdrop of the necessity of formation and open access of institutional electronic repositories, this paper focuses on unfolding how open access to sound e-research corners promote quality education. Besides, it will also design a framework that will assist the HEIs to build sound e-research centers. For the purpose, in-depth interviews will be conducted with 50 researchers working in reputed HEIs in Bhubaneswar to ascertain how open access e-research centers facilitate quality research. Focus Group Discussion will also be conducted among experts in the field like research heads of selected HEIs, Chief Librarians of established Libraries and reputed educationists of the State for designing the framework to form e-research centers. The findings of this research will help in communicating ideas and findings of researchers to all the corners that matter for quality research.

Open Access Research Trends in Higher Education: A Literature Review

“…Previous studies had identified the Acceptance of OA as well as the Arguments promoting OA [9]. The Tools trend includes works related to the tools aimed at facilitating the development, use, or access to digital resources are included, by integrating different resources [38,40,50], complementing the integration efforts [58], presenting the elements necessary for developing and publishing open academic courses, and allowing different national standards to be compatible [66]. Previous works don't seem to address the tools as such but in the relation to the actors that use some OA resources [11] or see them as a part of the technical barriers [11].…”

“…A group of authors focused their attention on the "Austrian Transition to Open Access (AT2OA)", authorized by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy [19,33,35,[38][39][40][41]. According to [29] in this project, running from 2017 to 2020, "the 21 public universities cooperate to promote OA through concerted measures" [29].…”

“…In this trend, the works related to tools aimed at facilitating the development, use, or access to digital resources are included. A group of works focuses on tools that integrate different resources [38,40,50], while others propose tools to complement the integration efforts [58] and others work on the elements necessary for developing and publishing open academic courses, including the tools that would allow different national standards to be compatible [66].…”

Implementation of Open Science Principles in Educational Research: Seen through the Prism of Teachers’ Engagement in Data Exchange

“…It is desirable for teachers' efforts to exchange ED to be supported by the appropriate educational policy on the control of research quality at the level of the department, higher educational establishment, state, the academic community, etc. We did not aim to develop special recommendations because we consider it reasonable to start by implementing a complex of measures at the institutional and individual levels for strong support of Open Science (Swain, 2020), as proposed by the scientists of the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine.…”

“…implementation of the principles of Open Science in scientific and educational spheres (Swain, 2020);  modernization of the main priority areas of psychological and pedagogical research and updating the training content for academic staff (Sovetkanova et al, 2021);  appropriate scientific support for the creation of national educational and information spaces (Santoso et al, 2019;Musa, 2019;  use of electronic systems with open access to facilitate quality research (Spirin et al, 2017);  raising teachers' awareness of the ways and prospects of informatization of education (Zhornova & Zhornova, 2014) and the use of innovative pedagogical and digital technologies, Web 2.0 services in the educational process, etc. (Revenko, 2021);  research into innovative methods of education and information and communication technologies developed in Ukraine and abroad (in particular, online platforms for distance learning) to improve the quality of the educational process (Mann et al, 2020);  the use of Open Educational Resources by teachers (Guo et al, 2015), etc.…”