FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

My dear readers of Journal of Extension Education,

Recently I had an opportunity to handle a session on Open access journals in empowering extension researchers in an International Conference. The web-based scholarly publishing system has travelled a long way since the inception of the journals, Journal Des Scavans and Philosophical Transactions, in 1665. Since then, journals have become one of the widely growing mediums whereby researchers can communicate their results to a national and international audience of peers.

During the session, we discussed about the abundant data and information held by agricultural institutions that need to be publicly accessible online, and reusable. Implementation of Open access could be the right initiative in this direction, which could benefit research and researchers.

The three principles of open access laid down (Madalli, 2013) are:

1. Knowledge unto him who produces knowledge - Freeing knowledge from the shackles of economic compulsions. This completes the cycle of knowledge and spirals it into growth.

2. Scholarship is the same; priced or open- Scholarship is the same no matter where. OA content is not low quality and all that is published in priced journals is not high quality.

3. If one is convinced others will be - Working towards National Level policies and Mandates. Open Access is one way to bridge the gap by making information resources available freely. A systematic and persistent approach to Open Access will pave the way to true Democratization of Knowledge.

We were under the impression that most of the journals in social/behavioural sciences such as agricultural extension would have gone open-access. This has not been the case so far, with penetration of open access publishing in social sciences much slower compared to other sciences. Many journals in this discipline continue to be distributed in print form, not moving to online, open-access forms.

A study conducted by Edgar & Willinsky (2010) on journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS) found that only 30 % of the journals in Social Sciences are open-access.

You may be aware that the online version of JEE is open access and articles of JEE are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. JEE provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We are indexed in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) which is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

I hope JEE readers find the papers in this issue, interesting. Do send your feedback to editorextension@gmail.com. .

D Puthira Prathap

Chief Editor

JEE 29(3)