Dear OKS members,

As some of you may know, Journal of Tropical Agriculture (JTA) published by the Kerala Agricultural University is the first agricultural science journal in India with an online editorial system. Although JTA has been published since 1961 as a print version (initially as “Agricultural Research Journal of Kerala”), it went online only in 2006 making all volumes starting from 2001 open access (please visit http://www.jtropag.in/index.php/ojs). Our project for online publishing was supported by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), New Delhi under the “Technology Information Facilitation Programme (TIFP)”. Technical assistance was provided by the SJPI project of the National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Our experience over the past two years shows that the online manuscript submission, review, tracking, editorial, and retrieval system such as OJS (Open Journal Systems) helped us to overcome some of the perennial problems that JTA – and many other similarly placed journals – faced in the past (e.g., sourcing good quality manuscripts, getting competent and timely manuscript reviews, high production costs, low visibility, and the like). First, the manuscript flow increased dramatically from 2 to 3 papers per month prior to the commissioning of the online version to 8 or 9. There has been a corresponding increase in the geographical spread of the articles too, i.e., more submissions from diverse regions such as Africa, Latin America and East Asia, besides several Indian states. Yet another advantage of the online editorial system is that the reviewers from far and wide are now more easily available, which was a major constraint with the conventional editing system.

One pitfall, however, is the lack of awareness/familiarity among some sections of the Indian scientific community on aspects relating to online submission, review etc. Nonetheless, this is not an insurmountable task and could be resolved by imparting familiarization trainings on OJS and similar other software. In this connection, I may add that recently we conducted a six-day KAU–University of Florida workshop on Scientific Writing in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management for the scientists of our National Agricultural Research System. The workshop covered aspects such as scientific writing and open access publishing. Many participants adjudged it as a very effective and useful activity.

B. Mohan Kumar
Associate Dean,
College of Forestry,
Kerala Agricultural University,
KAU PO, Thrissur 680 656, Kerala