Coimbatore: The University Grants Commission (UGC)’s ‘Consortium of Academic and Research Ethics (Care)’ has so far added around 1,000 Indian academic journals to its list since it was formed last November, and the list is growing, said Bhushan Patwardhan, vice-chairman of UGC. He said the UGC was seeking to add more ‘credible Indian journals’ to its list under Care.
Patwardhan, who was in the city recently, said CARE has stakeholders from across fields such as statutory bodies, academies and councils to review the journals every quarter.
Last November, the UGC had formed CARE to ‘prepare a list of credible quality journals’ in the fields of social sciences, humanities, languages, arts, culture, Indian knowledge systems etc. The move came after bogus journals, predatory and paid academic journals started mushrooming across the country.
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“Studies showed that 88% of journals in the UGC approved list were dubious. India has earned a very bad reputation because of this in the past 15 years. So we wanted to create a credible database of reputed journals to stop the practice of pay and publish,” he said.
Pointing out that the consortium has bodies such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, he said the members together decide which journals are good to be included in the list.
He said the databases such as Scopus and Web of Science could not be followed blindly in the process, as there were many journals in Indian languages and Indian knowledge systems which cannot go into those databases. “For that we need to have system like Care,” he said.
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