www.IndianJournals.com Members Copy, Not for Commercial Sale Downloaded From IP - 117.240.50.232 on dated 28-Jun-2019 LIBRARY HERALD Vol 57 No 1 March 2019 * Research Scholar, RCU, Belagavi,Librarian,Government First Grade College, Ramdurg-591123, District Belgaum, Karnataka, India. E-mail: hanif.bn@gmail.com ** Librarian, University of Hyderabad, Central University PO, Hyderabad- 500046, Telangana, E-mail: bravicta@gmail.com Open Access Journals and their Research Impact - A Pilot Study MOHMED HANIF NASHIPUDI* DR. B. RAVI** The purpose of this paper is to study the journal impact rankings of the open access SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) database. The paper looks at the SJR database which offers essential scientometric information for more than 28,000 scholarly and professional journals based on data licensed from Elsevier’s Scopus database. In this study, an attempt is made to study the research impact of the open access Library & Information Science (LIS) journals for ten years. This study tries to emphasis the importance and quality of the open access journals in the field of LIS and the growth of their research impact indicated by the different journal quality indicators by the open access movement. Keywords: Open Access Publishing, Open Access Journals, Gold Open Access, Indian OA Journals, Scholarly Communication, and Research Impact. 1 INTRODUCTION Scholars want to be able to have free access to several types of sources. The modernphenomenon relating to free online access to digital information is Open Access. Thepublishing policies of Open Access improve the impact of scholarly literature becausescholars publish their scientific articles without the expectation of payment. The Budapest Open Access Initiative from 2002 and Berlin Declaration on Open Access toKnowledge in the Sciences and Humanities dated 2003, were the first which included adefinition, information and the statements of Open Access phenomenon. It was decidedthat there were two roads to Open Access: (i) Open Access journals – the golden road to Open Access. The articles from the selected journals are openly accessible immediately. These journals will not charge subscriptions or access fees. Part of the DOI: 10.5958/0976-2469.2019.00004.6