(22 Feb 2024) Vikramshila Education has announced the launch of its first platform, Aakashganga Open, which aims to help disseminate research and democratise access to knowledge while championing affordability, transparency, and community engagement.
Aakashganga Open is designed to host mega journals alongside journals published by societies, institutes, and universities keen on embracing open-access publishing. What sets Aakashganga Open apart, the founders say, is its ‘unwavering commitment to providing the lowest and most affordable article processing charges worldwide, ensuring that scholarly communication remains inclusive and accessible to all’.
The platform offers a comprehensive and transparent peer review process – with pre-publishing double anonymous peer review as well as post-publishing open review, ensuring rigor, integrity, and accountability at every stage of the publication journey. Aakashganga Open boasts a fully automated system, streamlining the registration process, article submission, editorial review, and peer review through state-of-the-art algorithms. This, the founders say, ensures that every article goes through rigorous scrutiny while benefiting from a transparent and digitised review process.
The platform’s community-driven approach is aimed at empowering academics to actively participate as publishing editors and peer reviewers – with incentives, grants and discounts provided to authors, publishing editors, and reviewers. It has support from premier Indian institutions such as IIMs and private institutions like Manav Rachna and BIMTECH, and aims to become India’s premier open access repository of academic content.
The press release in full is here.
