I have taken birth in a small village called lingapuram of charla mandal khammam dist, a place where 100% population depend on agriculture. It is prominent for chilli cultivation in telangana. Being a son of farmer i have practical experience of how hard is farming. Education taught me how important is agriculture and farmer to this society. So i decided to help farmer by developing new varieties of chilli that can yield much production. I have obsession with soil and wanted to isolate organisms that improve crop production. That’s how i entered into my Ph.D in soil microbiology. With the advice and constant support from my gurus Prof. Pavan Kumar Pindi, MSR Krishna and Prof. Vijaya sarathi, i concentrated on soils of bhadrachalam forest area and isolated efficient bacterial strains for crop production. We have standardised a protocol for DNA isolation from soil samples cost effectively which got published in prestigious springer Journal 3-biotech. We proposed a formula for BIO-GEO fertilizers and novel criteria of soil selection for developing crop specific shelf life free biofertilizers.

During my Ph.D i realized that access to world scientific literature is very scarce in Indian universities. The situation is not different in several other nations in the world. It was at my initial stage of Ph.D while i was searching deep for the literature, i discovered a huge gap of what’s being discovered and what’s accessed. Most of the core stream journals are subscription based which require money to get access. The university subscriptions are limited, while the charges are heavy that a state and central university cannot afford some times. Open access journals seem to be potential alternative for an aspiring researcher and a developing country like India. The interesting fact is except western world, most of the 3^rd world countries are facing the same issue with accessibility. This made me take an initiative to make scientific literature free and open access to researchers across the globe; and started a company Elyns Group-Explore and Expand.

The Journey was not easy, indeed the inception too. Lot of hurdles discouragement and demoralization. Of course common for a start-up. People like Dr. Bealls names us predatory...! My previous experience as a Scientific Editor helped me a lot in overcoming the problems. Slowly universities started believing us. More than 1500 professors, from across 100 universities including Stanford, Harvard and Oxford came on board for reviewing the article voluntarily. A resent testimonial from Dr. Paul G Mathew, Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and a video testimonial from Dr. Efren Rael from Stanford University School of Medicine proves our quality. This gave us confidence on what we are doing and hope on new projects.

Email spamming has been a serious issue in online scientific Publishing. It’s a sensitive issue too. Companies including Springer-Nature (as per Dr. Beall’s report) are following the same email campaign technique to reach the ground level researcher. I think it’s necessary in a competitive market to advertise our product and expose our service. Unfortunately this email campaigns turning out to be a puzzling issue as to understand which journal is legitimate. Also, there are several other scales available in the market to analyse the quality of a journal making a reader/research confused. For example there is an alternative to impact factor like journal impact factor, Global Impact factor, etc., which are not being issued by SCI. There is no single unique metric by which a journal can be assessed. Of course SCI impact factor is a widely accepted metric but, several studies report with the flourish of open access the SCI not is being considered as a unique metric. Altmetrics which counts the authors personnel contribution to science is now a days getting tremendous attention in the scientific community. I think it’s time to correct the scientific metrics. GRESTN is coming up with solutions in the form of research tools, software and web platforms.