The underlying thinking behind The Grassroots Institute (TGI) is to bridge the gaps between theoretical and discourse based knowledge developed in academic institutions and the actual field milieu using or requiring that body of knowledge. Generally observed, there is mostly a unidirectional flow of knowledge from universities or research institutions to the rural/urban communities who are treated recipient ends of development interventions. The Grassroots Institute envisages to bank for research, trainings, documentation, publication, participatory initiatives and discourses upon local and Indigenous knowledge systems and communities’ primary experiences and experiments. The documentation, publication, trainings and academic discourses can better help mainstream the grassroots knowledge sets, local innovations, local needs and local technologies in the contemporary research, teaching and extension agenda of academic institutions/platforms. Obviously, the academic institutions and research organizations need to be supported and oriented to the real and grassroots issues, strengths, dynamism and needs of the common people especially Indigenous communities. In order to realize this paradigm construct, all teachers and researchers in academic institutions should contribute to field implementation projects, and all field staff of practice-based organizations should teach or assist the students. This way, all teachers will become field practitioners too. They would have a combine of the theoretical knowledge and practical insights at a time. The philosophy of the “grassroots” validates the same interface of ground reality with the rhetoric or theory (The Grassroots Institute promotes this philosophy). With the above background and objectives, the Grassroots Institute has started publishing the journals to provide opportunities to budding researchers, young academics, scholars, teachers and field practitioners not only to document and research relevant aspects and changes at the grassroots level but also communicate the results of their findings. Their findings should reach the public domain and mainstream/elite academics. Intention of our journals is also to stimulate debates, discourses and new thinking among research communities, academics, field practitioners and policy makers for people-centric right orientation and progress.
Encouraged from the success and learnings from the important initiative “Grassroots Journals” operational since 2018, The Grassroots Institute (TGI) has initiated TGI Books. Primarily, this is an initiative to add and contribute to the objectives of TGI as highlighted in preceding para. TGI Books initiative is outlined to consciously identify the neglected zones where new books are conceived and authors are encouraged to write, followed by open access or low-cost publishing to cater the scholarly or knowledge needs of the readers, practitioners, scientists, managers, planners, policy makers, public bodies, libraries, academics and field workers. There can be the edited books and sole author books contributed by single writers or group of contributors. The first edited work of TGI is “Mountain Ecosystems and Resources Management” Vol. 1, which is followed by series of Open Access eBooks that can be seen on TGI Books home. In the year 2024, we intend to publish 9 books plus a special series on War in Ukraine.
All our books are registered with ISBN in Library and Archives Canada, and submitted digitally in Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress and numerous other library databases. Our books are distributed by EBSCO and other aggregators. We assign DOI to each book and its each contributory chapter, if the version is edited.
TGI Books publishes scientific and academic/research oriented books on the relevant topics of broad subjects like Environment, Development, Society, and Governance, touching overall the disciplines of Science, Social Science, Law, Technology, Architecture & Planning, Communication, and Agriculture. We do not publish textbooks, comics, fiction, general interest books, or games.
Initially, TGI Books cannot afford paper print books; therefore, we need to publish electronic versions of books. eBooks are distributed digitally across wider networks globally along with DOI-linked platforms. These eBooks are mostly the Open Access books.
In the Open Book Publishing Author Pay Model, we adopt 2 principal ways of publishing books: a) Sole Author Book, and b) Edited Book. A Sole Author book may be written by one or more authors (3-5). Under this arrangement, an author or group of authors proposes a title of the book in a given proposal format, and agrees to pay a publication fee ascertained mutually with the authors. Accordingly, the book is dedicated to the particular author or group of authors.
A publication fee or Article Processing Charges (APCs) is the business model for our edited book publishing. Under this arrangement, the TGO Books is to charge a nominal fee upon acceptance of an article for publication. The idea is for the fee to cover the costs of production, although in practice it might cover more or less. Because rejected articles pay no publication fees, the publication fee must cover the costs of publishing the accepted article plus the cost of reviewing the number of submissions rejected or withdrawn for each accepted submission. The invoice may go to the author, and the author or co-author directly pay the bill. Hence this model is called as the "author pays" or "author fee" model. The fee is called as "article processing charge" (APC). Majority of the articles should be linked to one of the ‘Grassroots Journals’ for benefiting the authors and easing out the editorial process. In the cases where the costs of the full book is borne by an author or group of authors, the book will include no article from other contributors and be solely dedicated to those authors only.
