India has lost its way on open access

It is an unlikely industry to have become the great success of the digital age when all the pundits were predicting its demise when the Internet era began. But helped by a bizarre business model, it has proved all the doomsayers wrong with astonishing revenues and profit margins that surpass even those of even giant corporations like Apple and Google.

It gets its products for free, top notch products that have been assessed for quality by the leading experts in their respective fields, again for free or for a pittance, and then sold them at exorbitant rates to customers. In the process the original makers of the products are themselves barred from accessing their own work because they had been forced to sign away the intellectual property rights on it!

Most readers would be surprised to learn that we are talking of the scientific, technical and medical or stm publishing industry. The core of their business is scientific journals which are published weekly or monthly, journals that carry the latest research in a large number of disciplines.

And if you think that such a limited business would yield little profit you are in for a further shock. It is an estimated US $30 billion industry whose market leaders enjoy astonishing profit margins of 35-40 per cent.

Knowledge is in their thrall as the fruits of research are behind prohibitive paywalls. Not many can afford all the journals, not even a well-endowed Harvard University. Imagine then the plight of institutions and universities in developing countries. But neither institutions nor governments have been able to alter the system.

How exactly does this system operate? Scientists, funded largely by governments, give the results of their research to stm publishers for free; other scientists who peer review the papers, that is, check the scientific validity of the research, also do the work for free.

Only the basic editing costs are borne by the publishers who then, bizarrely, sell the product back to the libraries of government-funded institutions and universities because scientists need to keep abreast of developments in their field of study, ranging from agriculture to nursing and chemical engineering.

It is as perverse a system as one can find but given the cachet of being published in the top line journals scientists have become slaves to the system. A collective stand by university libraries and government institutions could have ended the bizarre system but that did not happen.

Around 2011, many American libraries with dwindling budgets threatened to end subscriptions but the industry stood firm and continued with their high rates. In fact, their profit margins increased.

A global revolt against the commercial stm publishing model led to the open access (OA) system based on the ideal that scientific research should be free and open to all and not the preserve of the likes of Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and Nature.

Since the Budapest Declaration of 2002 by scholars and scientists, the OA movement which aims to remove all barriers to end the glaring inequities in knowledge has gained ground steadily. India has been a pioneer in OA but appears to have lost it way in the past decade.

Among the early champions was Subbiah Arunachalam, a former government scientist who set up India’s first OA repository at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. IISc researchers were encouraged to self-archive their papers in digital repositories maintained by research-based institutions.

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Departments of Biotechnology and Science and Technology have also launched OA repositories but progress has been desultory because the crusading spirit has been missing both in the scientific fraternity and in government.

Much was expected from India. Stevan Harnad, a signatory to the Budapest Declaration, wrote in 2008 that India was specially positioned to help herself while helping the rest of the world by adopting a national OA self-archiving mandate for its vast network of research institutions and funders to maximise its research impact and to improve access for itself.

Harnad believed the rest of the world would follow India’s example. Instead, the world has moved far ahead while India has stagnated in the OA movement. While much of India’s research output remains behind paywalls, Europe for instance, has embraced OA with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Among the exemplars are Denmark, the UK, France and Germany with their share of OA publishing ranging from 83 per cent to 69 per cent. As for the US, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has directed that US taxpayer-supported research should become immediately available to all freely and no later than 2025.

An expert committee of scientists on OA had suggested that the government encourage the archiving of preprints—a paper in the preliminary form of publication—and those accepted by journals. It also urged the toning up of repositories of government funding agencies.

Three years ago, the Modi government indicated that OA science would be central to its new science and technology policy. Central to this vision was the setting up of an Indian Science and Technology Archive of Research that would provide OA to the outcomes of all publicly funded research along with the publication of the full text of scientific papers as soon as these are accepted by a journal in a publicly available repository.

While these goals remain in the air, a special team of government is involved in negotiations with the global stm publishers on its One Nation One Subscription (onos) scheme.

The idea is to bring down the costs, said to be around Rs 1,500 crore annually, through a common subscription and to make the research journals available to all government institutions of higher education and research organisations, many of whom could not afford to do so on their own.

The bargaining that has been underway for long, involving 70 publishers who seem to be in no hurry to climb down.

It is not something that all scientists are in favour of. onos still means dishing out hefty sums to the publishers which goes against the grain of OA. Besides, given the vast number of research institutes and their fragmented nature such a deal is likely to leave out a number of smaller journals.

So how would the two sides agree on a common subscription? Besides, the scheme ignores a critical issue—the technical challenges of making the journals available across the country.

This was first published in the 16-30 June, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth

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