‘Indians Spend Nearly $2.4 million to Publish Research in Open Access Journals’

Sahana Ghosh

The study does not include the expenditure on OA papers published by Indian researchers in subscription journals which make papers available on OA on payment of a fee. Raising the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals, the authors opine the funding agencies in India should “forbid researchers who are now using research grants” (funds provided only for research) to cover APCs. The analysis shed light on the fact that Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying APC, ranging from Rs 500 to $5,000, in the five years, to publish about 15,400 papers. Use of OA journals levying APC has “increased” over the four years from 242 journals and 2,557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been a spike in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a slower pace. More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLOS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often, the authors note. Though most leading Indian journals are open access ones and do not charge APC, there is a leaning towards “foreign journals” in the pecking order. “Most Indian journals are nowhere near the top in this order. In general, researchers prefer to publish their papers in prestigious journals (as considered by the community), irrespective of the publishing country of a journal. However, most of the prestigious journals (in science, technology and medicine) are published from either North America or Western Europe,” Madhan observed. To circumvent the expenditure, Madhan suggested researchers make their papers OA in two ways. “They can publish their papers in traditional professional journals that do not levy an APC and place the accepted manuscript (called post-print) in an inter-operable institutional repository. There are ways -- protocols -- by which all the distributed institutional repositories could be viewed as a single mega repository by a searcher.” Institutions can also establish and maintain an inter-operable repository at a negligible cost using open source software such as EPrints and DSpace. In India, there are many institutions that have set up such repositories. Notable among them is ScienceCentral -- maintained by CSIR -- URDIP Pune, which hosts repositories for institutions of CSIR, DBT and DST, and harvests and indexes metadata of the contents in those collections. It provides a single search interface, points out Madhan. At the global level, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is a major player. The attitude, “paying money to publish papers” that the APC levying journals are trying to nurture, is dangerous for the scientific community, Madhan warned. “There is a feeling that this idea offers space for dubious publishers who exploit the scientific community and corrupt the research system, and one can no longer ignore the growth of such predatory publishing,” he added.

(Sahana Ghosh can be contacted at sahana.g@ians.in)