New Delhi: Indian researchers paid a whopping $17 million in 2020 to publish their research articles in open access formats, with over 80 percent of it going to commercial publishers including MDPI, Springer Nature and Elsevier, a new study has revealed.
The study was conducted by researchers from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, the Indian Maritime University in Kolkata and Berhampur University.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the latest issue of the journal Current Science, also highlighted the need for a nationwide open access policy to help scientists publish their funded research, and for development of a national open access repository for Indian researchers. Further, researchers part of the study suggested that a framework be put in place to aid the development of Indian open access journals.
Since private publishers usually charge readers a subscription fee to access research material, high subscription fees make much of this material inaccessible to students, especially in lower-income countries.
Open access journals, on the other hand, do not charge a subscription fee, but charge authors APCs to publish the study without a paywall. As a result, such articles are free for anyone to access, download and share.
For this study, researchers from IIM-A and IMU analysed the number of articles published in reputed open access journals in 2020, across several scientific fields.
Findings of the study show that around $30 million was cumulatively spent as processing fee by teams of researchers which comprised at least one Indian member. Of this, Health and medical sciences researchers paid $7 million as APCs, followed by life and earth sciences ($6.9 million), multidisciplinary ($4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science ($4.8 million).
Humanities, literature and arts, social sciences, business, economics and management categories accounted for APCs amounting to only $53,000, $311,000 and $117,000, respectively.
According to the study, APCs have become common in the “Global North, adopted by many for-profit organisations and encouraged by many funding organisations in the US and the UK”. While such publications are on the rise, high processing charges are a “real obstacle to publishing” in open access journals for low-income countries, researchers added.
Despite this, the study reveals that Indian researchers accounted for 26,127 of the 50,662 articles, across all subjects, published in Web of Science-indexed journals in 2020.
The Web of Science (WoS) is a citation index.
Among these articles by Indian researchers, 18,150 were published in 1,517 journals that levy APCs, whereas 7,977 were published in 819 journals that do not levy processing charges.
While 81 percent of APCs levied on Indian researchers in 2020 went to commercial publishers like MDPI, Springer Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media, only around 5 percent went to Indian publishers, the study reveals.
Researchers also pointed out that the idea behind open access journals was to ensure equitable access and check “rampant commercialisation” of scholarly publications, but “established publishers have now positioned themselves” in the open access landscape.
According to the research team, the primary issue faced by Indian researchers is the lack of a dedicated system to facilitate funding for open access publications and that of a nationwide mandate, like the one that exists in many other countries.
Though funding agencies like the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Department of Biotechnology, and Department of Science & Technology have mandates to make research open access, their policies are “old and discuss mostly adding a copy of the published article into the repository and not publishing” in open access journals, the researchers wrote in their study.
They added that India “must consider a country-level OA policy mandate that helps researchers publish their funded research” in open access journals.
Note: An earlier version of this report stated that $30 million was cumulatively spent on article processing charges (APCs) globally in 2020. However, this figure pertains to APCs levied on teams of researchers with at least one Indian member during the same period.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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