On 25^th November, the Indian government announced a central scheme to enable public research and education institutions to access scholarly work free of charge. The “One Nation, One Subscription” was earmarked with an initial sum of Rs. 6,000 crores, to cover subscription costs for the next three years. The PIB press release states that over 6,300 government education and research institutions in India will gain access, to the over 13,000 e-journals owned by some 30 international publishers.

Reactions have been positive so far, with many welcoming the move. On X, Dibyendu Nandi, a space physicist at IISER Kolkata, termed the scheme “a step forward in the right direction.” Some top journals can be incredibly difficult to access, without paying for subscriptions, that are exorbitant to say the least. Google Scholar could often the go-to, though rarely do most relevant content be accessible for free. In these cases, research institutions pay for open access to publishing journals. 

But this isn’t the norm. Academicians – in the sciences, social sciences and humanities – are kept out of reach, thanks to paywalls that keep scholarships wanting for more liberty. Nonetheless, there are other challenges still remaining, which awaits state intervention to scientists’ call for a more inclusive budget.   

Publishing industry’s murky underbelly

India’s arguably the only country with such a relaxed subscription service in place. Usually, departments at universities across the world are hard-pressed to offer students and scholars subscriptions (if at all they do in other places) to journals of a relevant discipline. This means having to pay to view research that occurs in other disciplines, preventing open access to work in interdisciplinary fields. Research ends up in silos by design, which inhibits any substantial progress.

For-profit journals like Springer Nature, and their likes, have excessive fees in place to access their content. Admittedly, not everybody demands for this, definitely not subscription journals. But then subscription journals aren’t lucrative. Nature charges $200 for a single annual subscription, which amounts to nearly Rs. 17,000 in Indian currency (in today’s rate). Meanwhile, open access journals don’t demand authors to pay for publication, but require institutions to pay for them.

But this includes the cream of journals. Scientists in developing countries like India has to pay a lot more to simply have access to the same piece of research. In this light, the government’s decision to waver this fee could ease burden scientists have from participating in research that’s unpopularly symbolic of corporate interference. It’s not like scientists aren’t plagued by other problems that the government isn’t answerable to. Research institutions, even the prominent ones are underfunded for their research programs, have their woes go unheeded for. However, there’s an elephant in the room that’s gone unmentioned in any government communiques.

Credit: Wikimedia

Publishing costs, databases and research in the developing world

There’s a cost accrued to publish papers that institutions have to pay for. Journals don’t publish for free, of course, and there’s cost incurred from conducting peer-reviews, proof-reading work, making illustrations and even doing a press release. It may be worth mentioning to state that an unpaid reviewer could add as much quality and dedication as any other. But scientific publishing has been under close scrutiny over the years, especially with the rise of predatory journals being caught for publishing content without any editorial review.

This isn’t the condition in every journal, but it’s as though the price tag on the journal, say Nature, which is a hybrid journal, makes them more immune from having peer-reviewers or even corporate higher-ups who’d incentivize an exclusive culture that still doesn’t have every quality paper in reach.

Academics have different ways to reach out to their peers, but then institutions pay for this too. In fact, The Hindu, says that some Rs. 30 – 50 crore rupees so far, to access online databases such as SCORPUS and Web of Science, to receive analytics and insights to track citations – building a corpus of related research work. Basically, simply mining papers costs money.

These exorbitant costs cut both ways aside from wanting to simply read papers, in that it diminishes incentives for researchers who’d be doing high-quality research but not have it published in a journal with a higher reach. Corporatization has added to this list of endless concerns on why science in developing countries don’t fare as well compared to their wealthier counterparts. The prices are seen exorbitant for most of the world – conducting research that bears unfair public bias as that being unimportant, and having researchers put away from carrying out ambitious efforts – for which they find no funders, or those who have the zeal to fund any ambitious projects in the first place.

Suffice it to say, scientists in the West do acknowledge this has been a problem, both in terms of having to access themselves personally, since research institutions only provide access for a few select journals, at the cost of viewing research done elsewhere across the globe. So far, dissent has been ineffective, and without options, scientists everywhere choose to publish in other less-known journals, to avoid having to pay off one’s pocket. In this light, the government’s incentives are the right step against limitless greed.

Wanting to be heard

By all means, the government’s action shouldn’t merely come as a savior complex. Indian science needs state support. There are woes in Indian research, that aren’t necessarily contributed purely from talent deficit, as much as it’s from a lack of public finances being used to justify research. The Anusadhan National Research Foundation, which would receive Rs. 50,000 crores in funds, maybe a viable answer, but the elephant in the room is where and how these funds will be distributed and utilized. but there’s a lot more to be addressed.

Scientists, are people, and they’re vulnerable in light of conditions that are too stressful to handle otherwise, and seems a majority of stakeholders in India’s academia has been left out from enter as decision makers in discussions on matters that will affect them, and shape the ecosystem going forward.  

Today, academia’s known to suffer from a “publishes or perish” crisis that isn’t making life easy for quality scholarship to thrive for long. And scientists need to be heard, not passively, but as active decision makers. If there’s a message to take away from recent discourse on scientific research in India, it’s that scientists and their institutions are desperate to be heard.