For India’s scientists, academic publishing has become a double-edged sword Premium

India is restructuring its science governance with a new National Research Foundation, creating an opportunity for open-access publishing to be a leading voice for accessible, equitable research-publishing. Open-access journals charge authors APCs, diverting funds from research and for human resources. India’s ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ plan could also increase the monopoly of commercial publishers. Instead, India could set up an ‘open publishing’ repository, inviting global participation and paving the way away from numerical metrics of research accomplishment.

As India restructures its science governance, with the recently approved National Research Foundation, the national scientific enterprise can be a leading voice for accessible, equitable, and fiscally responsible research-publishing.

Communicating research is an integral part of the scientific endeavour. It advances scientific understanding and bridges science and society. One important way in which this happens in academic settings is through scholarly journals, which publish scientific papers.

Academic publishing starts with a scientist submitting a new set of findings to a journal. The journal assesses the manuscript by sending it out to experts for their comments, also known as ‘peer review’; the experts offer these comments on a voluntary basis. The journal passes them on to the researchers, who may modify their manuscript accordingly.

The whole process takes a few weeks to several months. After the journal accepts a manuscript for publication, it is featured on the journal’s website and/or is printed as a physical paper.

The process of academic publishing is designed to ensure scientists’ studies are rigorous even as it makes validated research accessible to the wider community.

A scientist’s research papers are relevant to their career advancement. University and institute ranking schemes also take note of the numerical metrics related to one’s publications: the number of papers, the number of citations, the impact factor, the h-index, etc.

Driven by the academic demand for publications, academic publishing has emerged as a flourishing business. Commercial academic publishing is led by for-profit companies based mostly in the U.S. and Europe. In their traditional subscription model, libraries and institutes pay a fee to access published research.