The scheme involves an
expenditure of Rs 6000 crore over three years starting from 2025. It aims to
offer access to 13000 e-journals from 30 international publishers such as
Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Oxford
University Press, etc., benefiting 18 000 000 students and faculty, researchers
and scientists of 6300 government-run higher educational institutions and
research centers. It will be managed by the Information and Library Network
(INFLIBNET), an autonomous body under the University Grants Commission. Over
time, this facility which is expected to reshape the academic and research
landscape of the country, is likely to be extended to the remaining
institutions.
However, this ambitious
initiative, which aims to reduce subscription costs and facilitate improved
access to scientific literature for higher educational institutions and
government R&D laboratories, has sparked intense debate. Some librarians point
out that according to the Web of Science database, about half of the
articles published in the past four years are freely accessible. Over it, many
papers published in 2023 by the Journals covered under the proposed ONOS are
already freely accessible. In light of this, some have raised a fundamental
question: Why invest in a subscription model when the world is moving towards
Open Access (OA) publishing?
Open Access journals make
peer-reviewed papers freely accessible to the readers via Internet. As against the traditional subscription model
where content is made accessible for a fee, OA refers to publishing accepted
papers, mostly electronically, after due peer review and making them freely
accessible to the readers. There are, of course, different models of OA. The
common model, known as gold OA, involves charging the authors a fee called Article
Processing Charges (APC) to publish a paper in the journal. APC for a single paper may run into thousands
of dollars. For instance, Nature charges around $6970 per paper. Under the Hybrid open-access model, journals
contain both open-access and closed-access papers. Here a publisher is
partially funded by subscription, and by authors in the form of processing fee
for the papers that are made freely accessible. Another model is Green OA under
which the author is permitted to post his paper to a website controlled by the
author or the institute that funded the work, from where readers can download it
without paying.
Ideally, the scientific
literature, particularly that is funded by tax-payers money, should be freely
accessible. In line with this, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy
has mandated that starting in 2026, all research papers derived from public
funding must be made freely accessible without delay. Similarly, the European
Union’s Horizon Europe declared that peer-reviewed publications resulting from its
funding must be made freely available online. This trend is likely to grow
further in the days to come. Given all
these developments, one wonders about the financial prudence of the ONOS.
While the initiative to support
authors with processing charges for publishing in international journals has
been welcomed by the academic community, many believe that a larger portion of
these funds under the scheme should be directed towards financing active
researchers from Central research institutes/ universities to pay processing
charges – estimated to be around ₹ 985 crores per anum – which are prohibitively expensive for young scientists
wishing to publish in reputed OA journals.
That aside, a significant unintended
consequence of the digital publishing of scientific Journals has come to light.
A recent report reveals that long-term preservation of research papers in
digital form is not guaranteed. For example, a paper published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly
Communication indicated that 28% of seven million papers with Digital Object
Identifiers (DOIs) published online have been lost. The author of the paper,
Martin Paul Eve, emphasized that systems to preserve papers online have failed
to keep pace with the growth of the research output. Eve also warned that “The
threat posed by the disappearance of the scholarly record is real”. The author also cautioned that “without active
understanding and intervention, we will continue to lose valuable material and
threaten the persistence of digital links to scholarship and research”.
These global developments underscore
the need for a new approach, particularly in an era where ‘self-reliance’ has
become the national priority. While Indian scientists are currently publishing their
papers in prestigious journals such as
Nature, Science, etc., there remains significant scope for India to publish
world-class journals. Achieving this, however, requires a robust journal
publishing ecosystem. To build such a system, publishers must be able to
undertake the pre-publishing process without charging prospective authors and
make content freely accessible to readers online. For this to happen, government funding is
essential. Such funding would enable Indian
publishers to attract high-quality research papers from around the world, benefiting
the country in two key ways: first, it would encourage Indian scientists to
publish their research on credible digital platforms within the country; and second,
it would position India as a trusted leader in global scholarly publishing of
scientific literature.
All this may warrant a tweak in
the ONOS program.
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