15 Nov, 2016
Indians spend close to $2.4 million annually to get their scientific research output published in different open access (OA) journals, authors of a new study say, raising concerns that scientists often have to cough up two months’ salary to get their work into those journals.
"We estimate that India is potentially spending about $2.4 million annually on Article Processing Charges (APCs) levied by those journals. To publish a paper in OA, some journals levy a charge that is equivalent to two months' salary of an assistant professor in India," Muthu Madhan of DST Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, told IANS.
The authors arrived at the figure based on the data mined from Science Citation Index Expanded that revealed 37,078 papers were published by Indian researchers in 881 OA journals during the five-year period from 2010 to 2014.
Criticising the practice, Madhan says it is not right, given the major part (about 70 per cent) of research funding is sourced from taxpayers.
He said:
And there is a shortage of funds for research. It is not right for researchers to give part of it to rich publishers – who overcharge anyway for the meagre services they provide and take home profits in the range 30 to 40 per cent year after year, even when the economy was not doing well.
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. 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. To circumvent the expenditure, Madhan suggested researchers make their papers OA in two ways.
Madhan said:
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 and 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.
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