[LIS-Forum] Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published ?

[Vittal varaha murali]

Dear Moderator, I request you to post the below in LIS forum.

Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published?

We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers
published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more
than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in
the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This
accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output,
considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used
488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR
500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers. 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. Most
leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of
OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journls
and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. There has
been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower
pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical
Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega
journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially
spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be
prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through
interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin
America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch. We
further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform
similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is
already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and
DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and
reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among
repositories.

*Current Science*
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/fcarticles.php
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/forthcoming/18652.docx

Postprint: http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/

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