It's most unfortunate that we misuse scarce funds without much debate and good understanding. Regards, - Murari Tapaswi On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 11:32 AM Subbiah Arunachalam via LIS-Forum < lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> wrote:
Friends,
Here is a message posted in the NKRC WhatsApp group.
*"APC Support* Article Publishing Charges /Article Processing Charges (APC) is one of the components of the ONOS scheme. APCs for selected good quality open access journals will be centrally funded through the executing agency for ONOS. As decided by the Core Committee, ONOS, fully open access journals which are in top 1% as per any of the 3 indicators: CiteScore, SNIP or SJR published by SCOPUS are eligible for payment of APC from ONOS. The Open Access journals can be either from the 30 publishers providing access to their published journals in ONOS or other publishers."
***
What a waste of taxpayers' money meant for research. Even if one doesn't pay APC, many journals will publish the paper, only they will not make the paper IMMEDIATELY Open Access.That can be overcome by either placing the final author version in a global repository like Zenodo (CERN, Geneva) or HAL (CNRS, Paris) or placing the preprint in a preprint server such as arXiv/ bioRxiv/ ChemRxiv ..., even before the journal publishes the article. Also, one can always send a reprint (or a link to the reprint) to potential readers. The Rs 150 cr allocated annually for the next three years for APC can be better invested. For example, when Dr R Chidambaram was India's PSA, crystallographers proposed the setting up of at least one synchrotron. Dr Chidambaram was seriously considering setting up a synchrotron facility in Kolkata. The PAC's office almost cleared the proposal but subsequently it got derailed. [A synchrotron may not be a good example as it would cost a few thousand crore rupees (!), but one could think of many other ways of spending scarce resources to maximize benefit. Actually, I have several suggestions.
Several years ago my colleagues and I wrote a paper on the subject of paying for publication in a journal: *https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf <https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf> *.
As far back as 1988, James C Thompson, then Librarian of the University of California at Riverside, said, "*The commercial publishers are in the information conduit for historical and anachronistic reasons; there is no technical or economic reason why they must remain a part of it.*" He also said this about commercial publishers, "*These publishers are not really in the business of education; their business is making money*." In fact, in the same year Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born immigrant who minted money as a publisher in the UK boasted that he had "set up a perpetual financing machine." And in 2025, we are paying the commercial publishers huge sums of money not only towards subscription but also APC, and on top of it, we are surrendering copyright to original work performed by us! Doesn't it sound ridiculous?
With warm regards,
Subbiah Arunachalam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009
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