Good morning from Chennai.

I checked the 2025 Annual Report of arXiv (the latest available). https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2025_arXiv_annual_report.pdf. a few weeks ago. Here is page 16. You might also wish to see page 14.

Clearly 61% of arXiv's operating budget came from members (56%) and individuals (5%). 

Currently, there are only 6 fee-paying members from India, the Vishwa Guru hoping to be No. 1 in the world of science sometime soon. The Indian members are IMSc (Chennai), CMI (Chennai), IIT Dharwad, IIT Mumbai, IUCAA (Pune), and IISc (Bengaluru). 

Incidentally, IISc, the home of three physicist Fellows of the Royal Society and arguably the No. 1 higher educational institution in the country, became a member only last year!  

Considering the enormous volume of submissions (3.8%of all submissions in 2025 came from India as against 6.6% from China and 27.3% from the USA) and downloads, India is essentially a freeloader—enjoying the benefits of a service without paying its due share to cover the expenses. However, we are ready to spend millions on subscriptions and APCs for journals published by commercial publishers. On top of that, virtually every Indian author surrenders the copyright of their work to journal publishers. And we think scientists and science administrators are rational beings! When we use arXiv, we face none of these hassles. No APC, no copyright transfer. On top of that, you get a date stamp for claiming priority and free public peer review. 

But there is also some silverlining. arXiv came to be because of a comment made by Dr Spenta Wadia at the Aspen Centre in Colorado in 1991 which triggered Paul Ginsparg to automate Joanne Cohn's mailing list of about 180 string theorists. Within a week of arXiv coming into being Dr Ashoke Sen made India's first submission to arXiv. Within a month there were at least four preprints from India including one by Dr Wadia's group. Jump to 1997. A few young scientists at MatScience, notable among them the late Rahul Basu, Kapil Paranjape, and Ganeshyam Date, together with the support of their computer section head, G. Subramoniam, and his team, set up India's first and only mirror server for arXiv. We can justifiably be proud of them all. But what about our science administrators. Not only did they fail to consider that it is only fair to support arXiv but they didn't even bother to reply when someone pointed it out. 

Let me tell you, as long as we do not recognise the value of and support community-led scholarly communication initiatives, like Current Science and arXiv, we will be spending our research funds unwisely.