Arun’s remarks looks very critical but are based on sound understanding and
hence make us think and re think …
Bp Prakash
On Tue, 7 Nov 2023 at 11:30 PM, Francis Jayakanth
From: Subbiah Arunachalam subbiah.arunachalam at gmail.com Mon Oct 30 20:08:25 IST 2023
In an yet to be published (but accepted) paper titled "Publications in gold open access and article processing charges expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output," Raj Kishor Kampa, Manoj Kumar Sa and Mallikarjun Dora have made some assertions which I would like them to reexamine.
1. They begin their paper with the statement "The article processing charges (APC) ensure the financial viability of open-access (OA) scholarly journals." This is simply not true. *Indeed APC benefits the publishers at the cost of science and scientists*. On the contrary, India could use the huge sums that Indian researchers give away (as APC) to foreign publishers year after year (17 million US dollars in 2020 alone, according to Kampa *et al*.) for strengthening research infrastructure, disbursement of scholarships to students on time, supporting doctoral students and early career researchers attending conferences, supporting exchange visits and so on. Indeed, APC charged by most gold OA journals is simply a means to make huge profits for the publishers, witness the huge operating margins declared in the balance sheets of the large commercial publishers, often referred to collectively as the publishing oligarchs. The profit margins of some of these companies, as pointed out in 2017 by Stephen Buranyi in an article in *The Guardian*, are very much higher than the profit margins of tech companies like Apple, Google/Alphabet, and Amazon. For example, Springer Nature has declared margins of 24, 26 and 27 per cent in the last three years, and these don't come anywhere near the profit margins of RELX (Elsevier). *Indeed APC benefits the publishers at the cost of science and scientists*. Remember most of the APC paid by Indian researchers comes from Indian taxpayers who may be happy to support research but not scientists paying to get papers published in such journals.
What could really make open access financially viable are preprint archives such as arXiv and bioRxiv and community-led OA journals which do not charge APC.
2. APC Gold OA does not help "bridge the chasm between haves and have-nots of scientific publications, thereby paving the way to reaching equity and inclusion," as Kampa et al. would like us to believe. What it actually does (in the case of India) is to rob a poor nation and transfer the funds to publishing companies in the richer nations. In what way can it be considered as a way to 'reach equity and inclusion'? Transferring taxpayers' money from an emerging economy to commercial entities in affluent countries is unethical and immoral. For the same reason, signing transformative agreements with commercial publishers should also be shunned.
With best wishes,
Arun -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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