Friends, Greetings from Chennai, India. The future of knowledge exchange in STEM, social sciences and other areas of scholarship is through preprints supported by post public peer review.* The journal, as we know it, has served us well for over 300 years till men like Robert Maxwell came on the scene and greed of the publishers became the dominant feature and the interest of science and scientists were sacrificed at the altar of their greed. Recall that Maxwell openly said that publishing journals had become a perpetual money making machine. In the past the imperialists came as traders to countries of the Global South and colonized them and plundered their wealth. The case of the British rule of the subcontinent was the best (or should we say the worst) example. This is exactly what is happening now. What is worse, we are willingly inviting the publishers and surrendering to them. At least when the British wanted to subjugate India, there was some, even if only sporadic, resistance, witness the heroic battles waged by Rani Velu Nachiar, Rani Jhansi, Tipu Sultan, and several others. Now we are giving a red carpet welcome to commercial publishers of the West and taking them on a 'bus tour' to our best academic and other research institutes (including IISc!) so they could teach the faculty and doctoral students how to write and submit research papers that would be acceptable to them for publication if one also accepts to pay APC and surrender copyright to one's own intellectual creation, often facilitated by taxpayers' money. I often wonder how a nation which ranks close to the top in inequality can decide to spend its scarce resources on paying APC to publish research papers (which could jolly well be published in other journals which do not charge APC or better still placed in a respectable global archive at no cost). Why can't we follow the example of the US NIH and insist that all research papers resulting from public funding be made publicly available at the same time they appear in a journal? Why can't we have an equivalent of OSTP's Nelson memo? At the least, why can't we implement the CSIR's plan and the DBT-DST mandate of open access through institutional and national level repositories such as Science Central and CSIR Central? With best wishes, Subbiah Arunachalam *Please see 1. https://council.science/publications/normalization-preprints/ 2. https://blog.sciety.org/sciety-wrapped-2024/?ref=sciety-product-news-newsletter&attribution_id=6756c00b9a8811000167fe7c&attribution_type=post