India Spends $715 Million On The Wrong Kind Of Open Access Journals

Numerous articles on Walled Culture have chronicled the struggles to turn the aspirations of open access to knowledge into reality. The central reason people do not have free digital access to all academic knowledge is that publishers have been successful in subverting attempts to provide it. Publishers are strongly motivated to undermine open access, since its successful implementation would reduce their currently fabulous levels of profit, far greater than in most other industries.

The clearest sign of how successful academic publishers have been in colonizing the idea of open access is the rise of gold open access. Under this approach, articles are freely available online, but academic establishments pay for their researchers’ work to be published, usually in the form of “article processing charges”, or APCs. Publishers were quick to embrace gold open access, because once the system was in place they could push up the price for those APCs continually until their profit margins matched or even exceeded those under traditional publishing models.

Unfortunately, many funding bodies still see gold open access as an acceptable way to achieve open access’s goals, and continue to fund it. For example, India has just signed a huge journal subscription deal, worth $715 million over three years, with 30 academic publishers. It will allow an estimated 18 million researchers and students in India to access some 13,000 journals, including many leading titles. There is an open access element to the deal, but as a news item on Science explains, it is gold open access:

Some part of the $715 million will cover the fees some journals charge to publish papers open access, making them immediately free to read by anyone worldwide when published, [director of the coordinating agency for the Indian initiative] Madalli told Science. Details of that component have not been worked out yet, but the amount will be calculated based on the country’s current spending on these fees, known as article-processing charges (APCs), which are paid by authors or their institutions, Madalli says.

Rahul Siddharthan of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, who chaired a group on open science, is pleased the agreement will reportedly cover APCs. At a global average of about $2000 per article, they are unaffordable for many scholars in India, he says.

The $2,000 average APC figure indicates just how extreme the current gold open access model has become. The Science article notes that:

Some scholars criticized the deal for continuing to spend public money on journal subscriptions at a time when many countries have been shifting to other business models that provide articles open access, including some that do not charge author fees.

This is a reference to the diamond open access approach, which has been advocated on this blog many times before. In the Science report, that view is echoed by Sridhar Gutam, a scientist at the ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research and founder of Open Access India:

Gutam says India should embrace the “diamond open-access” business model, in which the government or other funders cover costs and authors, and scholars and their institutions do not pay to publish or read articles. Although government institutions—including his own—have tried to promote free-to-access repositories for scientific papers, comparatively few researchers use them. Gutam says many prefer to boost their chances for career advancement by publishing in prestigious journals from European and U.S. publishers, which some reformers have criticized as unreliable and overly restrictive gatekeepers of quality papers. “The current plan fills a short-term goal,” he says, “but the larger system needs reform.”

Gutam is correct that the entire publishing system needs reform, with a move to new business publishing models. That’s precisely what a recent grant from the Gates Foundation to the nonprofit, open access publisher PLOS aims to facilitate:

PLOS has been awarded a $3.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, underscoring its commitment to pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models. The 3-year funding package from the Gates Foundation will support PLOS’ transition towards APC-free publishing by enabling authors, funded by the foundation, to publish with PLOS without facing APC barriers, and to contribute to open access publishing options for authors who do not have access to funding. This 3-year grant offers support while PLOS is actively working on new publishing models grounded in open science starting with an ongoing research & design project.

That’s not the first time the Gates Foundation has made moves in this direction. Walled Culture reported back in September on an important shift to diamond open access by the funding body. The latest grant, albeit small, is welcome, just as India’s three-year lock-in to the inefficient and hugely expensive gold open access approach with its massive new subscription deal is deeply disappointing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published on Walled Culture.