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

"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...."