India’s plan to pay journal subscription fees for all its citizen may end up making science harder to access

"India, the world’s second-most populous country, is planning to make scholarly literature available for everyone under its latest science, technology and innovation policy.

The policy will push for the whole country to have a nationwide subscription to replace existing subscriptions paid by different research and education institutions to access research journals. The Indian government is in talks with the world’s top scientific publications, including one of the biggest scholarly publishers, Elsevier, to create the system.

If it works, India will become the largest country to give access to paywalled journal articles to more than 1.3 billion of its citizens....

Both India and Germany’s cases are two clear examples of deliberate ignorance pursuing short term narrow options of prestigious conformity to the oligopoly of commercial publishers over value to society...."