Rising cost of science journals worries top science officials - Livemint

"Even as India has announced plans to significantly raise its research and development budget during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17), its top science officials say they can’t afford to subscribe to international science journals. While India is yet to publicize the 12th Plan document, officials said that science departments wanted Rs.500 crore for international journal subscriptions during the five-year period, a fivefold increase over what was needed in the 11th Plan. While slowing economic growth and concerns over a yawning fiscal deficit has meant a tightening of the purse strings, science officials said that the government wanted to rein in spending on journals, mainly because of 'concerns over profiteering', or the practice of pricing journals way over what it cost to publish them. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India’s largest science body with 39 laboratories, subscribes to more than 8,000 academic journals. It said that its contracts with several international publishers would end by the year end and it still hadn’t decided on renewing them. 'I can’t afford their exorbitant prices,' said Samir Brahmachari, director general, CSIR. 'We are still negotiating but publishers seem to expect too much of a margin on publishing journals. That’s unacceptably high.' He didn’t name any of the publishers. Brahmachari’s comments came on the back of science minister Vayalar Ravi’s publicly stated concerns over the price of science journals. 'I’ll try my best to get this (budget for journals) passed, though I doubt whether the Planning Commission will allot Rs.500 crore just for journals,' Ravi said last week as part of a longer speech on the 60th anniversary of the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (Niscair), a CSIR body