It’s Not too Late for Open Access in India | Katina Magazine

"Open access advocacy in India has been largely a one-man effort by Subbiah Arunachalam, an information scientist interested in scholarly communication, scientometrics, science policy, and information and communication technologies for development (Madhan, 2017; Arunachalam, 2024)....

The history of open access in India is rife with missed opportunities; however, the current moment offers a chance to learn from global experience and develop a more effective strategy.

A retrospective analysis of open access experiments over the past two decades validates the prescience of Arunachalam’s advocacy. Failures of commercial publisher-centered initiatives underscore the need for community-driven approaches.

The shift by funding agencies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from allowing author-pay open access to requiring preprint archiving highlights the need for a more strategic and sustainable approach to open access. Indian funding agencies and institutions should motivate scientists to use preprint servers, which have proven to be very effective in scientific communication, to share their findings, rather than relying on the traditional publication lifecycle.

Indian scholarly journals should also adopt preprint archiving as a standard practice and leverage the speed and transparency it offers. Like Discrete Analysis and other overlay journals that add peer review to preprints, Indian journals can build on preprints while maintaining rigorous quality standards. This approach significantly reduces the cost of running a journal.

Recently, the US and Japan, two major science-producing nations, have wisely decided to make their publicly funded research openly accessible through interoperable repositories by 2025 (Singh Chawla, 2024; Nelson, 2022). India should advance a similar policy—this time with a proper resource commitment to ensure successful implementation. Without delay, India should implement INDSTA, the interoperable open-access portal for publicly funded research outputs, as proposed in the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (STIP) in 2020.

ANRF should recognize and fully support diamond open access journals run by Indian scholarly societies to sustain their mission. These journals, such as the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, are run by dedicated communities and have earned international respect defying metrics like “impact factor” (Marcus, 2016).

Finally, India should consider two models that, as Arunachalam recently put it, “follow the Gandhian ideal of trusteeship”: Subscribe to Open (S20) and Direct to Open, developed by Annual Reviews and MIT Press, respectively...."