India Can Have Its Own Open Access Digital Publishing Platform - The Wire Science

"Non-commercial models to scholarly communication use decentralised electronic publishing platforms, have no APCs, host papers on open-access repositories, and are featured in not-for-profit indexing services. Second, the African Journals OnLine and Nepal Journals Online publish papers that are open-access. More importantly, they focus on region-specific research and discussions. So as such they are freed of the need to make money by focusing on the more-profitable US- and Europe-centric points of view. Third, some other publishers, especially F1000Research and eLife, have adopted a review system in which they publish peer-reviewers’ comments along with the paper. Fourth, open-access preprint repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SocArXiv, agriRxiv, etc. are leading the way with online archiving (although there are some “non-fatal” downsides with their lack of peer-review). India’s Departments of Science & Technology and Biotechnology launched an open-access repository of papers funded by them, called ‘Science Central’, some years ago. But because of architectural and operational drawbacks, it has fallen into disuse....  In particular, and with the European Commission’s ‘Open Research Europe’ as a precedent, it has an opportunity to develop a digital open-access platform with minimal to no APCs. The Indian government has advanced a potential solution called ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS). But it calls for large and recurring investments and wouldn’t address core issues like improving the quality of the research output, developing more practical research metrics, and preventing corporate publishers from monetising publicly funded research...."