Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output

"Article processing charges (APCs) ensure the financial viability of open access (OA) scholarly journals. The present study analyses the number of gold OA articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)- indexed journals by Indian researchers during 2020, including subject categories that account for the highest APC in India. Besides, it evaluates the amount of APC expenditure incurred in India. The findings of this study reveal that Indian researchers published 26,127 gold OA articles across all subjects in WoS-indexed journals in 2020. Researchers in the field of health and medical sciences paid the highest APC, amounting to USD 7 million, followed by life and earth sciences (USD 6.9 million), multidisciplinary (USD 4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science (USD 4.8 million). The study also reveals that Indian researchers paid an estimated 17 million USD as APC in 2020. Furthermore, 81% of APCs went to commercial publishers, viz. MDPI, Springer–Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media. As there is a growing number of OA publications from India, we suggest having a central and state-level single-window option for funding in OA journals and backing the Plan S initiative for OA publishing in India".