Science Budget & Open Access Publications: An Indian Perspective
Budget cuts and austerity grips Indian science, yet researchers seem to publish in open-access journals like PLoS One. How do they manage the publishing cost among the financial crisis?
Open access to academic publications is almost a decade-old, but a controversial mantra. Simply put academics as well as the public should be able to access scholarly content without pay for them, be it journal articles, book chapters, or books. But publishing is a business and publishers want to make money. Naturally, the open-access movement and the publishers reached a consensus that the publishing authors, i.e, researchers, pay for their publications.
However, despite budget cuts and austerity spells, Indian scientists manage to publish paid articles in journals like PLoS.
Some Numbers
Public Library of Science (PLoS) started accepting scholarly publications since 2003. Data obtained using simple string search, “Author Affiliation: India” in the PLoS site returned hundreds of published papers for the past 12 years. The first published article on PLoS from India was in PLoS Biology in 2003, and the next one in the same journal only 2004. But the numbers in all the PLoS journals went up from the next year, which almost doubled in 2009 (120 papers) from 2008 (63 papers).
The total papers from all the PLoS journals — PLoS One, PLoS Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens — summed up to 811 by 31 December 2014. 722 of them were published in PLoS One alone. From 01 January 2015 until 30 November 2015, PLoS One alone published 619 articles from India, out of the total 674 PLoS articles.
Money Matters
Asked about how do they manage the publication costs to get articles on open access journals like PLoS, Kamanio Chattopadhyay, an established material scientist at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) says, “It depends on one’s productivity,” adding, “Managing the payments of one or two papers are feasible by most Indian scientists. For those who publish extensively, it may be difficult.”
He is of the opinion that Indian researchers publish in PLoS because of its high impact factor. However, he is sceptical about the rise in impact factor because of open access. “Frankly, I have not seen any modelling of the available data to support or oppose it. I think only a good paper will have an impact,” he says.
For a young researcher at a National Institute of Technology (NIT) in India, budget or budget cut is “little to do with open access” publishing. “The journal has open access charges, which can’t be paid until you have the funding.”
Queried about fund management to pay for open access journals, the young researcher says either the host institute helps researchers in paying, or sometimes the journal would waive the charges if such a financial crisis arises. He adds, “Some academic or research institutes have kept a threshold value, like impact factor 4, and the charges for anything being published in journal above that value will be paid by the institute.”
Open access, after all, is a business model. Who wants to pay less and get quicker and hopefully, a high-quality publishing will move on to other favourable open-access journals. Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group, Science’s Science Advances, Royal Society of Chemistry’s RSC Advances, Peer J, journals of BioMed Central are some other examples of many open access journals, naturally with varying publishing price-tags!
Is There A Quality Control?
No doubt there are plenty of open access journals. But how good is the quality of research published? “A bigger problem of open access is the emergence of journals who charge small money and publish whatever they get,” says Chattopadhyay. “These journals are mushrooming and can ruin open access.”
However, David Crotty, editorial director of journals policy at the Oxford University Press, New York, USA, says, “The quality seems to be on the rise.” Crotty is an executive editor of the Scholarly Kitchen, a blog that analyses the current affairs of the scholarly publishing world.
Crotty says, “But a great deal of these papers is not based on a groundbreaking, original hypotheses. We see a lot of “regional” studies, or as one of my editors calls them, ‘me too with an accent’.” That is, if a group identifies a new phenomenon, then researchers in countries around the world will then do a study in their country to see if that phenomenon holds true on a localized basis.
Because of lacking originality, many journals do not publish such regional papers, though they are still valuable to know the regional impact of a phenomenon, according to Crotty. So he adds, “ [This] may be a driver here for papers in a journal like PLoS One, which only reviews for accuracy and not for significance or originality. Where another journal would reject such a regional study, PLoS One will publish it.”
Whether budget cut has a direct impact on open-access publishing is worth scrutinising, according to Crotty. He says, “ I think looking at the overall trends in publishing research — not just Open Acces — would be of great value in demonstrating [scientific] growth and increased quality coming out of India. This is good for a country’s economic health over the long term.”
Apparently there are differences in perspectives about the gap between these two issues — budget cuts and open access publishing. When asked about the future of this gap, Chattopadhyay says, “I cannot see future through a crystal ball, but personally I do not think it is a great disaster if we do not publish in open access.”
