Science Policy, Competition And Profits

The centre has proposed that all publicly-funded research be freely accessible to all. But most such journals require the author to submit the manuscript to the publisher for free, who then sells it. It is time the government puts in place laws and rules in this regard

- Dunu Roy & Dinesh Mohan

The proposal for an “open science policy” that will ensure that the results of, and information generated by, all publicly-funded research become freely accessible by everyone and that all will have free access to bulk subscriptions of important scientific journals across the world has understandably been welcomed by people, especially scholars and academia. It is, therefore, a proposal that demands closer scrutiny of its merits and possible demerits.

The first question that arises is, why isn’t this information already freely accessible to everyone? After all, all publicly-funded research is eventually funded from public taxes and we all pay taxes—through every item we buy, leave alone all the other cesses and duties. In fact, there are already several University Grants Commission (UGC) schemes to make research findings accessible to educational institutions. These include IndCat (1991) that has a store of 1.42 crore books and 2.7 lakh research theses for open access (OA) contributed by 317 universities (out of a total of 789); Shodhganga (2010), also OA, has 1.9 lakh theses from 375 universities; E ShodhSindhu (2016) has over 7,000 e-journals and 30 lakh e-books for reference by 178 universities and 84 technical institutes and N-List opens up over 6,000 e-journals and 32 lakh e-books to about 3,000 colleges.