Dec
11
Research article publishing: individualised, institutionalised… Nationalised?
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Last week’s announcement that the Indian government had concluded a “One Nation One Subscription “deal with 30 major journal publishers to allow 18 million users free access to previously paid for journal articles over five years starting on the 1st of January 2025 should, in my view, have sent a ripple of apprehension through the journal publishing businesses. Instead, the only people who commented immediately, were Indian academics who espoused the cause of open access and saw it as a retrograde deal.
Personally, I see it is a landmark deal. It has the potential, over time, to change very many things. It has apparently taken five years to construct this agreement, but just think of it in precedent terms. If India can do this, then why not Brazil? If it is appropriate for India then surely it is hugely appropriate for countries in Africa and South Asia who have real problems with the cost of access? This could expand the existing provision hugely and remove all the limitations which great schemes like Research4Life, Hinari , Agora and Oare have always suffered from.
But this, I imagine, was not the objective. While the 30 publishers gathered together to negotiate this, hopefully holding hands with their anti trust lawyers all the while, they might have been thinking about the problems of illicit use in India or indeed the threat of the Indian state declaring their monopoly illegal. I have very happy members from the 1970s of publishing books through the then British Council overseas aid scheme “The English Language Book Society”. These ELBS editions were meant to cut out illegal local reprinting by publishing at a third of the price of the UK edition, the difference made up by the UK government.
I recall standing in a bookshop in Kuala Lumpur one day and being shown my own company;s first year university biology textbook. displayed on the shelf alongside four Indian and Malaysian pirated editions, all illegally reproduced and all selling for less than mine!
However, the reasoning behind distinguishing this as a landmark move is slightly different. I think that in Europe and the USA we have a problem in imagining that the huge research and innovation enterprises in science and technology now funded by the Indian and Chinese governments, and increasingly by the Brazilians and others, will forever and always want to publish through multinational companies domiciled in Berlin or Amsterdam or New York. While brand and prestige still rule, and commonly used metric systems refuse to recognise change and experimentation, the current situation just holds. Loosen any of those ties and it could become very attractive for an Indian or Chinese state publishing house to assume the publishing role, creating diamond open access by legislation at a single stroke!
And as I have so often written here, I do think that the ties are loosening. The assumption, for a start, that US, UK and EU science research will always prevail in quality and size of funding terms is now shot to pieces. In an interview that I conducted a week ago with a Chinese AI researcher in Beijing, we explored both the huge progress being made in China and the collaborative nature of much of the research that will drive AI forward. We are now past the point where publications in chemistry in the leading journals are dominated by Chinese researchers: publications, not submissions. We are also past the point where Indian data scientists go to Silicon Valley automatically to seek work. At all levels. Indian data science has world leadership capacity.
I have argued in the past that self publishing will have huge importance in the future development of reporting scientific research and innovation.. I think that the CEREUS model , whenrevised to repair its current deficiencies and, as now backed by springer Nature has a huge future, but self publishing will take many forms . It logically takes forward existing pre-print server publishing into a more controlled and managed environment using peer review potentially pre-and post publication. In fields like medical science, I see huge importance in institutional publishing, as major players seek to underline and demonstrate the quality and extent of their research activities -and brand them. I also see that funders may wish, in certain circumstances, to become research publishers themselves . Governments have a poor track record in open publishing, but the geopolitical changes in the balance of power may make them feel that this is a role for them. Isolationist politicians and trade war warriors all over the world are likely to complicate things, by not seeing what is happening or by defending so called “national interests”.
Finally, when those 30 publishers were all in the same room, I wonder if the conversation strayed away from debating what the Indian government might be persuaded to hello, hello there I’m fine. How are you pay them to some momentary thoughts about what collaboration might produce elsewhere. Did they ponder, I wonder, on the possibility of a self regulation system for the acceptance of articles might reduce bogus submissions and increase the integrity of their publications.? Perhaps they spent an odd moment considering standardised peer review procedures so that all researchers could be sure that all articles had been scrutinised in approximately the same way? I know, I know. It is a lot to ask. But it is Christmas, and old men must be allowed to dream…