Are journal archiving and embargo policies impeding the success of India's open access policy?

Abstract

India's primary science funding agencies, the Department of Science & Technology, and the Department of Biotechnology (DST & DBT) together formulated an open access (OA) policy in 2014. This policy mandates immediate self-archival of research articles generated from publicly funded research across all the institutions in suitable repositories. But with inadequate infrastructure and awareness, the OA mandate did not flourish as expected. This paper aims to understand whether journal policies impede the prospect of DST-DBT OA policy and the possible routes to achieve policy compliance. The analysis presented in this paper tracks down the journal self-archiving policies of the top 50 popular journals (among Indian authors) from each of the six STEM fields-Biology, Chemistry, Clinical-Medicine, Engineering, Materials science, and Physics. The results show that most journals have an embargo of 12-24 months on self-archiving of the post-print (final author version after peer-review), which contradicts the DST-DBT OA mandate. The study also reveals that hybrid journals dominate, and article processing charges craft a new form of inequity forIndian STEM researchers. We expect that these findings will be helpful for the funding agencies to restructure their policies, and negotiate with journal publishers to resolve the contradictions.

Limitations of the “Indian one nation, one subscription” policy proposal and a way forward

“…Therefore, the proposed ONOS policy seems a good idea. But the previous study shows that disciplinary context in subscription-based journals is an important consideration, and a blanket policy will lead to a waste of resources (Koley and Lala, 2022a) Moreover, the constant shift toward the OA by the leading publishers put even a more significant question on a subscription-only deal.…”

“…The advantages associated with OA are well described in the literature, but they have specific challenges, including the features of different models. Green OA route, making research articles available online through institutional repositories, is quite optimal for researchers, but the implementation of a journal embargo, ranging between 6 and 24 months, seriously hinders this route (Koley and Lala, 2022a). The gold and diamond open access models are fundamentally based on two different strategies (Björk, 2017; Demeter and Istratii, 2020), where the gold route charges APC and diamond journals do not charge APC (Frantsvåg et al, 2021).…”

Call for papers: Current issues in scholarly publishing

“…The academic publishing landscape is rapidly evolving in response to both continued and emerging challenges. Efforts to transition away from subscription publishing models have posed a series of new challenges: as open access models diversify, so too does the complexity of navigating licensing (Baldwin & Pinfield, 2018), embargoes (Koley & Lala, 2022), predatory publishing (Grudniewicz et al, 2019), and supporting authors with the rising costs of Article Processing Charges (Butler et al, 2023) through transformative agreements (Fontúrbel & Vizentin-Bugoni, 2020;Farley et al, 2021). In tandem, the Open Science movement has catalyzed advancements in publishing infrastructures and tools, such as preprint servers (Ni & Waltman, 2024).…”