What Can We Learn from Missed Opportunities in the Transition to Open Access?

Earlier this year, Michael Upshall interviewed Madhan, director of libraries at Jindal Global University in India. Madhan became a committed advocate for open access through the lucky chance of meeting and being mentored by the pioneer of open access Subbiah Arunachalam, with whom he still works today. In this Q&A, developed from their conversation, Madhan, who has previously written for Katina about the state of open access in India, describes some of the unique features and latest developments in scholarly publishing in India, including the recently signed One Nation One Subscription deal.

It seems that you were involved in open access from very early on, from the early years of the twenty-first century. When did you first get involved with institutional repositories?

I have had the privilege of working with Subbiah Arunachalam on research projects since 1998, starting at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai. Through his writings and our discussions, I came to understand the challenges of doing science in India—particularly the unequal access to scientific information compared to developed countries.

He believed that bridging this gap was essential for the advancement of science, technology, and academic research in the country. He considered innovative approaches like “Scholarly Skywriting,” proposed by Stevan Harnad, and arXiv, the preprint server established by Paul Ginsparg, to be highly significant. Also, he believed scholarly communication through trusted open repositories was a major boon for developing countries like India, which continue to face challenges in accessing scientific literature and gaining global visibility for their research. In 2000, he invited Professor Harnad to India for an event celebrating Eugene Garfield’s seventy-fifth birthday, organized at MSSRF, where open access through interoperable repositories was a topic of discussion.

I was fortunate to attend the event and learn from the discussion. As the idea of maximizing access to scholarly information through open interoperable repositories struck me as a clever use of technology—one that could coexist with existing scholarly communication systems—I became curious to learn more about the repository software and the protocols on which these repositories were built.

Did you have a repository at the time of that conference?

The first institutional repository in India was set up at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. In early 2000s, scientists at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), a unit within IISc, began experimenting with EPrints and created a repository for IISc. Shortly thereafter, people at the Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC) at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bengaluru began promoting DSpace. Experts from NCSI and DRTC conducted numerous workshops across India to train librarians in establishing and maintaining interoperable repositories.

Notably, in 2005, Arunachalam organized two 5-day workshops on EPrints, featuring experts from the University of Southampton and the University of Toronto. These workshops greatly benefited the participants by providing direct access to the software developers.

These initiatives helped ignite the institutional repository movement in India, which has since grown, with many institutions now having repositories, often led by librarians. However, this growth has not been proportional to the number of universities and research centers in the country. It is disappointing to note that many top Indian institutions still haven’t established institutional repositories. Even where repositories do exist, they are often poorly maintained. This situation highlights a concerning lack of institutional support for open access through repositories.

The story of open access, as you know, is convoluted, and it hasn’t turned out quite the way that everybody expected. You said in an interview, I think back in 2020, that as long as we continue to use article processing charge (APC)-based journals, we cannot expect to make access to research affordable to all. Do you still believe that?

The idea that authors should pay to make their work open access on commercial publishers’ websites is fundamentally wrong.

It surprised me that accomplished scientists, including Nobel laureates, endorsed the author-pay open access model as an alternative to subscription journals—seemingly unable to recognize its exclusionary nature and foresee that the for-profit publishers would appropriate the model to serve their own interests. Advocates who pushed for “unrestricted rights” for research papers supported the author-pay model, but in doing so, they inadvertently made it easier for publishers to impose new forms of taxation on authors.

Initially, publishers opposed open access, particularly fearing that if researchers began sharing their own versions of papers (post-prints) in open online repositories, they would lose control over the distribution of research articles. However, the rise of the author-pay model presented them a way out. Publishers quickly embraced and exploited it, as it allowed them to maintain both control and profits. They introduced embargoes to delay the sharing of author-version post-prints in open repositories, while promoting their paid open access model as fast track to visibility.

Promoted under the banner of “immediate” open access (with promises of unrestricted rights that few can meaningfully exercise) and legitimized by the support of governments and funding agencies, the author-pay model has thrived.

However, even after two decades of promoting the author-pay model, the reality has fallen far short of the expectations of its early supporters. Subscription journals still exist, open access has largely been absorbed into the existing system, and it has created new financial burdens and deepened the divide among scientists and scholars. The author-pay open access is a deeply flawed trade-off—essentially jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

In addition, the author-pay open access model—which incentivizes a volume-driven business model where each paper is treated as a unit of revenue—has helped the rise of predatory journals. With open access journals publishing hundreds of thousands of papers, it has become increasingly difficult to draw a clear line between good and bad publishing outlets.

A positive aspect in an otherwise negative situation is that individuals and institutions that were once strong advocates of the author-pay model have begun to recognize its pitfalls after numerous failed experiments and initiatives.

Institutional repositories were announced in the 2000s following the Budapest Open Access Initiative, but it’s probably true to say that they haven’t become as universal as everyone hoped. Why do you think that is?

Open access advocates initially believed that the scientific community would quickly embrace interoperable repositories to make their research openly accessible. However, for several reasons, that vision has not fully materialized.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative originally envisioned a complementary relationship between two pathways to open access: self-archiving and open access journals. Unfortunately, this balance was disrupted as the author-pay open access journals became dominant. Commercial publishers further hindered the adoption of self-archiving by imposing embargoes on postprints (the final peer-reviewed versions authored by researchers), making it more difficult for researchers to embrace self-archiving as a routine practice.

Instead of exercising their rights to freely share peer-reviewed manuscripts through institutional repositories, many researchers have conformed to the commercial publishing system, increasingly opting to pay APCs for “immediate” open access on publishers’ websites. This growing dependence on publisher-controlled models has sidelined self-archiving, despite it being a simpler and cost-effective method of sharing research.

Given the complexities of building an open access ecosystem through interoperable repositories, support from institutions, governments, and funding agencies is essential. As Professor Balaram, former director of the Indian Institute of Science, pointed out: scientists “should be permitted to put in the repository the full-text article as it appears in a journal. For this, countries such as India should have a law specifying that the copyright for articles published with publicly funded research always vests with the authors and their institutions.”

A notable example of bold leadership in this area is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which took a principled stand by terminating subscription to Elsevier journals. This decision resulted from Elsevier’s policies conflicting with MIT’s commitment to open access, particularly its dedication to ensuring the MIT community’s right to freely share the knowledge they generate.

To reform scholarly communication, institutions must take bold steps—like those taken by MIT—and actively support researchers in retaining the rights to make their work freely accessible to all.

Recently, several new models of open access are becoming more widespread, such as publish-review-curate. What is your view of this scenario?

The publish-review-curate (PRC) model, built on the foundation of preprint archiving, is a good approach to scholarly communication. Overlay journals, which operate within the PRC framework, have existed for some time, but their adoption has remained relatively limited. However, if PRC journals begin charging authors high fees for review, such as eLife’s $2,500 review charge, they risk replicating the same participation divide seen in the author-pay open access model. Why should “reviewing a preprint,” an activity driven by community service, carry such a prohibitive price tag?

In addition, PRC initiatives face challenges from for-profit secondary database providers. A notable example is Clarivate’s removal of eLife from the Journal Citation Reports, citing its non-traditional peer review model, potentially affecting submissions to the journal and its revenue. PRC journals must remain resilient in the face of such pressures.

Do you think there’s a role for librarians here?

Of course. Librarians should actively promote open access. They should monitor the evolving trends, understand the different models shaped by scientific norms, and raise awareness among researchers. They can play a crucial role in establishing and effectively managing institutional repositories to store and share research, ensuring that the content is properly harvested by major service providers for enhanced visibility. Furthermore, they should design targeted services, programs, and outreach initiatives around repositories to engage scientists and scholars in fostering broader open access participation. Librarians should also support the development and successful implementation of open access policies at different levels.

Let’s talk about the One Nation One Subscription deal, which is probably the most surprising news in scholarly publishing from India for some years. I believe you raised doubts about this kind of deal even before it was signed. What's your view?

ONOS is an expensive and ill-conceived misstep; it is like watering barren land. The majority of the intended ONOS beneficiary institutions lack the essential infrastructure required to utilize the resources provided and are offered inconvenient access mechanism. ONOS is largely founded on assumptions that are disconnected from the practical challenges faced by beneficiary institutions.

The government is expected to spend ₹6,000 crore (approximately $723 million) on journal subscriptions from 30 publishers over a three-year period beginning in 2025. The annual expenditure of ₹2,000 crore (about $241 million) is more than double the estimated spending in previous years. A considerable proportion of the papers published by ONOS-affiliated publishers are open access. For example, Springer Nature, one of the ONOS publishers, reported that 50 percent of its articles published in 2024 were open access. When the expanding volume of freely available open access content is viewed relative to the publishers’ total content output, the financial loss from ONOS is magnified.

Within the ONOS spending, approximately $18 million (7.5 percent) per year has been allocated (double dip) for article processing charges to make papers open access on publishers’ websites, without any clear plan regarding the intended recipients. Beyond this, ONOS has no relevance in advancing open access to Indian research output. Labelling ONOS an “open access” initiative is nothing short of an absurd charade.

India has missed two key opportunities to advance open access to public-funded research:

The first came in 2014, when the Departments of Science & Technology and Biotechnology announced a retroactive policy requiring researchers to deposit peer-reviewed papers in open repositories within two weeks of acceptance in a journal (with some exemptions). Shahid Jameel, then CEO of the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance, called it “a step in the right direction,” as the policy would have applied to the vast majority of publicly funded research in India. However, the Departments failed to implement the policy, ultimately becoming mute spectators to its inaction.

The second missed opportunity came in 2020, when the Indian government drafted a new Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy that emphasized open science. Key proposals included establishing the Indian Science and Technology Archive of Research (INDSTA) to host all publicly funded research, mandating immediate public access to journal-accepted papers, and ensuring open availability of research data. However, the policy remains a draft with no traction.

Instead of investing in essential open scholarly infrastructure, the government is currently prioritizing and funding ONOS—an expensive distraction.

Thank you, Madhan, for your time and for giving us your views.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.