LibCognizance: Free access to journals

One Nation, One Subscription journal-access plan of India

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1. The plan will make scholarly literature accessible for free to everyone in the country

2. The proposal The government will negotiate with the world’s leading scientific publishers to set up a nationwide “One nation one subscription” journal-access plan to make the scholarly literature available to everyone for free which is currently limited to the scholars of individual institutions subscribing to it.
3. The proposal The proposal is being developed by the Office of the Principle Scientific Advisor to the Government of India and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). After being approved by the Cabinet, it is likely to happen before the year’s end.
4. Success of plan will depend upon  The willingness of publishers to negotiate nationwide subscription.  If the government could make it cheaper to give access to the paywalled literature to all citizens.
5. The idea of plan emerged from  The discussions about whether the country should join a global open access initiative “Plan S”.  According to Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India, the government is not going to join Plan S.
6. What is Plan S ?  Making full and immediate Open Access a reality.  Plan S is an initiative for open access publishing launched in 2018, with the aim of making full and immediate access to the research publications a reality by January 2020, It is supported by an international consortium "cOAlition S”.
7. “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.” (https://www.coalition-s.org/about/) The main Principle of Plan S
8. Plan S supports Gold route  Gold route of Open Access in which the articles are freely and permanently accessible to everyone, immediately after publication. These articles are published under creative commons license and also available to reuse as long as the authors are given proper acknowledgment as the copyrights to their work are retained by authors. These articles can be published in two types of journals.  Fully open access journal, in which articles are freely available online to everyone to read, usually after the author have paid Article Processing Charges.  Hybrid journals, which are subscription-based journals and have the option for Gold open access also if an author wish to publish in this category.  DOAJ (Directory of open access journal) is an online directory of fully open access journals (https://doaj.org/)
9. One Nation one Subscription favours Green route Green route of Open Access is all about the self-archiving permission provided by the publishers to their authors so that they can submit either the preprint or the postprint version of their articles (but before publication in a journal) in institutional repository making it freely accessible to everyone. The copyrights are retained by the publisher and the articles are freely accessible when the embargo period is over ( though the embargo period will not apply in all cases.) However, there is a limited restriction on the reuse of work.
10. Researchers’ rights  Here also the researchers has to wait for the embargo period is over ranging from few months to years to publish in repositories.  “Rights-retention” policies that ensure researchers keep the right to share their work in repositories without breaching copyright agreements. A growing number of institutions like Harvard University and funding agencies behind Plan S have introduced similar policies to keep the researchers rights safe.
11. Researchers’ rights  But according to Rahul Siddharthan, a computational biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and a member of the advisory group, “Existing repositories in India aren’t very popular, so there’s a risk researchers won’t get behind green open access unless policies are enforced”.
12. Ongoing debate on proposal  One group of members in the advisory group wants that government should pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) in reputed Open access journals for the researchers who are unable to bear these charges to publish. “Paying to publish is not good for countries like India, where resources for research are scarce,” says Madhan Muthu, a librarian at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, who is part of the advisory group.
13.  Rahul Siddharthan, a computational biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and a member of the advisory group, also supports establishing a central government fund to pay APCs for reputable open-access journals.  On the other side some members are against the use of public funding for paying APCs. According to Muthu and Arul Scaria, an intellectual-property researcher at the National Law University in New Delhi and an advisory group member, “public funding should not be spent on publishing fees, in addition to subscription costs”.
14.  Some members suggest that India should be the part of global initiative to reform publishing system, but they are not against the proposal of national subscription if at reasonable rates.  According to Dominique Babini, an open-access advocate with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences in Buenos Aires, “Funding agencies should invest more in local and regional open-access journals that do not require authors to pay to publish, which make up about 70% of those listed in the international Directory of Open Access Journals”
15. References  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4  https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2019/05/gold-and- green-open-access-copyrights.html  https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2019/09/open-access- leading-to-goal-of.html  https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-develops-rights- retention- strategy/#:~:text=The%20Rights%20Retention%20Strategy%20i s,with%20a%20CC%20BY%20license