Current Science

Muthu Madhan ¹, Siva Shankar Kimidi ², Subbiah Gunasekaran ³, Subbiah Arunachalam ¹

Affiliations
1 DST Centre for Policy Research, Archives and Publication Cell, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560 012, IN
2 Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Kandi, Sangareddy 502 285, IN
3 Knowledge Resources Centre, Central Elecrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi 630 003, IN

Abstract

Paying to publish is an ethical issue. During 2010-14 Indian researchers have used 488 open access (OA) journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from US$ 7.5 to 5,000, to publish about 15,400 papers. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased from 242 journals and 2,557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$ 2.4 million annually on APCs paid to OA journals and the amount would be much more if we add APCs paid to make papers published in hybrid journals open access. It would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing in Latin America and China, especially when funding is scarce. Scientists are ready to pay APC as long as institutions pay for it and funding agencies are not ready to insist that grants provided for research should not be used for paying APC.

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Muthu Madhan , Siva Shankar Kimidi , Subbiah Gunasekaran , Subbiah Arunachalam

Abstract

We inadvertently missed to present the total number of papers written by Indian researchers in the first sentence under the Discussion section (page 707). Please read the sentence as 'Over 14.4% (or 37,122) of the 256,822 papers from India as seen from SCIE have been published in OA journals'.

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