India has lost its way on open access

New Delhi’s focus on striking a deal with the scientific publishing industry ignores the true spirit of open access and knowledge sharing

- LATHA JISHNU

IT IS an unlikely industry to have become the great success of the digital age when all the pundits were predicting its demise when the Internet era began. But helped by a bizarre business model, it has proved all the doomsayers wrong with astonishing revenues and profit margins that surpass even those of even giant corporations like Apple and Google. It gets its products for free, top notch products that have been assessed for quality by the leading experts in their respective fields, again for free or for a pittance, and then sold them at exorbitant rates to customers. In the process the original makers of the products are themselves barred from accessing their own work because they had been forced to sign away the intellectual property rights on it!

Most readers would be surprised to learn that we are talking of the scientific, technical and medical or STM publishing industry. The core of their business is scientific journals which are published weekly or monthly, journals that carry the latest research in a large number of disciplines. And if you think that such a limited business would yield little profit you are in for a further shock. It is an estimated US $30 billion industry whose market leaders enjoy astonishing profit margins of 35-40 per cent. Knowledge is in their thrall as the fruits of research are behind prohibitive paywalls. Not many can afford all the journals, not even a well-endowed Harvard University. Imagine then the plight of institutions and universities in developing countries. But neither institutions nor governments have been able to alter the system.