We Write It. We Check It. Then We Pay to Read It.

The case for free and open academic publishing, and what India could do about it.

At A Glance

• Researchers do the work and often pay to publish it. Peer reviewers check it for free. Readers pay to read it. Publishers collect from all three.
• Open access was meant to fix this. Too often it has only moved the paywall from the reader’s door to the author’s.
• India’s One Nation One Subscription scheme has widened access, but most of that money still goes to buying back reading rights.
• I propose a National Open Access Framework: free to read, nominal cost to publish, judged on quality and not on ability to pay.
• Key takeaways are listed at the bottom.

Anyone who has trained in medicine in India knows this moment.

You have a clinical question. You search, and you find the paper that answers it. You click. A box appears asking for thirty or forty dollars for forty-eight hours of reading. You close the tab and make do with the abstract.

That paper was probably written by doctors like us. It was checked by doctors like us, for free. And the patient whose care it could have improved was, in all likelihood, lying in a bed down the corridor.

Credit Where It Is Due

I want to say this clearly before I say anything critical.

Scientific publishing has served medicine well. Edward Jenner published his account of cowpox and smallpox in 1798. Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA in a single page of Nature in 1953. In both cases, publication did three things. It put the work in front of people qualified to question it. It kept a permanent record. And it let others build on it.

Peer review, with all its faults, is still the best filter we have. None of what follows is an argument against journals or against review. It is an argument about who pays, and who profits.

Four People in the Room

Every published paper involves four parties.

Look at that table for a moment. Three of the four parties give something and get little or nothing back. The fourth collects from all three.

The researcher. A novelist earns royalties on every copy sold. A researcher earns nothing from a paper, however widely it is read. Worse, the researcher may have to pay a hefty fee to publish it. For a young faculty member in a district medical college, that is not a small number. It is often the difference between publishing and not publishing.

The peer reviewer. Reviewers are the backbone of the system. They catch the flawed statistics, the missing control group, the conclusion that the data do not support. They do it in the evenings and on Sundays, unpaid, and in most institutions it counts for nothing at promotion time.

The reader. Usually a fellow researcher or a clinician. The person who will actually turn the finding into better care. And the person most likely to be stopped by a paywall, particularly in a smaller institution with a thin library budget.

The publisher. The publisher’s position is more complicated. Publishers do real work, and the move online has not made that work free. But they also earn from every direction at once, and the large ones run on profit margins that most industries would envy. They also control the journal metrics that decide who gets promoted and who gets funded. So academia keeps chasing the high-impact journal, and the publisher sets the price of the chase.

The Open Access Trap

Open access was supposed to be the answer. Make every paper free to read, and the reader’s problem disappears.

In practice, much of open access has simply shifted the bill. Instead of the reader paying a subscription, the author pays an article processing charge. In some well-known journals, that charge alone runs into several lakh rupees. Some hybrid journals collect subscriptions from libraries and publication fees from authors for the very same issue.

The paywall has not gone. It has moved from the reader’s door to the author’s.

There is a second problem. When a journal earns money for every paper it accepts, some journals start accepting everything. The rise of predatory journals is a direct result of the pay-to-publish model, and our residents are their favourite targets.

So open access, as it is usually practised, fixes one unfairness and creates two more. That is not what the idea was meant to be.

Why Does This Model Survive?

If so many people are unhappy, why has nothing changed? Three reasons.

The first is prestige. A paper in a famous journal still carries weight in a selection committee that no free journal can yet match. Nobody wants to be the first to give that up.

The second is money. Publishers earn from several directions at once, and that income buys influence over how research is judged.

The third is real risk. Any new system has to pay its bills and maintain its standards. A free journal that runs out of funds, or lets its review slip, helps nobody. These concerns are fair and should not be waved away.

But none of these reasons is a scientific one. The current model survives because it is familiar, not because it serves science best.

What India Has Already Done

India has taken a real step. Since 1 January 2025, the One Nation One Subscription scheme has given students, faculty and researchers in government institutions access to over 13,000 journals from 30 international publishers. The outlay is ₹6,000 crore for 2025 to 2027.

That matters. A researcher in a state college can now read what a researcher in a premier central institute reads. I welcome it.

But notice where most of that money goes. It goes to the same publishers, to buy access to papers that Indian researchers often wrote and reviewed for free. The scheme does support publication fees, but centrally funded support is mainly for journals in the top five per cent by citation metrics. That helps some authors. It also strengthens the very prestige chase that keeps costs high.

ONOS solves the reading problem, for now, by paying for it. It does not yet change who owns the knowledge.

A Proposal: The National Open Access Framework

Our own tradition has a verse that many of us learnt in school:

Vyaye krite vardhata eva nityam, vidya dhanam sarva dhana pradhanam.

When it is spent, it only grows. The wealth of knowledge is the greatest wealth of all.

Knowledge in India was meant to be given away. That is not a romantic idea. It is a practical one, and it is exactly what academic publishing needs. So here is what I would propose: a National Open Access Framework, with a simple motto.

Publish in India. Share with the World.

In practice, it would look like this:

1. Free to read, for everyone, everywhere. No subscription, no paywall, no embargo.
2. Nominal cost to publish. A small fee, or none at all, so that a paper is accepted for its quality and not for its author’s budget.
3. Government-backed, community-run journals. Editorial boards drawn from Indian universities and professional bodies, with transparent peer review.
4. Money redirected, not added. Part of what universities and the government now spend on subscriptions could fund these journals instead.
5. Credit for reviewers. Peer review counted, in writing, for promotion and appointments.
6. Judged on the work. Selection committees and funders assessing the paper itself, not the name of the journal on its cover.

This will not happen overnight, and it will not replace international journals. It does not need to. It needs to give Indian researchers a respected, free, credible home for their work, and give the world free access to what India produces.

The Choice Before Us

Universities and governments are at a turning point. They can keep paying, year after year, to read what their own people wrote. Or they can build something that belongs to the people who do the work.

Will they take down the paywall? Will they build a system where knowledge reaches everyone who needs it? The answer will decide who gets to read, write and use science in India for the next generation.

Key Takeaways

• Researchers and peer reviewers give their work to journals for free. Readers then pay to read it.
• Author-paid open access often moves the paywall rather than removing it, and has fuelled predatory publishing.
• The model survives on prestige and publisher income, not on scientific merit.
• One Nation One Subscription widens access, but mostly by paying publishers for reading rights.
• A National Open Access Framework, free to read and nominal to publish, would let India lead by example: Publish in India. Share with the World.