A few weeks ago, a message pinged into my inbox asking if I would peer-review a manuscript submitted to a reputed scientific journal published by Elsevier. I was tempted. The topic of the manuscript was related to my own research on what happens to wild plants and animals when previously forested landscapes are transformed into large plantations of a single crop species. A quick look at the journal website showed that the journal published quality research and a bunch of academic grandees sat on the editorial board. Their request to me indicated a recognition of my expertise in the field. By accepting to review the paper, I could learn something new, share my expertise and comments with the authors and editors, and add a notch on my academic belt, so to speak.
And yet, I refused.
Scientists track their credentials and calibre by how many papers they manage to publish in such peer-reviewed journals and how often they are called upon to review manuscripts for them. In brief, here’s the good, the bad, the ugly of it. The good: the process of independent and anonymous peer review serves as a crucial quality-check and enables authors to hone and rectify their work before it is published. The bad: peer review can be a flaming hoop you are forced to jump through, more difficult if you are not a native English speaker, if you are from a less-privileged background, if you are from a relatively unknown institution in the Third World. The ugly: the process can degenerate into a situation where jealous peers and conniving editors disparage your work and obstruct publication, or simply display how racist, sexist, and patronizing they can be from their positions of power or anonymity. If I did the review, I would not be paid for it—that’s how scientific peer review works—but I could include the journal in a section in my CV listing all the national and international scientific journals that I had reviewed for. I could even register on a commercial website where academics track and showcase their journal peer review and editorial contributions. Still, it was not my skepticism over the peer review process, nor my lack of interest in counting review-coup that brought me to refuse.
Instead, here’s what I wrote to the Editor-in-Chief, copied to all members of the editorial board:
Dear Dr _____ and other members of the _____ editorial board,
Greetings for 2021 from India! I trust the year has begun well and you will all have a productive, healthy, and peaceful year ahead. I recently received an invitation… to review a paper for [_____ journal]… I am writing to you to explain why I am declining to review (or submit for consideration) any paper to [_____ journal]. At the outset, I would like to state that I have great respect for the work that the journal publishes and for all of you on the Editorial Board. My decision is based on the fact that the journal is published by Elsevier.
You are doubtless aware of the concerns already raised by many in the academic community and the media on the business of scientific publishing, particularly the role of companies like Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature. You may recall that many editors have resigned en masse from these journals as well in the past to protest against their practices.Recently, Elsevier along with others (including Wiley) filed a lawsuit in an Indian court against Sci-Hub and Libgen. Leading Indian scientists and researchers (and a group of over 2000 signatories) have protested this highlighting how Sci-Hub has greatly enabled access to scientific research in India and other countries. Sci-hub struck at the heart of the oligopoly of purely commercial publishers, which includes Elsevier and Wiley, who run scientific publishing like a fiefdom, charging exorbitant subscriptions or publishing fees, making exponential profits, and treating the intellectual output of scientists and institutions as if it was all their personal property. This is the case although the research published in these journals is funded by public agencies or other funders, and the papers are written, reviewed, and edited by scientists who seek no compensation for their intellectual inputs and time. With exorbitant subscriptions, steep open access publication fees or paywalls for each article, companies such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature are profiteering from an enterprise that generates knowledge which really belongs to all and which should be truly open and free for anyone in the world to access. To me, this is also a form of predatory publishing: unbridled corporate predation on captive academic prey.
To the argument that shunning such journals will compromise science, I can only point out to many journals of repute published by scientific societies and academies worldwide (such as the Indian Academy of Sciences) that make all their published papers free (diamond/platinum open access) and are able to run their journals with modest subscriptions and advertisements. There have also been initiatives like Amelica and Coalition-S. The alternatives are there for us to adopt as scientists and scholars if we wish.
I realise that, for early-career scientists, publishing in some of these journals is still important because of the undue importance still given to them by academic institutions in their scientific recruitment and recognition policies. I, too, have published in these journals and realise I am implicated in the perpetuation of this system. I will respect the views and needs of students and others I collaborate with on where they seek to publish in or review for. But as a token of protest, I declare that where it concerns my own work I will not submit a paper to these journals or review a paper for them, until such corporate predatory practices end. I do realise that my action is a mere token and not enough. There is more I myself need to do to make science universal, free, and accessible.
I hope you do not see this as an attack on your or the journal’s credibility but consider it in a more progressive spirit. If you have read this far, I thank you for taking the time. Kindly accept my regrets once again.
Best regards,
Shankar
It was a rant, a polite one, but a rant, nonetheless. As you can imagine, the Editor-in-Chief was not too happy about it.
§
Before the Editor-in-Chief wrote back, another member of the Editorial Board—the person handling the manuscript—wrote me appreciating my email and agreeing that scientific publishing had a lot of room to evolve, but personally preferred, as an editor, to engender small and positive changes from within. (Another member of the editorial board, a leading woman scientist from India, wrote saying she was not on the board as far as she knew. It turned out she had been invited a while back and had agreed to be on the board, but the journal had never involved her in its work, so she wrote again indicating that she would prefer her name to be removed. Why a woman scientist from India was on the editorial board but never involved in it is another story perhaps.)
With the Editor-in-Chief himself, a back-and-forth exchange of emails ensued, which I will paraphrase here. [I have tried my best not to misrepresent anything and have chosen to leave out names of the concerned people and journal as I have no issue with them individually and prefer to keep the focus on the issue of commercial scientific publishing rather than any individuals or particular journal. I have rearranged the discussion slightly for clarity and placed my interjections and asides, like this one, in square brackets.]
He started off by partly agreeing with me. He then said that Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature are no more predatory than many other businesses that one has to deal with these days. He said that as academics we clearly have a duty to try to find alternative models, and emphasized that his journal was an open access journal, for which the authors had to pay USD 1650 to publish in, unless they were from a World Bank low-income country where they could ask for a waiver. [Actually, the current rate is USD 1820 for a paper of 12-15 published pages, which is about as much as a Masters student would need for a 5-6 month field research project in India.] He wrote about how they receive a large volume of papers and how many scientists they approach to provide their peer review. They needed over 1000 volunteer reviewers he said in one email, changing the figure in a later email to indicate they had more than 1000 authors and over 2500 reviewers each year.
Then he wrote that if every paper had to be reviewed by 2-3 scientists, every scientist who wants to publish in these commercial journals are also obliged to review 2-3 papers for every paper they intend to publish, otherwise the system would not work. He said that if I did not want to publish in such journals, I should then also not read these journals or allow my students to do so.
That last bit got my goat. I wrote back respectfully disagreeing with him. I said readers have a right to access the research (which is publicly funded or funded by other agencies) irrespective of whether they personally support commercial publishers. I did not need to stress the importance of enabling wide access in the case of socially relevant studies or conservation research as the editor himself was doubtless aware of it. It also struck me later that the published research itself would have referred to other earlier research in various journals. In papers related to my field of work that may have included my own work or those of colleagues. Saying I cannot read a paper in this journal was just as absurd as saying the authors have no right to refer to my work or any other research published in non-commercial journals. Science simply cannot work that way.
The Editor-in-Chief raised a number of other valid points. He said that there was a suite of publishing options available for authors these days and another member of the editorial board was planning to launch a new conservation journal that addressed some of these issues. He named one journal that offered a reader-pays alternative for authors who cannot pay the Article Processing Charge (APC), and another that was open access and “provides competition” to his journal. So if you don’t like a journal for its policies you can find another one that better suits you. But, someone has to pay, he emphasised. Non-profit publishers don’t have to take a large cut for shareholders but, according to him, they did not achieve the same efficiencies as the large commercial publishers. He noted how most society-owned journals, earlier published on a non-profit basis, have shifted to Wiley and other commercial publishers and been forced to charge huge fees because it costs too much to publish a journal. As far as the journal he edits was concerned, he pointed out that authors retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights and Elsevier is granted publishing and distribution rights. Authors are paying Elsevier for publication and distribution only, which to him was reasonable. Furthermore, the articles were released under a Creative Commons license so people could use and re-use them in different ways (with attribution), so what was I complaining about? I should be reviewing for them since they are not doing any of the terrible things I was accusing them of.
There was stuff I agreed with and yet, much I still disagreed with. If someone has to pay and the authors are forced to pay to publish it is still an absurd payment in some ways, if you think of it, I wrote back. Companies like Elsevier rake in profits of 30-40% every year through a business model that appears unique to scientific publishing. Based on the figures the editor gave me, just this one journal he edited had more than 3000 highly-qualified scientists voluntarily contributing each year to Elsevier’s extraordinary profits. Imagine that! As a 2017 article in The Guardian puts it:
Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup.
Then there is the question of the APC that is levied by commercial journals that use an author-pays model (in journals that are not fully open access, an extra charge has to be paid to make it open access.) The APC is typically imposed without any transparency as to the real costs incurred by the publisher. Studies indicate that commercial publishers charge nearly 3 times more than similar non-profit publishers of reputed standalone journals. One can ask whether the huge profits made by the publishers under the guise of “efficiency” or “scale” are not better ploughed back into scientific societies (and nonprofits that support science) rather than to the pockets of wealthy companies and their shareholders. The commercial publishers appear to call all the shots. As Brian Nosek, a Professor at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for Open Science, said in an interview to Nasdaq, academic publishing is
the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.”
Even where learned societies had failed to run the journals on their own and had succumbed to handing it over to a commercial publisher to handle, as the editor pointed out was increasingly the case, most fail to disclose the terms of the arrangement with the scientific society. For instance, one of the leading societies in the field of nature conservation is the Society for Conservation Biology, whose flagship journal Conservation Biology is (unfortunately) published by Wiley, which levies a charge of USD 3000 for publication as open access. Fortunately, the society enables authors to publish their work at a reduced rate or ask for a waiver if they cannot afford the page charges: although such articles would be held by Wiley behind a paywall (about USD 42 per article, at present rates, for online access and PDF download). The journal website hosted by Wiley claims that “payment of article publication costs furthers the work of the society and conservation worldwide” but gives no indication as to what their deal is or what fraction of the profits are actually shared with the society.
For almost every commercial journal, I retorted in an email to the Editor-in-Chief, there is a non-profit equivalent that achieves the same quality at a significantly lower cost. They also make all papers available free for readers after a period of 6 months or a year (for instance, the journal Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science versus Nature produced by Springer; the Royal Society journals and PNAS, say, versus some sub-journals in the Nature crop). Further, any profits made from the academy or society journals contribute to a scientific rather than a business enterprise like Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, or other big commercial publishers.
Take, for example, the journal Human Ecology, a Springer journal that paywalls its articles or publishes as open access after you cough up a cool USD 2780, every dollar of profit going to Springer’s coffers. Contrast that with a superb journal in a similar field, published from the global South, like Conservation and Society published by the Indian non-profit and think-tank ATREE. This fully open-access journal, which recently was forced to go from diamond open-access to an author-pays model, has a transparent ownership and publication policy and levies an APC (only on authors from higher middle-income and high-income countries) of USD 600—just one-fifth of Springer’s rates. Another Indian journal, Ecology, Economy, and Society-The INSEE Journal charges nothing to authors and readers for open access. For a comparable non-profit or society journal published from the West, the Resilience Alliance publishes a fully open access journal Ecology and Society levying an APC of USD 975, or just 35% of Springer rates.
In the Indian context, there is also this absurd situation where Springer republishes many diamond open access journals, such as through their republishing agreement for the journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences. The journals are entirely edited, printed, published, and distributed by the society or academy imposing no page charges on authors and making the publication freely available to readers on the academy’s journal websites. Springer does zero editorial or publishing work but still charges the academy (for what? hosting on their online platform) and then paywalls the same papers at >USD 30 per paper. Just for parking it on their website! [Correction: Springer paywalls the papers, yes, but apparently does not charge the Academy.]
Another example is the journal Tropical Ecology published by the International Society for Tropical Ecology, which was diamond open access with no page charges until 2019, when they unfortunately succumbed to the ‘efficiencies’ and enticements of Springer. They now levy an APC of USD 2780 to authors who wish to make their paper open access, failing which they impose a paywall to each reader of ~USD 42 per paper.
Still, on the charges levied by commercial journals, the editor I was corresponding with had a different take. Like many things in life, you get [what] you pay for, he wrote. Journals like Nature have open access publishing charges that seem outrageous, but they were justified by the editing services of full-time professionals and unmatched quality they provided, and the citations the papers generated. If he had the money and his students produced something worthy of such attention, he would scrape it together to pay up.
This left me stupefied. If the publishing charges seem outrageous, it is perhaps because they are outrageous. Instead of figuring out a better way to make their work openly and freely accessible and appear on global databases and platforms, if leading scientists and academies worldwide subscribe to the costly vision of payment and efficiency and impact sold by commercial publishers, there is definitely something broken in the system. As a scientist from a non-profit organisation in a lower middle-income country like India I somehow could not countenance such sums of money being shelled out ostensibly to advance science. Have these journals come to command such power and clout that top scientists in the world will simply pay up unquestioningly? Do we still believe that counting citations is the way to build reputation in science? Can scientists who are so meticulous in preparing their papers and so generous with their time in reviewing them for free, in order to contribute to scientific growth and the growth of their community, not find better ways to advance science, academia, and community than relying on profiteering journals? Could we not invest more as a community in society-run, non-profit, open access journals and enhancing the list and quality of free journals, of which, as one can see from the Free Journals Network and the Directory of Open Access Journals, there are many?
According to a 2021 survey, at least 29,000 diamond open access journals are published around the world. While diamond open-access journals face many operational challenges, 70% of them manage to produce the journal at an annual operational cost of under USD 10,000. In other words, the amount of money a scientist pays as APC to Elsevier/Wiley/Springer or similar publishers for just 3 or 4 journal articles can be more than enough to support an entire journal for a year and produce science that is freely accessible worldwide. Even now, about 356,000 diamond open access papers are published per year compared to approximately 453,000 papers where the scientists have shelled out the APC (453,000 x average APC of USD 2000 implies ~1 billion USD). Imagine if those funds can be routed to support scientific societies and their journals, produce free and better academic community resources and databases (rather than the tyranny of science citation indices and Clarivate Analytics, for instance). Imagine if that money could be used to provide free, open, and easy access to all scientific publications!
§
Free, open, and easy access to all scientific publications is what Sci-Hub provides. In our email back-and-forth, the editor and I never discussed Sci-Hub, which was why I started off on my rant in the first place. And yet, the exchange had made me acutely conscious of my debt to Sci-Hub and of my own failings as a scientist.

Alexandra Elbakyan, a scholar and computer programmer who created and runs Sci-Hub, is probably the one person who has contributed more to global dissemination of science and access to scientific literature than any other person in human history. Sci-Hub offered a way to access scientific publications, including those behind paywalls. One just had to put in the link to the paper or the DOI and Sci-Hub delivered it online (in PDF) almost instantly for free. In recent years, it has been invaluable for scientists in countries like India who have no other access to these journals.
Before Sci-Hub, if I wanted to read more than just the abstracts of pay-walled papers (or more than just the titles of papers that had no abstracts), I would have to ask friends in some (usually foreign) university to download it via their library access and send it over, or write emails directly to author after author and wait for them to respond with PDF soft copies. Neither did that work all the time nor was it even remotely an ideal way to do research.
It should hardly come as a surprise then that open access papers are more likely to be read and cited. In fact, a 2021 study published in a Springer journal (some poetic justice there), found that papers downloaded via Sci-Hub were cited 172% more often than those that were not. I am no fan of citation counting, but irrespective of whether scientists want greater readership, open access, or more citations, they must acknowledge Sci-Hub does a service. There are other points of view about Sci-Hub, but after the last few years as an admirer of both Sci-Hub and Alexandra Elbakyan, I know on which side of the fence I will stay.
Sci-Hub is not just for scientists. It provides access to everyone. It is also particularly valuable to journalists and science communicators who often have no direct access to journals and find scientists both difficult to reach and reticent to communicate with journalists on a deadline. Take what the journalist and writer, George Monbiot, had to say, for instance:
After definitively disrupting the status quo, Elbakyan soldiers on, while commercial publishers who feel threatened by her keep filing lawsuits. The recent case filed in a Delhi court by Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society (ACS) brings charges of copyright infringement and asks for a dynamic injunction to block internet access to Sci-Hub nationwide. These three are among the top scientific publishers in the world, with ACS, despite being a scientific society and one of the wealthiest in the world at that, being opposed to or a laggard in supporting open access. The Delhi case —a David versus Trio-of-Goliaths case, if ever there was one—is still in court. Legal experts indicate a strong basis in law, ethics, and equity, going for Sci-Hub. One prays the court rules likewise.
§
It is easy enough to point a finger at greedy Goliaths, but what about the other fingers curled inward, biting into my fist, pointing to me? What had I done, as an individual scientist or as part of the scientific community, to make science free, open, and accessible? The floodgates opened. My thoughts and mortification came pouring out. I could barely keep track of the list of personal failures and all that I myself needed to do. I made a list.
- Many of my own scientific papers were in pay-walled journals. I had shared them as much as I could earlier, but I could do more to ensure that every one of them was accessible.
- A boycott of journals published by companies like Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Sage was one thing, but there were positive contributions I needed to make. I could do more reviews for diamond open access journals and also serve on their editorial boards, if invited. My record in this remains miserable. After turning down two such invitations in the past, I had served on the editorial board of one diamond open access journal (Current Science), only to resign after about three years giving workload as an excuse. I am one of the editors of a new diamond open access journal, Hornbill Natural History and Conservation, but I have done almost nothing for the journal so far. A society-run journal invited me to their editorial board and after the Editor-in-Chief assured me they were planning to make it open access and also bring a diverse editorial board with better gender representation, I have agreed to join, but am yet to contribute anything of significance.
- Instead of paying outrageous sums to journals, I could donate instead modestly to Sci-Hub itself or other individuals and non-profits supporting open science (such as the Center for Open Science, for instance). I could become a member of one or two scholarly societies relevant to my work, which publish open access journals.
- Even if scientific papers are accessible, they are rarely intelligible to the wider audience, beyond our peers, that we are often interested in reaching: journalists, science communicators, policy makers, and interested citizens. I could put more time into sharing relevant research in more accessible avenues, especially Wikipedia, where my contributions have been minuscule so far. An encyclopedic review on a bird species, could be contributed to something like the online Birds of the World (which has made all species accounts open and freely accessible in India, although requiring a sign-up), rather than to any pay-walled journal, however reputed.
- As a naturalist and biologist, I only have contributed a small fraction of my species observations to citizen science portals like eBird, iNaturalist, and India Biodiversity Portal. I have stockpiled thousands of useful and educational photos and other media, but shared only a tiny fraction so far where it can be used by the wider community, such as on Wikimedia Commons. There was a lot more I could do.
- As for my scientific datasets, I have sat on most of them for years. I could easily share them on open repositories like OSF and Data Dryad, with CC-BY or Public Domain licenses, so other scientists have access to the data and could do more with it than I myself can by clutching onto it as personal intellectual property. Technical reports (grey literature that academics typically consider less worthy than journal publications), too, often contain valuable information and material unavailable elsewhere and I could upload mine to public archives like Archive.org with free licenses. I can make academic presentations and talks available, too, through suitable repositories.
- I could re-do my CV to highlight public contributions to science and open access rather than try to pad it with an impressive list of publications in so-called high-impact-factor journals. For instance, the following summary of my contributions to Wikipedia should be in my CV. Although it only catalogues how little I have done so far, it should be at least as important to chronicle this as any other scientific work and publications of mine. (A bonus: as a regular editor I can gain access to scientific publications and digital libraries like JSTOR through the Wikipedia Library.)

8. Finally, I can ensure that in our own hiring and assessment practices, we do not privilege publication in the so-called high-impact-factor journals of these commercial publishers. If the scientific community does not privilege these journals, it will take the wind out of their sails and curtail the power commercial publishers currently wield. For an academic appointment, if publications are an aspect to consider, then the quality of the person’s work, motivation, and aptitude should matter more than any journal they have published in (or are yet to publish in). We have applied this rationale as far as possible in our research and it has paid rich dividends by attracting people with excellent capabilities in basic and applied conservation science.
§
Even if one accepts that the system of scientific publishing is unjust and broken, the responses to this so far (besides Sci-Hub, of course) seem like half measures. Boycotts like mine remain little more than tokenism. Deals arrived at by universities with publishers like Elsevier remain riddled with holes. Even the proposed “one nation, one subscription” policy that the Government of India proposes to negotiate where, in return for a centrally-negotiated payment to journals, all individuals in India will have access to journal articles, avoids the question of whether such huge payments should be made to benefit commercial publishers. As a nation, India’s science budget (R&D) is only 0.7%, much lower than most nations in our position, and a large part of that budget goes to the private sector (42%), defence and space (29%).
In a way, each of the above half-measures is a lost opportunity to shake the system loose of its existing anchors to sail on new voyages in the sea of science. We need a far deeper commitment to and more active engagement with free and open access to science and scientific knowledge in all its various stages and shapes. If science itself has the innate capacity to shake free of old paradigms and shift to new realities, perhaps it can happen in the system of scientific publication, too. And the time for that is now.
BIBIDISHANANDA BASU says:
Thanks for this amazing piece. As an early career researcher, I will keep this in mind. I always believed that the concept and material of the paper should matter rather than the journal and their impact factor and your piece reflects the same. I was not aware of these nuances of the publishing fraternity but its good learning for me and researcher like us should keep that in mind.
Also, I believe if we keep publishing good research work in not-so-well-known open-access Journal (which provides every criterion of ‘publication ethics’), then that journal will be popularized and their impact factor will also be greater.
Also thank you for emphasizing how much we should contribute in the public domains too.
31 March 2021 — 1:16 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for your comment. Glad it resonated with your thinking on journals. The choices we make on where we publish can influence the system going forward–hopefully away from the present model towards more diamond open access.
31 March 2021 — 4:33 pm
Sarthak says:
To be able to successfully popularise not-so-well-known journals by publishing good quality articles in them, the linkage of academic hiring with publishing in popular journals also needs to be changed. I don’t believe that institutions, academic or publishing, have incentive to change the status quo as their actions are unlikely to be driven by passion for scientific development. Only individuals with the specific motivation of furtherance of science and knowledge can bring about this revolution.
2 April 2021 — 10:33 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Good points. Individuals matter… but need to work together to bring about institutional change as well. If the academic hiring is privileging certain journals or impact factor based selection, that needs concerted action to be changed.
2 April 2021 — 1:03 pm
Rahul Siddharthan says:
Great article. One clarification via Twitter: Springer doesn’t charge the Academy. (Why they should charge readers for articles that are free via the journal is another question…)
https://twitter.com/joshiamitabhevo/status/1377171363576700931
31 March 2021 — 1:44 pm
T. R. Shankar Raman says:
Thanks… I had just added a correction to reflect this point when I saw your comment. Question though, if Springer paywalls Academy journal articles, do they share proceeds/profits back with the Academy?
31 March 2021 — 2:32 pm
Rahul Siddharthan says:
Good question. Another question is, how many people pay Springer for these articles?
31 March 2021 — 2:35 pm
Rahul Siddharthan says:
answered by Amitabh below—answer is yes
31 March 2021 — 2:41 pm
Dr Debal Deb says:
A long awaited article in support of the social accountability of scientists, open access publication, and definitely, sci-hub. I have never published by paying APC, not only because i am simply poor, freelance science worker with zero funding support, but also on principle. I feel you have told everything on my behalf. I will now resign from the reviewer position of the commercial journals to whom i gave a plenty of voluntary service.
And special congratulations for your superb language – your article reads like a first-rate ‘unputdownable’ thriller.
1 April 2021 — 1:14 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you for those kind comments. Maybe I should write thrillers–will get me more citations perhaps! Jokes apart, I am glad my piece resonated with your experience and thoughts.
1 April 2021 — 8:50 am
TNC Vidya says:
Yes, Springer shares profits with the Academy.
Also, what Springer provides is an enhanced PDF with links etc. I think, while what is on the Academy website is a simple PDF.
1 April 2021 — 4:39 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you for the clarification. Interesting… about enhanced PDF. I checked J. Biosci. (a sample paper). A paper PDF on the Academy website has in-text citations that are in blue but not bookmarked to that particular ref at the end. On Springer website click the blue and it works like a bookmark to that ref. Is that it?
1 April 2021 — 5:52 pm
San says:
Hello. I work in the typesetting industry and we are the minions working behind the scenes to ensure your work is fit for pdf publication. It is based on software like InDesign, 3b2 etc, which is not free. No microsoft products are free. We are paid by companies like Elsevier to typeset and no one realises our value or contribution. I think scientists etc are just unaware that there is an entire industry working behind the scenes. I agree that the rates are exhorbitant, Elsevier is greedy – they pay us also peanuts per page compared to what they make. I am not here to support or take sides. But please understand that all that you say is only one side of the picture. I can give you numerous typesetting challenges we face…it is not that simple. So please value our case and also understand that we will all be jobless if Elsevier were to go out of business.
5 April 2021 — 9:25 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Hi San, Neither am I unaware of the important work done by typesetters nor is this point new–it has been brought earlier–you will find posts about it elsewhere. I have worked closely with doing typesetting and layout myself (including using software like InDesign, InkScape and so on) to produce professional international journals, I have done copy-editing and a lot of proof-reading work on scientific manuscripts and so on. I value and appreciate the work involved. I think typesetters will be used even by others who publish journals through other models who want to make available typeset PDF papers. Who knows–they may even pay you better than the peanuts Elsevier gives, because they subscribe to a different set of values and ethos. But it is also true that online publication platform and software are developing and are being used by many publishers, which may affect the demand for such services as you mention going forward.
5 April 2021 — 10:13 am
Arun Srinivasa says:
I think that as long as we publish there will be jobs for typesetters, even if it is an open access journal, they will still need the same typesetting services.
8 April 2021 — 9:30 pm
Eben Goodale says:
Enjoyed reading this and agree in many aspects. In many ways I am knee deep in the publishing business. But ultimately I agree that we want to disseminate information as widely and freely as possible, and this goes for textbooks, too.
31 March 2021 — 2:06 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Eben. Good point on the textbooks.
31 March 2021 — 4:37 pm
Amitabh Joshi says:
Nice piece, and I (as an individual) pretty much agree with all you are saying. As Editor of Publications of the Indian Academy of Sciences, I just want to clarify that, contrary to what is stated in this piece, Springer does NOT charge IASc anything. On the contrary, they pay royalties to us for paywalling their (slightly value added version) of the articles, while we make the articles freely available on our website. The royalties thus earned, in part, help us to make all our publications (books and journals) free and open access.
31 March 2021 — 2:34 pm
T. R. Shankar Raman says:
Thank you for your comment. As I mentioned above, I have already added a correction in the post. It would be good if this aspect is made transparent on the journal websites, both in IAS and Springer, about the fraction of earnings shared with IAS to support its work. I did not find it when I was writing this post.
31 March 2021 — 3:06 pm
Amitabh Joshi says:
Hi Shankar Raman. Nice to see you after a while, if only online. Springer will not share publicly share details of their royalty agreements with any co-publisher and the Academy is also not at liberty to divulge such information.
31 March 2021 — 3:20 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you Prof Joshi. I understand that Springer and IAS cannot share the details, but the fact that royalties from payments go to support the Academy could be indicated. Aggregate figures could be provided somewhere (perhaps they already are?). People who are paying to access papers are also perhaps doing so unaware that free versions of the same papers are available on the Academy website. Also, for prospective authors, the Instructions for Authors on the Academy website (for Journal of Biosciences) helpfully indicates as the first two sentences that:
But the same Instructions for Authors on Springer website leaves out those two key sentences (but thankfully provides a link back to the Academy website). This is the first thing I often look for when I check a journal out.
31 March 2021 — 5:59 pm
Dr. K. Sreelalitha says:
Good evening sir, wonderful depiction sir. As an individual researcher with self financing each and every part of research i always have tough route while going for my publications. Where i need to select repute publishers to support my API, where the APC hit hardly. Your article is a eye opener in making decisions now. Definitely my publications are going to have a better path now. Thank you for all the insights you provided. Now i can think of my reviewer work also in a different prospective. Thank you
7 March 2023 — 8:27 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for reading Sreelalitha!
25 March 2023 — 2:21 pm
Amitabh Joshi says:
One more clarificatory point: For the journals we co-publish with them, Springer provides us access to online editorial management services and also typesetting/printing services, so its not really fair to say they do not participate at all in the manuscript handling or production processes. Editorial structure, policy and review leading to acceptance/rejection are completely handled by the Academy.
31 March 2021 — 3:26 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you for the clarification. Point taken.
31 March 2021 — 6:00 pm
Kannan says:
I agree with Tr R Shankar Raman concepts.
31 March 2021 — 3:47 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks!
31 March 2021 — 9:07 pm
Clare Conry-Murray says:
Great article. You have inspired me to refuse to review or publish in for Elsevier, Wiley and Springer. As someone with tenure, I think I have a responsibility to do what I can to change this system. I don’t have a lot of grants to pay to publish, so it may slow down my research, but I can focus on higher quality research too.
31 March 2021 — 4:55 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you. Yes, it is true that some of us are perhaps in a position of greater privilege and can take such decisions. It is very difficult for early career researchers–unless the system of academic recognition itself changes.
31 March 2021 — 9:09 pm
GN says:
Thanks for taking the time in narrating the events, details of how the editorial board members responded. Small attempts like this will eventually lead to keeping the academic ecosystem eliminate the predators. Some may argue that predators are part of the ecosystem, but this argument misses the point that all we need in a completely sustainable ecosystem is that we need both producers and consumers within the ecosystem. Commercial journal publishers are neither producers nor consumers or decomposers, and therefore they can be dispensed with from the system.
Heros like Alexandra Albakyan showed how important access is to research.
I particularly liked your profile: https://i2.wp.com/shankarraman.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Wikipedia_edits.png Looking forward to the times when academies will recognize and promote scientists based on such an index, instead of citation alone. If I were the dean/director of your institute, I will promote you to become a leader.
31 March 2021 — 8:13 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you… that’s an interesting way to look at the system. Wikipedia is absolutely fantastic, too!
31 March 2021 — 9:22 pm
Chayant Gonsalves says:
Absolutely riveting read. Have long since struggled to understand the complexities behind publishing in academia, much less to try to explain them to anyone else. Thank you for putting all of it neatly in one place.
31 March 2021 — 8:26 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Chayant… I am not sure if I have understood all the complexities either! I am sure there are people with a different stance towards such journals and a different take on the economics of it, but it just didn’t make sense for me.
31 March 2021 — 9:24 pm
Rucha Karkarey says:
Hi Sridhar,
Thanks for this deeply informative and insightful essay – it really helped demystify some of the complexities of academic publishing for me. There’s so much to unpack here! I’m reading and re-reading all the links you’ve provided slowly.
Being now in a purely Academic Institution, I am feeling the pressures of publishing/reviewing . I’ve submitted an article to a recently Wiley taken-over journal because I have always liked it’s scope. However, I had to make a plea for a waiver telling them how exorbitant the APC was with respect to my salary (Even though they no longer offer waivers to Institutions in India). Thankfully I received it, I was lucky. But I know this is not usually possible.
Thanks for providing actionable points. I do hope to make a more informed, ‘ethical’ decision moving forward.
31 March 2021 — 8:50 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Rucha for those comments. I can imagine the stress and pain involved in trying to find funds or awaiting a waiver. Whether journals offer waivers, how many they offer (some offer waivers only to some 2-3% of applicants I have heard), on what basis etc. also seems to be pretty opaque in most cases, although I must admit I myself have had little experience on this. Constant self-reflection is key, I think, to identify what is most equitable, ethical, appropriate for each of us.
31 March 2021 — 9:29 pm
Anand says:
Thank you for this Sridhar. It is highly informative and very nicely written. I really like your suggestions for all the positive steps we can take as individuals and as a community for improving the situation. That said, I am unclear about what is achieved by declining to participate in the review process for articles that have been submitted to journals published by these companies. To me, the review process (ideally) is an objective conversation about the research, and the key players are the authors, reviewers and editors, while the publishing company is incidental. Wouldn’t declining to review be a disservice to the submitting authors (who have chosen the journal for their own reasons, and would benefit from an ethical, expert and timely review), to oneself (reviewing can be a rewarding experience and a great learning opportunity especially for students or early career researchers), and to science as a whole?
31 March 2021 — 10:35 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Hi Anand, thanks for this point about this being a disservice to submitting authors. I cannot pretend I know the answers. I am not against reviewing (although I don’t believe peer review is totally objective either) but am asking what would be a better system/forum/mechanism to deliver reviews and help science move ahead. Just thinking aloud here: if the journal is indeed incidental as you suggest (I don’t think it is–there is a whole lot riding on which journal you are submitting to) nothing prevents the authors submitting to a diamond OA journal to get those reviews. If there are authors who, for their own reasons, submit to commercial pay-walled journals, there will be reviewers who, for their own reasons, will continue to participate and perpetuate this system, too. The authors will get their reviews one way or the other. Not sure if we can address the other issues by simply perpetuating the system though. And like I said right in my opening email, for early career researchers we must keep a lot of leeway as it affects career prospects under the present system. However, the learning-by-reviewing experience can be gained via other journals, too.
1 April 2021 — 8:38 am
Anand says:
Thanks again Sridhar and I largely agree. In response to your comment I’d like to clarify that my suggestion was about the publishing company being incidental, not the journal itself. And yes, it would be fantastic to reach a situation where all authors could easily choose diamond OA over paid journals without having to worry about career implications.
1 April 2021 — 10:30 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Yes… got it and thanks.
1 April 2021 — 10:44 am
Shankar Prakash Alagesan says:
Thank you so much for your insights. I am glad to be one among the 2000 signatories supporting Sci-Hub and Libgen. I am inherently committed to disseminating science open to ALL. As you rightly pointed, early career researchers and those in the job market are forced to make their knowledge paywalled in the so-called high-impact journals for the sake of employment because we may not convince everyone that open access publishing in lesser-known peer-reviewed journals are ALSO SCIENCE. I am confident that this will change, but not so soon as in India, UGC prescribes, UGC-CARE List (Group I and II). As per UGC, Web of Science and Scopus are the globally recognised databases. Though lesser-known journals may be added to those databases, I am afraid will they have a level playing field. Ultimately why do we need a globally recognised database in the first place to measure quality?
Also, there is a myth of QUALITY glued to anything published in Springer, Wiley other so-called profit-making publishing giants. We need to come out of it as well.
With all said, one of my contributions to an edited volume with Springer Nature is paywalled from January 2021. The edited volume costs INR 13740 and so far, it crossed 2500 downloads. However, what I hold – copyright of the chapter on one hand and a complimentary author copy of the edited volume on the other.
31 March 2021 — 11:28 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Shankar. Yes, would be great if UGC had a policy that does not privilege Web of Science (Clarivate) or Scopus (Elsevier) metrics. About publishing books, check out the discussion in these links:
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/04/academics-are-being-hoodwinked-into-writing-books-nobody-can-buy
and
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/17/are-publishers-really-hoodwinking-academics
1 April 2021 — 8:47 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Just adding this here for reference. This preprint just came out yesterday:
What do Indian Researchers download from Sci-Hub
by Vivek Kumar Singh, Satya Swarup Srichandan, Sujit Bhattacharya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16783
As the paper shows, data from 2017 suggests that of the 150 million+ downloads on Sci-Hub worldwide, the country with the most downloads was USA. India was third at ~13 million downloads (~5.8 million unique publications)–or nearly 40,000 per day. About a fifth of those are open access anyhow. The paper argues what a serious blow to Indian science it would be if Sci-Hub was blocked in India.
1 April 2021 — 8:59 am
Milind Watve says:
Shankar,
Congrats for the wonderful article. I have been writing about scientific publishing issues frequently on my blog, here
https://milindwatve.in/
most of which resonates with what you said.
Milind Watve
1 April 2021 — 9:27 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Hi Milind: thanks much for the comment and for the link to your blog. I very much enjoyed reading your posts from various different perspectives: as author, as reviewer, as a member of the scientific community, and as a connoisseur (shall I say?) of science (the marhaba post). Just dropping a few links here in case others want to check them out:
https://milindwatve.in/2020/11/18/indian-scientists-not-allowed-to-think-novel-current-science/
https://milindwatve.in/2020/09/17/how-peer-reviews-are-degrading-the-spirit-of-science/
https://milindwatve.in/2020/01/08/need-to-revive-the-marhaba-culture-in-science/
+ on predatory journals
https://milindwatve.in/2020/03/14/predatory-journals-simple-definition-simple-solution/
+ on impact factors and citations
https://milindwatve.in/2020/04/28/impact-factors-citations-and-ones-own-perception/
1 April 2021 — 10:58 am
n.v.joshi says:
Most insightful, very informative and superbly written as always. Thank you very much. Greatly enjoyed the comments and your responses too. Apart from the main focus about OA, your 7 point program as to what you could have done is absolutely outstanding and thought-provoking. On the same lines as what Dr. Debal has said above, this is what ‘Academic Social Responsibility’ is all about. Thank you for pointing out yet another way of ‘thinking globally and acting locally’. Congratulations – and I look forward to the thrillers 🙂
1 April 2021 — 10:16 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you Dr Joshi. Very pertinent point on Academic Social Responsibility. I am sure that the specific points for individual action will vary from person to person, depending on their context, but there is something or the other that most of us can do. Identifying what that could be through reflection and acting on it will help, I feel.
1 April 2021 — 10:47 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Just adding here a link to this superb talk by Prof. P. Balaram on scientific publishing. I wish I had seen it earlier and could have linked to or embedded it in my post. Do watch and listen from start to finish:
1 April 2021 — 12:59 pm
Gud says:
Well said, sir. Read your repurposed article on The Wire, and had to appreciate your professional and personal perspectives on this issue.
Funny thing I realised, certain articles I’ve published in these big-four monopolized publishing houses, I can’t access my own full works after certain month or so, unless I pay.
No one I’ve ever met has had the full access to anything. Jumping through loopholes in system to obtain data, that should be free in first place. 25-30 years back when journals used to physically print, it was a different scenario, now its a highly irrelevant with free internet.
If I have to pay 300 USD to read my own article, well I’d choose Sci-hub anyday over it.
Anyhow, it’s a business and I don’t see this issue dissolving, sort of ever.
5 April 2021 — 1:01 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Gud–that can be annoying. But I feel a change is both necessary and inevitable. Sci-Hub only made it an in-your-face issue rather than something on the backburner. And I am personally still hopeful that we may be able to bring about a change for the better…
5 April 2021 — 10:51 am
Anushka Rege says:
Thanks for this; it was timely for me. I (or rather my university) recently paid what I thought was a lot of money for publishing the MSc work. Made me think a lot about how many other better things could’ve been achieved with that money, how I could’ve never paid up had I been working elsewhere, etc etc. This article sums up the many aspects of the publishing world that we know of, but may overlook or are compelled to overlook.
1 April 2021 — 1:57 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Anushka for sharing your experience and thoughts. The point about being compelled to overlook is particularly worrying… wonder how many people are in that position because of the way our systems are set up.
1 April 2021 — 2:38 pm
Karthik Thrikkadeeri says:
Thank you for this brilliant piece. It is really encouraging, especially as an early-career researcher, that the status quo can be changed and is changing gradually, from the top. Absolutely echo your thoughts about channelling some of the ridiculous amounts of money going to these businesses, to open access initiatives! Although I had scrambled notions picked up from here and there regarding this broad issue, your comprehensive post covering the major aspects was very helpful. I particularly liked the points of action! Doubtless, this is something that I’ll be sure to consider at every step going forward.
1 April 2021 — 3:26 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Glad you found the post helpful Karthik. Nothing has shaken up the status quo as much as Sci-Hub has perhaps… still there is a lot we can do.
1 April 2021 — 5:22 pm
TNC Vidya says:
Very nice article! Wish more people would shift to other journals or to archiving platforms.
1 April 2021 — 4:44 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Perhaps the shift is already happening? I have no idea… wondering if this is being tracked by somebody.
1 April 2021 — 5:54 pm
Joke says:
Thanks Sridhar. When I left Wageningen after my masters in agroecology I keenly felt that hole where I used to have access to scientific articles and then all of a sudden it was GONE. When I heard a professor describe the peer review process (all that work for free? yet the journals cost so much?) I was indeed aghast.
What I liked best about your article was your self-examination of how YOU can contribute to this change. Not through a small boycott protest but by systematic and strategic action. Inspiration for all kinds of things; I think particularly of anti-racism and more women in leadership (or on your bookshelf!!).
1 April 2021 — 5:18 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Joke… yes scientific publishing is a system that seems to makes everyone’s eyes pop, except entrenched scientists! The reflective approach to personal action may work to some extent–I don’t know–especially if coupled with other efforts at the level of the scientific community or by working with smaller groups committed to bringing about such changes. And, yes… agree, of course, on your last point, too.
1 April 2021 — 6:10 pm
Margo Farnsworth says:
Hello Shankar, I joyfully rolled through this post for language as well as the logic. Accessibility to scientific information, application, evaluation and adjustments are critical to the scientific community, science communicators, policy-makers and the general public just as you describe and emphasize. You rightly point out the downfalls of professional publishing from the commercial perspective; but equally important are the facts you presented around race, gender and economic standing. Long ago, I too decided to avoid this “ecosystem”, as another here wrote. We can learn so much more and evolve science to such a greater degree if we involve more than just other scientists in our work. I have learned so much based around simple questions and observations from, not only my students and mentees, but members of the public – if only we share what we know with them. I found myself nodding (and even pounding the desk) on your points about the industry and what each of us can and should do. Thank you and be well!
1 April 2021 — 10:00 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Margo. I agree with you that we need to involve more than just scientists in our work. In particular, when we talk about ecological illiteracy among bureaucrats or gripe about policymakers failing to consider science, I wonder how we can expect that if we have not made efforts at substantial public engagement.
2 April 2021 — 10:31 am
Kishore says:
Hi, very eye-opening article. I had never realised that scientific publication has so many roadblocks. Any views on this – https://www.conservationevidence.com/ ?
Many thanks again
2 April 2021 — 12:39 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
I have not published in Conservation Evidence but it looks good: CC-BY and Open Access with no charges to authors or readers. Way to go!
2 April 2021 — 1:05 pm
Ragupathy Kannan says:
Sridhar, kudos on this brilliant piece precisely putting in words what many of us have felt strongly for sometime,
Maybe I should charge these companies $200 for every review I do! Why should we make our services available for free when they make money?
Of course, the ultimate sufferers are the early career scientists who try to publish their works. This has increased my resolve to continue making my (occasional) papers freely available via Wikipedia and other outlets, and to keep financially supporting Wikipedia. Thanks for so eloquently bringing this to the limelight.
Ragupathy Kannan
2 April 2021 — 6:12 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Kannan. This is a point that keeps cropping up: on early career researchers. What journals they feel incentivised/pressured to publish and how it counts towards their appraisal/job prospects. It is clear that whatever we do to shift scientific publishing to diamond open access, must accompany at least two things:
1) Senior academics/tenured profs should set an example by publishing in and reviewing regularly for diamond open access and nonprofit society journals and establish this as the most desirable venue for scientific literature. (A big shift that, I know!)
2) Targeting academic institutions/universities/science administrative bodies through persuasion, petitions, and coordinated campaigns to get rid of the existing systems of performance appraisal that privilege impact factors and commercial journals. In India, we could start with the UGC so-called performance-based Academic Performance Index (UGC-API). If you take a look at the UGC-API for scientists (Category III in the link), it sets up the API with 8 categories of publications. Besides being a totally outdated way of looking at it, it completely ignores diamond OA, public preprint archives, open dataset publications and so on. And it gets worse. It starts by giving you 15 points for each paper you publish in a refereed journal, but then goes on to do this arbitrary scoring based on impact factors, which lies at the heart of the problem:
Further, scientific collaboration and sharing are dealt with very poorly too–in fact, almost absent from consideration. Its just about points for joint publication divided as follows:
The sections of the UGC-API related to research projects (more money raised = more points), research guidance (thesis only), conferences and lectures given (points for international>national–so if I gave a closed talk to a small bunch of scientists in an international forum, I would get more points than if I gave a public talk at JNU or IISc streamed live and available to view for free around the world) and so on… the whole thing sucks …like supersucks!
3 April 2021 — 9:22 am
E. Somanathan says:
Nice post, Sridhar. But you don’t offer a solution beyond individual action that is little more than tokenism. Here is a possibility. Country governments and rich philanthropists and foundations can each set up a non-profit company that will be an academic publisher that offers publishing services to scientific societies that want to publish journals. The costs can be met by a mix of subscription charges and article-publishing charges for open access articles. Scientific societies can then cancel their contracts with the commercial publishers and instead contract with one these non-profits who will offer much lower subscription fees or article processing charges. The non-profits can also make all articles open access after a delay, like Science does. To some extent, university presses like Cambridge and Chicago are already playing this role. But there are not enough of them. I am a co-editor of Environment and Development Economics published by CUP.
You might wonder why I don’t advocate entirely government-subsidized non-profits that don’t charge anything to anyone. I think that might attract a lot of low-quality journals publishing articles on which publishers and academics, should not be wasting their time.
2 April 2021 — 6:35 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
True! In any case, I as an individual cannot provide a solution. It has to be generated and driven by us as a scientific community. I agree that we shouldn’t simply look for fully government-subsidized journals. (In any case , not great to be in a position of being totally dependent on any government–you may land up with an anti-science government.) But I think a big move away from the present scenario in the direction you indicate or discussed here is very much needed. The costs could be brought down while making it OA or models can be found like in existing diamond OA journals (where authors and readers are not charged). One needs perhaps to develop a fully open source software and systems to support the entire publishing workflow at lower cost: author, review, publish (with typeset and copy-edit), host, archive, share (rather like ARPHA does on a commercial basis now). It seems strange that we still submit word documents and figures which then have to go through multiple rounds of work before appearing online: a straight WYSIWIG workflow can be imagined with all stages made open and transparent (maintained like the history on Wikipedia pages) that gets the research out there with minimal dependence on the so-called value addition that the commercial publishers provide. (Not sure if this idea is clear: can explain more later!)
3 April 2021 — 9:37 am
Arun Srinivasa says:
I think that a comprehensive demorcatic response has to start with university libraries taking a more proactive role in educating the faculty about what is happening (I came to your article due to it being recommended by our Dean of Libraries , who is fighting…er..’negotiating” with elsevier). I am advocating this for our libary at Texas A&M University. And pressuring governments not to create lists of Q1 and Q2 journals (or atleast populate them with open access as first choice) in the name of “quality”
Given that libraries are meant to disseminate information (and since their role as pure repositories has diminished) they should take up the role of helping the top researchers (ie the well known muckty mucks) create good open access journals. The physics community started ArXiV, which, while not peer reviewed, allows folks to provide access to works for anyone. We should also start referencing open source works rather than the commercial works.
8 April 2021 — 8:37 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for the comment. Yes, a lot hinges on university libraries, but scientific societies, academies, and administrators also have a role to play to push for change. Research and conservation organisations and NGOs in the global South mostly have no institutional libraries or significant resources. They may be are willing to step up and do their bit, I feel, but are disadvantaged as players, unless the larger scientific community also steps forward to support broad changes in scientific publishing.
10 April 2021 — 10:41 am
Priya Davidar says:
Hi Shridhar, interesting and informative blog. Commercial publishers charge a huge amount to institutional libraries, apart from APC charges and paywalls. Really not fair. This set up has to change and change will come when more and more scientists challenge the system. Its beginning to happen. Priya
2 April 2021 — 7:58 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks, Priya. I agree–we need to act individually and collectively to change the system.
3 April 2021 — 10:01 am
NITIN PANDIT says:
Lovely rant, Sridhar.
Quick correction… the link to the C&S ownership and transparency policy does not work. You may want to use http://www.conservationandsociety.org/contributors.asp
And regarding the points you make with careful introspection… I found the 7 points to be very instructive… as they are an indicator of the “demand” which the commercial journals simply capitalize on… riding on the “publish-perish” culture. Some comments from readers have alluded to this.
It is interesting to note that recent movement of other journals to OA has been encouraging, also with philanthropic support… https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/ar-ftj102020.php
Finally, if you look at the fees charged by the commercial companies ($1 Billion, as you note)… with say about half being for egregious profits… so $ 500 Million… then it cannot be difficult for some philanthropists to set aside $15 Billion (about 3% net return) to create a reasonable system where real costs are covered. But then, do you think it will change the demand arising from the “publish-perish” culture?
3 April 2021 — 9:06 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Nitin–fixed the link. The Annual Reviews model (from the link you provide) is one of many emerging approaches: subscriptions taken by libraries that makes the entire journal and all the papers free for the world. Again, here is a non-profit publisher that delivers world class scientific publications without us paying through our collective noses, so to speak. An interesting model that does not rely on donations/altruistic motivations, but based on logic of continued self-interest of participating institutions according to this paper.
Still, a better model than paying Elsevier/Wiley/Springer/etc basically whatever they ask to make your paper open access. Finding to where to meet the (reasonable) costs of publishing so that companies don’t hoodwink scientists is just one of the issues. The publish-perish culture (where quantity and impact factor seem to have more weight that quality and substance), the points-system of appraisal (that UGC uses for instance), within-institution cultures, and mentor-mentee dynamics–all need to change. I think there are a number of points raised in the comments here that give pointers to both individual and collective action. Institutions can get together to change the science administration at the policy level, too.
5 April 2021 — 9:16 am
Rajah Jayapal says:
Hi Shankar Raman,
Thanks for lending a powerful voice against this unscrupulous practice and we, as researcher community, have accepted it as norm. Though this has been a long-standing issue in the Western academic world -often leading to fierce debates and flare-ups, this has unfortunately never gained traction here in the Subcontinent (barring occasional letters of concern and guest editorials that appeared in Current Science). I hope your blog will make people, particularly early-career researchers think again.
But, part of the problem lies with how scientists and their outputs are assessed in Indian universities and most institutions. You will be surprised to know that a publication in an ’international’ journal fetches much higher score than one in a ‘national’ journal in these annual assessments; and it is no coincidence that our ‘national’ journals are largely run by professional bodies/associations (often cash-strapped), and corporate publishers bring out the high IF ‘international’ journals. This dichotomy was actually invented by senior scientists, serving on various committees that oversee the academic affairs. So, we also have to blame ourselves for encouraging corporate publishing by pitching ‘national’ against ‘international’ journals. [I agree that many Indian journals are being taken over by them in more recent times].
For long, I was using Mendeley to organize my personal pdf collections. Recently, I came to know that Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier. Though it still continues to be free for basic version, I am not sure how long it will be. I have begun migrating to Zotero, despite its limited functionality compared to Mendeley (particularly with respect to metadata extraction).
Thanks again for bringing this up.
Jayapal.
3 April 2021 — 9:19 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Me too! I dumped Mendeley like a ton of bricks after Elsevier took it over. I use Zotero, too. It works great with LibreOffice, Google docs, my browser etc–so no problems there. As for the points related to the IF and points system for assessments, I have referred to it in response to another comment and I find it awful, too.
5 April 2021 — 10:54 am
Kartik Shanker says:
Hi Sridhar,
Nice post, and completely agree with all the points that you have made. Thanks much for raising it. I’ve been an ardent supporter of open access publications for close to 2 decades now, as Editor of C&S for about 10 years, and of Current Conservation for 15, and in other ways. I loathe the big publisher as much as the next person, but I thought I’d add a few perspectives and challenges to this.
1. C&S – which has been mentioned a few times – was originally published by SAGE. In 2005, when I was asked to serve as Editor, we took the then bold step of breaking ties with SAGE and having it produced entirely in house. This was non-trivial. For years, we did everything from managing the review system to typesetting to carrying the pen drive to the printers.
2. More importantly, it’s not easy for a non-profit produced journal to break in to the ranks of the big journals. We received utterly mediocre contributions in conservation biology (those that had been rejected by Tier 1, Tier 2 and perhaps even Tier 3 journals). Fortunately, we found a niche in conservation social science and political ecology. That it today has an IF of 1.9 (= 1 million in natural sciences, or something like that) and is one of the most respectable journals in the field is partly perseverance but also the chips falling its way. Many similar journals haven’t quite made it, and as others have pointed out, one gets little credit for publishing in them.
3. That it survived also owes tremendously to ATREE’s support these last 17 years. Not many NGOs have the resources or the inclination to support an academic publication that does little by the way of serving their more immediate goals. For many such journals, the editor spends every single day wondering where the next year’s funds are going to come from. Also note that it is ridiculously cheap to produce a journal in India compared to the US or Europe (I could be wrong about the exact numbers but I think Ecology and Society costs 10 times more to produce than C&S).
4. So how should such publications be supported? The simple arithmetic is that the money that goes into paying the ‘evil empire’ can go directly into paying for the production of open access publications. But in reality, it’s a bit more complicated than that, and Som has offered one (of a few) possible solutions. While these all may have their pros and cons, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t take the plunge and try them out? C&S tried very hard to get funds from the government (and Academies) and failed.
5. Current Conservation is not an academic journal, but follows the same principles of open access and has created one of the largest repositories of Creative Commons licensed nature illustrations. I mention it here because it has essentially been supported entirely by a family of NGOS (Dakshin, DMNCT, FES, WIPRO, WCT, ATREE and Balipara – we love you guys; and WWF and RNP who’ve pitched in before). We have tried all sorts of other avenues for funding and continue to do so, but this seems like our best bet for now.
I guess, in closing, my point is that open access is a great cause, but not easy to achieve. It needs policy change at the level of governments in the long run, and community support in the medium term. So, to everyone with access to funds, go out and support an open access journal today :-). Step up, folks, lets stick it to the man !!!
4 April 2021 — 10:33 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Hi Kartik, Thanks for sharing those experiences with Conservation and Society. I totally agree that there are a multiplicity of options and each may have pros and cons. And like you point out, we should try them out rather than stay with the status quo. And concerted support for one or more such journals through subscriptions, reviews, and other assistance is something most of us can do as individuals and institutionally.
5 April 2021 — 10:17 am
Kadambari Devarajan says:
You’ve articulated so well several issues with the academic publishing system. Pretty much everything you’ve mentioned resonated with me.
I wanted to add a note on preprint databases and archiving repositories – and how these related to the peer-review process. I’m increasingly finding that a solution that works for me (as an author and researcher who believes in open science and minimizing barriers to accessibility as a critical aspect of diversity and inclusion in STEM fields especially) is:
(i) publishing open access if a full waiver is provided by the journal (I’ve been able to publish in PLoS ONE, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, and Ecography thanks to this)
(ii) publishing in fully open access journals that have no fees associated which incidentally have fully open reviews (such as the Journal of Open Source Software and Proceedings of the Python in Science conferences)
(iii) publishing in one of the society journals which are typically reader pays (at least the ones I’ve identified) but offer the option of uploading to a preprint server like bioRxiv
In order to avoid any biases, usually implicit – on the basis of author name especially for non-Western names, affiliations, assumed author gender, etc. – I prefer double-masked journals. However this becomes a tad tricky with the third option I’ve mentioned since it’s a bit of an oxymoron for a manuscript to have double-masked review and publicly available on a preprint server. It looks like one workaround is that in a double-masked study, the reviewers are expected to not attempt to deanonymize authors – whether reviewers adhere to this often unstated expectation, and therein lies the rub!
TL;DR – Any journal where authors don’t have to pay but permit hosting a version of the manuscript on a preprint repository currently seems like the best alternative around for open research. Since preprint servers often permit upload of a revised version based on journal acceptance, this serves like a version-controlled public archive of the manuscript (pre- and post-review) as well.
4 April 2021 — 7:55 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Kadambari–I guess each of have to work this out for ourselves, in the absence of any one shining way forward (there may never be one, and in case, its preferable to have multiple OA models). Personally, I like your option (ii) and preprint archives are good but not enough to challenge the system. Most readers (and if it is journalists/lay-readers) would like to get the final version as published from the place it is published in and not root around on the internet to find a different version. If we are content with leaving a pre-print final version (which sounds like an oxymoron) out there somewhere, why should it not just be directly on the journal itself? Some journals only allow archiving of the final accepted version–not the version after proof corrections/copy-edit. Sometimes key changes are made in that stage. So while I like that pre-print archive versioning allows us to save all stages of a manuscript (except sometimes the final copy-edited one), it does little service to science to keep the final published PDF pay-walled or priced very high to open. That’s the fundamental problem that needs to change I feel.
5 April 2021 — 10:46 am
NAGARJUNA DALBANJAN says:
An eye invoking article scientist, merely a virtuous fulmination. A support from Gulbarga University Kalaburagi, Karnataka.
If at all I publish a paper, I will definitely make sure to be published by an Open access and maintenance free journal.. Thank you 🙏
4 April 2021 — 11:37 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Nagarjuna–It is a sort of virtuous fulmination, I agree! And if we do nothing further a virtuous fulmination it will remain!
5 April 2021 — 10:48 am
Dr Mayank Bapna says:
Thank you Mr Shankar Raman for sharing the post. What you conveyed is what most of us believe but never applied. I personally feel that “THE PUBLICATION HOUSE’S” have been overrated by the Professors/ Academicians and the research scholars are persuaded to follow the same. Publication is sharing of knowledge through a media and it has to follow an anarchy. The day it involves control, reputation, selectivity (due to some criteria) it looses the overall idea of sharing and hands on the monopoly to some chosen players, in this context, the publication houses.
There are many publication organizations whose ego-data runs on the fancy graphics (statistics) in which they highlight the number of manuscripts rejected in an year and for For me even the word “rejection” is in appropriate and not palatable at all for a researcher or academician but there are many who still use it.
The idea of open access needs to be MUST NOT be reprimanded by any Professor/Institute or University however, it must be appreciated. If I have a work to publish then it has to be published in an open access journal with the improvements suggested by the journal office and never be rejected.
I am not quite sure that a journal can be maintenance free or free of any charges as it has to generate revenue to run on its own.
Thank you for ignition of a thought provoking topic.
5 April 2021 — 11:19 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Dr Bapna for the point about rejection. I am not sure if a journal would be in a position to never reject a paper, but they can certainly do more to work with the authors for improvements leading to publication. Journals do need to raise revenue to run, as you rightly point out. The issue is about how they do it and whether the science is locked up or free.
5 April 2021 — 8:42 pm
Dr K M Harikrishnan says:
All the points in this wonderfully frank article are well taken. Rant or not, it had to be done and about time too. It is important for well meaning scientists to protest this kind of commercialization – knowledge on sale is reminiscent of the last days of Rome! You have been somewhat gentle on the racism aspect of publication – but then, it is a huge issue in itself!
5 April 2021 — 4:11 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Racism is undoubtedly an important issue, but was outside the scope of my post here. It requires careful attention and action to address it, too. Thanks for the encouraging comment about the post.
5 April 2021 — 8:44 pm
Ajith Kumar says:
The definition of predatory journals according to https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03759-y
“The consensus definition reached was: “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”
Didn’t some of these phrases, but not all, appear above too…
6 April 2021 — 3:01 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Touché!
7 April 2021 — 7:44 am
Luqman Muraina says:
While we must salute the outstanding consciousness of Indian & global South scholars like this author, I think we need to recommend that:
1. Educating Western rich scholars about their positionalities and privileges which makes them to afford this exorbitant fees
2. The editors in chief should then go on en masse to protest and rearrange ‘publication and distribution’ profiting & commoditization rights with publishing ‘predatory’ giants like Elsevier, Wiley online, Sage, etc.
Thank you
6 April 2021 — 7:13 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Good point–scientists, by paying the astronomical APC, are perpetuating an irredeemably iniquitous system, exacerbating the North – South divide, and erecting barriers to more disadvantaged scientists worldwide. The occasional waiver tossed out by the journals hides something far worse fully functioning behind it. We don’t want donations; we want openness, access, justice. If the existing system does not provide that, change it.
7 April 2021 — 7:52 am
Gopal S Rawat says:
Dear Sridhar,
I congratulate you on raising this pertinent issue that many researchers have been grappling with. Still I find a large number of researchers in India who manage to pay for such journals and publish their work and take pride in showing off their scientific achievements.
I used to be on the Editorial Board of Tropical Ecology till recently. But now the management has signed agreement with Elsevier. I guess, Elsevier convinced the management that the journal would get greater visibility and raise its Impact Factor by getting this ‘brand’.
Towards fag end of my career, I am also getting frequent invitations to join editorial boards of a few journals. Your article surely makes me think twice what to accept and what not to.
Thanks for sharing this.
Best,
Gopal S Rawat
—
8 April 2021 — 4:32 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thank you Dr Rawat for those comments. It helps for all of us to think twice as we are all implicated in this system in one way or the other.
13 April 2021 — 7:53 am
Sushil Kumar says:
Thank you for making all points very clear to every researcher. We have also taken an initiative in this direction and trying our best as we can.
13 April 2021 — 5:26 pm
Jeff says:
We’ve further option to discouraging publishing in these journals, like reducing our citations of works published in them.
As authors, we site many papers directly relevant to our work, but beyond these we site additional or superfluous tangential work. In pure math, there is a crystal clear distinction between these categories, either you use a result or technique from a paper or you do not do so. It’s surely less clear in other fields, but some distinction remains.
We have roughly three categories of superfluous tangential citations, first the academic chest thumping of implicitly claiming we’ve read the work, even if we have not done so, and second avoiding conflicts from reviewers who request extra citations, sometimes legitimately but often merely to bolster their own citation count, or to stroke important people’s egos.
I do not propose we stop engaging in superfluous tangential citation entirely. Instead, I propose we “means test” citations and strictly minimize non-critical non-informative citations to journals published by Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer.
You should cite any work you directly use of course, and sometimes you should cite works purely because they appear more informative, but if you only directly use some ancestor or later work within the same theme, then cite the work you directly use and related works in journals not published by Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer.
We could explore citing even published works purely to preprint servers as well, so the journal name never appears within our paper.
In wikipedia, we should replace citations to journals published by Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer by citations to journals published elsewhere. We should always weigh works’ overall quality so that replacements only improve wikipedia overall. Ideally, all wikipedia citations would first reference non-exploitive non-paywalled publisher, but then include some problematic publishers as secondary citations only when well written and targeted at a general audience.
13 April 2021 — 11:11 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for those points. Minimizing non-critical citations from such publishers and choosing to avoid citing papers from them altogether and instead cite an equivalent paper in an open access, non-exploitative publisher (when it is available) seem reasonable. In some ways, the latter is already happening in my work: frustrated at getting paywalled papers, I refer more often to the latter types of papers anyway.
19 April 2021 — 9:04 am
Emilio Jordan says:
Hi Shankar,
thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts. They have made me meditate a lot and we will use this text to discuss with my laboratory colleagues here in Argentina.
I would just like to point out a samll thing: outside of India, Birds Of The World is not for free. Annual full acces costs US$ 49. It does not seem like a lot of money, but if we think that those who collaborate with the texts do not receive a formal payment (just a free access account)… it looks like the same history
Thanks again and best regards
Emilio
22 April 2021 — 7:18 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Emilio. Birds of the World was earlier not free for India as well. But in return for a number of Indian ornithologists contributing a set of updated species accounts on endemic birds of the region, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology made the site free access for everyone in India. Which was great for us. Perhaps this could happen in other countries as well. Although, ideally, I feel Cornell should free up the whole site for the whole world (and I am sure people will still donate to them to support any costs). It beats me that in 2021 an institution like this paywalls a superb resource like this. People in richer countries and institutions, perhaps unscrupulous traders in wild birds etc. would be taking subscriptions and accessing the information more easily, while the majority of citizens and those in Third World nations will have no access. Makes no sense. Free it up, Cornell! And release it all with CC-BY. And the world will bless you!
30 April 2021 — 5:47 pm
Rohit says:
Excellent article Sir. Directly in line with my views about the current practices in research and major role of publishers in disrupting the ethical balance of scientific community.
4 May 2021 — 7:14 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks Rohit!
7 May 2021 — 7:03 pm
Elizabeth Ann Duffy says:
Hi Shankar,
I’m a producer on BBC Radio 4’s Digital Human podcast. I loved your article, and was hoping I could speak to you about it on an upcoming episode. Could you let me know the best way to get in touch with you?
Best wishes,
Elizabeth Ann
28 May 2021 — 8:00 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Hi, Have emailed you. Cheers, Shankar
30 May 2021 — 7:40 pm
Iqbal says:
Hi, your writing is really interesting. I would like to comment specifically on this part:
“more difficult if you are not a native English speaker”.
I really feel this as a person who doesn’t communicate in English on a daily basis, as a person who doesn’t speak English at undergraduate colleges, as a person who doesn’t speak English in the office. Sometimes I would like to present the results of writings or studies that I made either alone or with a team, but the hardest thing is when I have to convey it in English. So what I feel is that people who are proficient in English are automatically have one level of advantage over me because they can easily convey what they are doing.
Anyway, thanks for this interesting article. I really enjoyed reading it.
20 September 2021 — 10:12 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for reading Iqbal and for that comment–very true and its one of hoops many of us are forced to jump through to get taken seriously in scientific writing. There is also the rather annoying comment one gets from journal editors and reviewers to get your English checked by a native English speaker (with no effort to point out whether there are in fact any errors at all in English in your manuscript). I mentioned this in a recent discussion here.
28 September 2021 — 8:13 am
Shankar Prakash says:
I have recently read the below article and stunned.
A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review.
Link to the article: https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2
20 November 2021 — 3:24 pm
Shankar Prakash says:
Stop Tracking Science initiative https://stoptrackingscience.eu
20 November 2021 — 5:00 pm
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for this and the link to the publication.
26 November 2021 — 1:48 pm
Dr. Jalaja says:
Dear sir,
I am completely in line supporting your statements. Thank you so much for inspiring many to take the right path. Regards.
8 March 2023 — 10:29 am
TR Shankar Raman says:
Thanks for reading Jalaja!
25 March 2023 — 2:21 pm
Sarika says:
Hello,
Excellent information. Sad to say but I am fade up with all the experiences you have mentioned in the article. Publishing research articles is really very tough job.
I have shared your article on my blog. The link is given below.
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2427163657869986673/9088496133574469321
11 April 2023 — 10:17 pm