Open-access publishing: Boon or bane for Indian medical researchers?

Abstract

The concept of Open-Access (OA) publishing was initiated in the early 2000s with the idea to provide free, equal, and OA of scientific knowledge to all communities and countries. The article published in an OA journal is freely available on the public internet and permits any users to read, download, copy, distribute, and print. The OA articles are published much sooner and are believed to get more citations than the articles published in subscription-based journals. Since the end-user does not have to pay to read an OA article, the author usually pays Article Processing Charges (APCs) to get his/her work published in OA journals. High APCs of OA journals are usually a serious concern for medical researchers in India, which restricts them to publish in OA journals. Since most OA journals are new, they tend to have low impact factors as compared to subscription-based journals, which prevent many good researchers to get their work published in OA journals. Furthermore, predatory journals exploit the idea of OA and tend to publish poor or very low-quality research papers. This has resulted in distrust among the authors and readers that OA publishing is not peer-reviewed or has low quality. In conclusion, publishing in OA journals has both pros and cons. With the Government of India’s ambitious “One Nation, One Subscription” policy in the pipeline, medical researchers in India are hopeful that soon both access and publishing in scientific journals will be free for all in the country.