Report: “India’s Chief Science Adviser: Cost of Academic Publishing is ‘Untenable'”

From Science Business:

India’s annual multi-million-euro outlay on scientific publishing is a bad deal for the country, says Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government.

“We have to take a clear position – the current situation is untenable and costly,” VijayRaghavan told Science|Business.

VijayRaghavan was speaking after he tweeted that India would be signing up to the most radical opposition to the scientific publishing status quo: Plan S, an initiative launched last year by a group of European funders to ensure that, by 2020, taxpayer-funded research results are made immediately free to read.

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This system is not any one publisher’s fault, VijayRaghavan said.

“It’s an addiction fed by the publishers, but you can’t blame the publishers for that – it’s the community. We’re caught into chasing metrics. Life sciences, in particular, has this journal vanity to an excessive manner. That is not a good thing. It’s a creation of the community,” he said.

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