India-wide subscription to research journals paves path for Global South

Imagine you start reading an important news article on a website and a message flashes on your screen asking for a hefty fee to read the entire article … it would be irritating, to say the least. 

This is the reality for most scientists. They are locked out of scholarly journals that carry the information they need to progress their research unless they pay a fee to the publisher. And the charges have risen to levels several hundred times higher than inflation. As a University of Missouri librarian calculated in 2020, compared with 1983, charges are 113.78 times higher than inflation for famous scientific journals such as Nature, 189.18 times for Science and 244.49 times for the New England Journal of Medicine. Put another way, NEJM price rises have outpaced inflation by 24,339 percent. 

Indian researchers and research institutions collectively spend around 15 billion rupees (USD$200 million) on journal subscriptions for scholarly literature every year — a huge cost for a growing economy and a problem not unique to India but similar for all countries of the Global South.