Across India and globally, public funds largely drive scientific research. Governments pour significant resources into labs, equipment, and researcher salaries. Ironically, the fruits of this publicly funded work often end up in journals owned by a select few commercial publishers. These publishers, however, typically don’t compensate the very authors who produce the research or the peer reviewers who volunteer their time and expertise to vet it.
Adding insult to injury, these same publishers then demand hefty subscription fees for access to these journals. This creates a system where the public is forced to pay twice: first to finance the research, and then again just to read its findings.
This stark reality prompted the groundbreaking Budapest Open Access Declaration in 2002. This declaration boldly confronted the deeply rooted norms of scholarly publishing, which had historically locked away vast swathes of global research behind costly paywalls. It emerged alongside the growing open access movement, which questioned why, in a digital age free from the expenses of printing and postage, knowledge remained confined behind prohibitive subscription barriers. The declaration sparked a powerful initiative aimed at democratizing scientific knowledge, ensuring that publicly funded research would be freely available to everyone.
Yet, over two decades on, this inspiring vision of equitable and inclusive knowledge sharing largely remains a distant dream. While commercial publishers have seemingly embraced ‘open access,’ they’ve done so by introducing new, equally restrictive financial hurdles. Researchers now contend with exorbitant Article Processing Charges (APCs), which can range anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 per paper. Consequently, numerous institutions, particularly in the Global South but also in more affluent countries, find themselves unable to afford either publishing or accessing crucial research.
In India, the government has stepped in to tackle this unfairness with its ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) initiative. Beginning in 2025, ONOS grants all researchers in publicly funded institutions access to journals from 30 prominent international publishers. Although this nationwide agreement comes with a hefty price tag – particularly since more than half of global research is already open access, according to scholarly databases – ONOS’s underlying goal is laudable. It signifies a move towards extending access beyond just the most privileged institutions.
However, this also pushes us to confront more fundamental questions. Why should we keep funneling vast sums to foreign publishers just to access knowledge created by our own researchers, funded once again by public money? Shouldn’t this invaluable knowledge be freely available to every citizen, fostering the scientific literacy essential in an age overwhelmed by misinformation? And critically, where does the vision of an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (Self-Reliant India) fit into this equation?
The Intricate Web of Knowledge Ownership
Copyright transfer is a standard procedure in academic publishing, where authors officially hand over the legal ownership of their scholarly creations to a publisher. This practice gained prominence following copyright legislation like the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, which bestows exclusive rights upon creators. Publishers, in turn, sought to secure these copyrights to control the dissemination of articles in their journals and regulate any future commercial exploitation.
Traditionally, this transfer was considered vital for publishers to manage permissions, oversee reproduction, and facilitate distribution. This was particularly true for subscription-based models, where publishers generated revenue by charging readers for access to the journals they published.
Consequently, copyright transfer agreements became the norm, obliging authors to surrender their exclusive rights over their work if they wished to see it published in reputable scholarly journals.
Today’s publishing landscape presents a more diverse picture. While traditional subscription journals still demand full copyright transfer, the emergence of open-access publishing has shifted the paradigm. Most truly open-access journals allow authors to keep their copyright, instead applying licenses like Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) that permit widespread, free reuse as long as the original author is properly credited.
Despite these advancements, many authors still sign copyright transfers under the immense pressure to publish in an academically competitive environment. This practice clearly undermines effective research dissemination, reuse, and even the authors’ own interests. Newer initiatives, such as ‘Plan S,’ strongly advocate for authors to retain copyright, fostering broader accessibility and unrestricted scholarly communication. Authors are increasingly urged to meticulously examine copyright transfer agreements to fully grasp their retained rights and the specific publishing conditions.
Understanding Creative Commons Licenses
Authors have the option to publish their work under various Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which precisely dictate how others can reuse their material. Three types of CC licenses are particularly noteworthy:
Firstly, the CC-BY (Attribution) license permits others to share, reuse, and even adapt the work—including for commercial use—provided they acknowledge the original author. Secondly, CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) allows reuse but strictly prohibits any commercial application. Lastly, CC-BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) is the most restrictive, permitting reuse only for non-commercial purposes and forbidding any adaptations or modifications.
Interestingly, publishers frequently advocate for the CC-BY-NC-ND license. In reality, however, this license severely curtails knowledge reuse by preventing crucial activities like translation, remixing, or text mining—all of which are essential for educational advancement and technological innovation.
The Power of Retaining Copyright
When authors relinquish copyright to publishers through publication agreements, they often surrender legal authority over how their work is accessed, reused, or shared. Major publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer usually mandate copyright transfer for their subscription-based journals, granting them exclusive rights to distribute and profit from the content.
Consequently, authors frequently encounter legal quandaries when attempting to archive their own articles in institutional repositories or share them publicly, which ultimately diminishes their work’s visibility. Conversely, authors who retain their copyright—or secure the right to share their work under an open license—gain the freedom to share, adapt, and reuse their scholarship without restrictive institutional or commercial limitations.
Prominent commercial publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis, alongside society publishers like the American Chemical Society, employ restrictive licenses within their subscription models, thereby securing exclusive legal rights to monetize access. Adding another layer of complexity, since around 2024, these major publishers have also begun selling scholarly content to leading Big Tech firms for training artificial intelligence (AI) models, frequently without the explicit consent of the authors. For instance, Taylor & Francis’s agreement with Microsoft alone is reportedly worth $10 million. The burgeoning global market for AI dataset licensing is projected to reach nearly $486 million by 2025.
Empowering Authors: Practical Steps Forward
Authors have several proactive steps they can take. Firstly, they should prioritize self-archiving preprint versions and accepted manuscripts of their papers in both preprint servers and institutional repositories. Secondly, before submitting their work, authors should seek to amend publishing contracts with journals to retain key rights, utilizing resources like the SPARC Author Addendum template. Thirdly, it is crucial for authors to champion institutional policies that mandate rights retention, automatically allowing for open licensing of all scholarly output from their institutions.
Moving forward, authors could also opt for the CC-BY license or utilize institutional open access platforms. These choices guarantee their papers are freely available to the public while simultaneously safeguarding against unauthorized commercial exploitation.
As we observe Open Access Week, the question ‘who owns our knowledge?’ transcends a mere theme; it serves as an urgent call to reclaim intellectual independence. The path to truly equitable scholarship hinges on authors, not corporations, retaining ownership and freely sharing the knowledge that molds our society.
Moumita Koley, a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, contributed this analysis.