Current Science – Close Read

An odd paper about India’s gold OA fees

A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled ‘Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output’ and is authored by Raj Kishor Kampa, Manoj Kumar Sa, and Mallikarjun Dora of Berhampur University, the Indian Maritime University, and IIM Ahmedabad respectively. This is the paper’s abstract:

Article processing charges (APCs) ensure the financial viability of open access (OA) scholarly journals.The present study analyses the number of gold OA articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)-indexed journals by Indian researchers during 2020, including subject categories that account for the highest APC in India. Besides, it evaluates the amount of APC expenditure incurred in India. The findings of this study reveal that Indian researchers published 26,127 gold OA articles across all subjects in WoS-indexed journals in 2020. Researchers in the field of health and medical sciences paid the highest APC, amounting to $7 million, followed by life and earth sciences ($6.9 million), multidisciplinary ($4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science ($4.8 million). The study also reveals that Indian researchers paid an estimated $17 million as APC in 2020. Furthermore, 81% of APCs went to commercial publishers, viz. MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media. As there is a growing number of OA publications from India, we suggest having a central and state-level single-window option for funding in OA journals and backing the Plan S initiative for OA publishing in India.

It’s unclear what the point of the study is. First, it seems to have attempted a value-neutral assessment of how much scientists in India are paying as article processing charges (APCs) to have their papers published in gold OA journals. It concludes with some large, and frankly off-putting, numbers – a significant drain on the resources India has availed its scholars to conduct research – yet it proceeds to “suggest having a central and state-level single-window system” so scientists can continue to pay these fees with less hassle, and for the Indian government (presumably) to back the Plan S initiative.

As far as I know, India has declined to join the Plan S initiative; this is a good thing for the reasons enumerated here (written when India was considering joining the initiative), one of which is that it enabled the same thing the authors of the paper have asked for but on an international scale: allowing gold OA journals to hike their APCs knowing that (often tax-funded) research funders will pay the bills. This paper also marks the first time I’ve known anyone to try to estimate the APCs paid by Indian scientists and, once estimated, deem the figures not worthy of condemnation.

Funnily enough, while the paper doesn’t concern itself with taking a position on gold OA in its abstract or in the bulk of its arguments, it does contain the following statements:

“Although there is constant growth in OA publications, there is also a barrier to publishing in quality OA journals, especially the Gold and Hybrid OA, which levies APC for publications.”

“However, the high APC charges have been an issue for low-income and underdeveloped countries. In the global south, the APC is a real obstacle to publishing in high-quality OA journals”

“Extant literature reveals a constant increase in APC by most publishers like BioMed Central (BMC), Frontiers Media, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), and Hindawi”

“One of the ideas of open access was to make equitable access and check the rampant commercialization of scholarly publications. Still, surprisingly, many established publishers have positioned themselves in the OA landscape.”

“formulation of national-level OA policies in India is the need of the hours since OA is inevitable as everyone focuses on equity and access to scholarly communications.”

But these statements only render the paper’s conclusion all the more odd.

Of course, this is my view and the views of some scholars in India’s OA advocacy community and the authors of the Current Science paper are free to disagree. The second issue is objectively frustrating.

Unlike the products of science communication and science journalism, a scientific paper may simply present a survey of some numbers of interest to a part of the research community, but the Current Science paper falls short on this count as well. Specifically, not once does its body mention the words “discount” and “waiver” (or their variations), which is strange because OA journals regularly specify discounted APCs – or waive them altogether – if certain conditions are met (including, in the case of some journals, if a paper’s authors are from a low- and middle-income country). Accounting for discounts, researchers Moumita Koley (IISc Bengaluru) and Achal Agrawal (independent) estimated the authors could have overestimated Indian scientists’ APC expenses by 47.7% – ranging from 4.8% when submitting manuscripts to the PLoS journals to 428.3% when submitting to journals of the American Chemical Society.

Gold OA’s publishing fees are not in proportion to the amount of work and resources required to make a published paper open-access, and often extortionate, and that while discounts and waivers are available, they don’t spare research-funders in other parts of the world the expense, continue to maintain large profit margins at the expense of governments’ allocations for research, and – has scientist Karishma Kaushik wrote for The Hindu – the process of availing these concessions can be embarrassing to researchers.

Issue #1: the Current Science paper erects a flawed argument both in favour of and in opposition to APCs by potentially overestimating them! Issue #2: In their correspondence, Koley and Agrawal write:

“A possible reason for their error could be that DOAJ, which forms their primary source, does not mention discounts usually given to authors from lower-income countries. Another important error is that while the authors claim that they filtered the articles. Page 1058: ‘Extant literature suggests that the corresponding author most likely pays the APCs’. Following the corresponding author criterion, APC expenditure incurred by Indian researchers was estimated; they have not actually done so. Table 2 shows the discrepancy if one applies the filter. Also, Table 1 shows the estimated error in calculation if this criterion is included in calculation.”

To this, the authors of the Current Science paper responded thus:

“We wish to clarify any misunderstanding that may have arisen. We analysed the APC expenditure incurred in India without calculating the discounts or waivers received by authors as there is no specific single source to find all discounts, for example, an author-level or institute-level discount; hence, it would be difficult to provide an actual amount that Indian researchers spent on APC. Additionally, discounts or any publisher-provided waivers are recent developments, and discounts/waivers given to authors from LMIC countries were not mentioned in DOAJ, which is the primary source of the present study. Hence, it was not analysed in the current study. These factors may be considered as limitations of the study.”

This is such a blah exchange. To the accusation that the authors failed to account for discounts and waivers, the authors admit – not in their paper but in their response to a rebuttal – they didn’t, and that it’s a shortcoming. The authors also write that four publishers they identified as receiving 53% of APCs out of India – MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier, and Frontiers Media – don’t offer “country-level discounts/waivers to authors” from LMICs and that this invalidates the concerns of Koley and Agrawal that APCs have been overestimated too much. However, they don’t address the following possibilities:

The identification of these four publishers itself was founded on APC estimates that have been called into question;
“Country-level” concessions aren’t the only kind of concessions; and
The decision to downplay the extent of overestimation doesn’t account for the publishers that received the other 47% of the APCs.

It’s not clear, in sum, what value the Current Science paper claims to have, and perhaps this is a question better directed at Current Science itself, which published the original paper, two rebuttals – the second by Jitendra Narayan Dash of NISER Bhubaneswar – the authors’ unsatisfactory replies to them, and, since we’re on the topic, doesn’t seem to have edited the first correspondence before publishing it.

On Somanath withdrawing his autobiography

Excerpt from The Hindu, November 4, 2023:

S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that he’s withdrawing the publication of his memoir, Nilavu Kudicha Simhangal, penned in Malayalam. The decision followed a report in the Malayala Manorama on Saturday that quoted excerpts from the book suggesting K. Sivan, former ISRO chairman and Mr. Somanath’s immediate predecessor, may have hindered key promotions that Mr. Somanath thought were due.

“There has been some misinterpretation. At no point have I said that Dr. Sivan tried to prevent me from becoming the chairman. All I said was that being made a member of the Space Commission is generally seen as a stepping stone to (ISRO’s chairmanship). However a director from another (ISRO centre) was placed, so naturally that trimmed my chances (at chairmanship),” he told The Hindu, “Secondly the book isn’t officially released. My publisher may have released a few copies … but after all this controversy I have decided to withhold publication.”

I haven’t yet read this book nor do I know more than what’s already been reported about this new controversy. It has been simmering all evening but I assumed that it would simply blow over, as these things usually do, and that the book would be released with the customary pomp. But the book has indeed been withdrawn, which was less surprising than it should have been.

Earlier today, I was reading a paper uploaded on the Current Science website about Gold OA publishing. It was run-of-the-mill in many ways, but one of my peers sent me a strongly worded email decrying the fact that the paper wasn’t explicitly opposed to Gold OA. When I read the paper, I found that the authors’ statements earlier in the paper were quite tepid, seemingly unconcerned about Gold OA’s deleterious effects on the research publishing ecosystem, but later on, the paper threw up many of the more familiar lines, that Gold OA is expensive, discriminatory, etc.

Both Somanath’s withdrawn book and this paper have one thing in common: (potentially) literary laziness, which often speaks to a sense that one is entitled to the benefit of the doubt rather than being compelled to earn it.

Somanath told The Hindu and some other outlets that he didn’t intend to criticise Sivan, his predecessor as ISRO chairman, but that he was withholding the book’s release because some news outlets had interpreted the book in a way that his statements did come across as criticism.

Some important background: Since 2014, ISRO’s character has changed. Earlier journalists used to be able to more easily access various ISRO officials and visit sites of historic importance. These are no longer possible. The national government has also tried to stage-manage ISRO missions in the public domain, especially the more prominent ones like Chandrayaan-2 and -3, the Mars Orbiter Mission, and the South Asia Satellite.

Similarly, there have been signs that both Sivan and Somanath had and have the government’s favour on grounds that go beyond their qualifications and experiences. With Somanath, of course, we have seen that with his pronouncements about the feats of ancient India, etc., and now we have that with Sivan as well, as Somanath says that ISRO knew the Chandrayaan-2 lander had suffered a software glitch ahead of its crash, and didn’t simply lose contact with the ground as Sivan had said at the time. Recall that in 2019, when the mishap occurred, ISRO also stopped sharing non-trivial information about the incident and even refused to confirm that the lander had crashed until a week later.

In this milieu, Sivan and Somanath are two peas in a pod, and it seems quite unlikely to me that Somanath set out to criticise Sivan in public. The fact that he would much rather withhold the book than take his chances is another sign that criticising Sivan wasn’t his goal. Yet as my colleague Jacob Koshy reported for The Hindu:

Excerpts from the book, that The Hindu has viewed, do bring out Mr. Somanath’s discomfort with the “Chairman (Dr. Sivan’s)” decision to not be explicit about the reasons for the failure of the Chandrayaan 2 mission (which was expected to land a rover). The issue was a software glitch but was publicly communicated as an ‘inability to communicate with the lander.’

There is a third possibility: that Somanath did wish to criticise Sivan but underestimated how much of an issue it would become in the media.

Conveying something in writing has always been a tricky thing. Conveying something while simultaneously downplaying its asperity and accentuating its substance or its spirit is something else, requiring quite a bit of practice, a capacity for words, and of course clarity of thought. Without these things, writing can easily miscommunicate. (This is why reading is crucial to writing better: others’ work can alert you to meaning-making possibilities that you yourself may never have considered.) The Current Science paper is similar, with its awkward placement of important statements at the end and banal statements at the beginning, and neither worded to drive home a specific feeling.

(In case you haven’t, please read Edward Tufte’s analysis of the Challenger disaster and the failure of written communication that preceded it. Many of the principles he sets out would apply for a lot of non-fiction writing.)

Somanath wrote his book in Malayalam, his native tongue, rather than in English, with which, going by media interviews of him, he is not fluent. So he may have sidestepped the pitfalls of writing in an unfamiliar language, yet his being unable to avoid being misinterpreted – or so he says – still suggests that he didn’t pay too much attention to what he was putting down. In the same vein, I’m also surprised that his editors at the publisher, Lipi Books in Kozhikode, didn’t pick up on these issues earlier.

Understanding this is important because Somanath writing something and then complaining that it was taken in a way it wasn’t supposed to be taken lends itself to another inference that I still suspect the ruling party’s supporters will reach for: that the press twisted his words in its relentless quest to stoke tensions and that Somanath was as clear as he needed to be. As I said, I haven’t yet read the book, but as an editor (see Q3) – and also as someone for whom checking for incompetence before malfeasance has paid rich dividends – I would look for an intention-skill mismatch first.

Featured image: ISRO chairman S. Somanath in 2019. Credit: NASA.

R&D in China and India

“A great deal of the debate over globalization of knowledge economies has focused on China and India. One reason has been their rapid, sustained economic growth. The Chinese economy has averaged a growth rate of 9-10 percent for nearly two decades, and now ranks among the world’s largest economies. India, too, has grown steadily. After years of plodding along at an average annual increase in its gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.5 percent, India has expanded by 6 percent per annum since 1980, and more than 7 percent since 1994 (Wilson and Purushothaman, 2003). Both countries are expected to maintain their dynamism, at least for the near future.”

– Gereffi et al, ‘Getting the Numbers Right: International Engineering Education in the United States, China and India’, Journal of Engineering Education, January 2008

A June 16 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled ‘China’s Rise as a Major Contributor to Science and Technology’, analyses the academic and research environment in China over the last decade or so, and discusses the factors involved in the country’s increasing fecundity in recent years. It concludes that four factors have played an important role in this process:

Large human capital base
A labor market favoring academic meritocracy
A large diaspora of Chinese-origin scientists
A centralized government willing to invest in science

A simple metric they cite to make their point is the publication trends by country. Between 2000 and 2010, for example, the number of science and engineering papers published by China has increased by 470%. The next highest climb was for India, by 234%.

Click on the image for an interactive chart.

“The cheaters don’t have to worry they will someday be caught and punished.”

This is a quantitative result. A common criticism of the rising volume of Chinese scientific literature in the last three decades is the quality of research coming out of it. Dramatic increases in research output are often accompanied by a publish-or-perish mindset that fosters a desperation among scientists to get published, leading to padded CVs, falsified data and plagiarism. Moreover, it’s plausible that since R&D funding in China is still controlled by a highly centralized government, flow of money is restricted and access to it is highly competitive. And when it is government officials that are evaluating science, quantitative results are favored over qualitative ones, reliance on misleading performance metrics increases, and funds are often awarded for areas of research that favor political agendas.

The PNAS paper cites the work of Shi-min Fang, a science writer who won the inaugural John Maddox prize in 2012 for exposing scientific fraud in Chinese research circles, for this. In an interview to NewScientist in November of that year, he explains the source of widespread misconduct:

It is the result of interactions between totalitarianism, the lack of freedom of speech, press and academic research, extreme capitalism that tries to commercialise everything including science and education, traditional culture, the lack of scientific spirit, the culture of saving face and so on. It’s also because there is not a credible official channel to report, investigate and punish academic misconduct. The cheaters don’t have to worry they will someday be caught and punished.

At this point, it’s tempting to draw parallels with India. While China has seen increased funding for R&D…

Click on the chart for an interactive view.

… India has been less fortunate.

The issue of funding is slightly different in India, in fact. While Chinese science is obstinately centralized and publicly funded, India is centralized in some parts and decentralized in others, public funding is not high enough because presumably we lack the meritocratic academic environment, and private funding is not as high as it needs to be.

Even though the PNAS paper’s authors say their breakdown of what has driven scientific output from China could inspire changes in other countries, India is faced with different issues as the charts above have shown. Indeed, the very first chart shows how, despite the number of published papers having double in the last decade, we have only jumped from one small number to another small number.

“Scientific research in India has become the handmaiden of defense technology.”

There is also a definite lack of visibility: when little scientific output of any kind is accessible to 1) the common man, and 2) the world outside. Apart from minimal media coverage, there is a paucity of scientific journals, or they exist but are not well known, accessible or both. This Jamia Milia collection lists a paltry 226 journals – including those in regional languages – but it’s likelier that there are hundreds more, both credible and dubious. A journal serves as an aggregation of reliable scientific knowledge not just for scientists but also for journalists and other reliant decision-makers. It is one place to find the latest developments.

In this context, Current Science appears to be the most favored in the country, not to mention the loneliest. Then again, a couple fingers can be pointed at years of reliance on quantitative performance metrics, which drives many Indian researchers to publish in journals with very high impact factors such as Nature or Science, which are often based outside the country.

In the absence of lists of Indian and Chinese journals, let’s turn to a table used in the PNAS paper showing average number of citations per article compared with the USA, in percent. It shows both India and China close to 40% in 2010-2011.

The poor showing may not be a direct consequence of low quality. For example, a paper may have detailed research conducted to resolve a niche issue in Indian defense technology. In such a case, the quality of the article may be high but the citability of the research itself will be low. Don’t be surprised if this is common in India given our devotion to the space and nuclear sciences. And perhaps this is what a friend of mine referred to when he said “Scientific research in India has become the handmaiden of defense technology”.

To sum up, although India and China both lag the USA and the EU for productivity and value of research (albeit through quantitative metrics), China is facing problems associated with the maturity of a voluminous scientific workforce, whereas India is quite far from that maturity. The PNAS paper is available here. If you’re interested in an analysis of engineering education in the two countries, see this paper (from which the opening lines of this post were borrowed).

‘Free Indian science’: Responses, rebuttals and retrenchments

In the April 3 issue of Nature, Joseph Mathai and Andrew Robinson published a Comment on the afflictions of scientific research in India – and found the interference of bureaucracy to be chief among all ills. Most of the writers’ concerns were very valid, and kudos to them for highlighting how it was the government mismanaging science in India, not the institutes mismanaging themselves. In the May 8 issue of the same journal, three letters in response to the piece were published, under Correspondence, which brought to light two more issues just as important although not that immense, and both symptomatic of mismanagement that appears to border on either malevolence or stupidity, depending on your bent of mind.

Biswa Prasun Chatterji from St. Xavier’s, Mumbai, wrote about the “disastrous” decoupling of research and education in the country, mainly as a result of newly created research institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. These institutions led bright, young students away from universities, which as a result were parched of funds. The research bodies, on the other hand, fell prey to increasing bureaucratic meddling. Chatterji then points to an editorial in the November 1998 (vol. 75) issue of Current Science by P. Balaram, now the director of the Indian Institute of Science. In the piece, Prof. Balaram describes C.V. Raman as having been a firm believer in universities being the powerhouses of research, not any separate entities.

The latest issue of 'Current Science' (May 10, 2014) — The latest issue of ‘Current Science’ (May 10, 2014)

In 1932, C.V. Raman helped found Current Science after recognizing the need for an Indian science journal. In one of its first issues, an editorial appeared named ‘Retrenchment and Education’, in which the author, likely Prof. Raman himself, lays out the importance of having an independent body to manage scientific research in India. Because of its relevance to the issues at hand, I’ve reproduced it from the Current Science archives below.

[scribd id=223361205 key=key-7pekxcp24ziilj9lef3 mode=scroll]

The second letter’s contents follow from the first’s. Dhruba Saikia, Cotton College State University (Assam), and Rowena Robinson, IIT-Guwahati, ask for the country’s university-teaching to be overhauled. Many professors I’ve spoken to ask for the same thing but are turned to amusement after they realize that the problem has been left to fester for so long that the solution they’re looking for requires fixing our entire elementary education system. Moreover, after the forking of education and research described in Chatterji’s letter, it seems that universities were left to fend for themselves after their best teaching resources were drawn away by the government. Here is a paragraph from Saikia’s and Robinson’s letter:

Hundreds of thousands of students graduate from Indian universities each year. However, our own experience in selecting students indicates that many are ignorant of the basics, with underdeveloped reasoning skills and an inability to apply the knowledge they have.

There was also a third letter, this one critical of the Mathai-Robinson piece. Shobhana Narasimhan, a theoretical physicist from JNCASR, Bangalore, says that she is free to pursue “curiosity-driven science” and doesn’t have to spend as much time writing grant proposals as do scholars in the West, and so Mathai-Robinson are wrong on that front. At the same time, it seems from her letter that those things she has access to that her presumably better-equipped Occidental colleagues don’t could also be the result of a lack of control on research agendas and funding in India. In short, she might be free to pursue topics her curiosity moves her toward because the authorities don’t care (yes, this is a cynical point of view, but I think it must be considered).

So I emailed her and she replied.

“The quick answer to your question is I don’t think more overview of research funding is the answer to improving Indian science. My colleagues abroad spend more time writing proposals to get funding than actually carrying out research… I don’t think that is a good situation. Similarly getting tenure at an American university often depends on how much money you brought in. We don’t have such a situation (yet) and I think that is good.

We shouldn’t blindly copy foreign systems because they are by no means perfect. [Emphasis mine]

I have been on grant committees and I found good proposals always got funded. But I do agree that there is often much dead wood in many Indian departments, but that can also happen abroad.

I am aware that I may be speaking from a position of privilege since I work at one of the better funded institutes. Also as a theorist, I do not need much equipment.”

I would say Narasimhan’s case is the exception rather than the rule. Although I don’t have a background in researching anything (except for my articles and food prices), two points have been established with general consensus:

The Rajiv Gandhi-era promise of funding for scientific R&D to the tune of 2% of GDP is yet to materialize. The fixation on this number ranges from the local – for unpaid students and ill-equipped labs – to the global – to keep up with investments in other developing countries.
Even if there is funding, there is no independent body staffed with non-governmental stakeholders to decide which research groups get how much, leading to arbitrary research focus.

A case of Kuhn, quasicrystals & communication – Part IV

Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011. This led to an explosion of interest on the subject of QCs and Shechtman’s travails in getting the theory validated.

Numerous publications, from Reuters to The Hindu, published articles and reports. In fact, The Guardian ran an online article giving a blow-by-blow account of how the author, Ian Sample, attempted to contact Shechtman while the events succeeding the announcement of the prize unfolded.

All this attention served as a consummation of the events that started to avalanche in 1982. Today, QCs are synonymous with the interesting possibilities of materials science as much as with perseverance, dedication, humility, and an open mind.

Since the acceptance of the fact of QCs, the Israeli chemist has gone on to win Physics Award of the Friedenberg Fund (1986), the Rothschild Prize in engineering (1990), the Weizmann Science Award (1993), the 1998 Israel Prize for Physics, the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics (1998), and the EMET Prize in chemistry (2002).

As Pauling’s influence on the scientific community faded with Shechtman’s growing recognition, his death in 1994 did still mark the complete lack of opposition to an idea that had long since gained mainstream acceptance. The swing in Shechtman’s favour, unsurprisingly, began with the observation of QCs and the icosahedral phase in other laboratories around the world.

Interestingly, Indian scientists were among the forerunners in confirming the existence of QCs. As early as in 1985, when the paper published by Shechtman and others in the Physical Review Letters was just a year old, S Ranganathan and Kamanio Chattopadhyay (amongst others), two of India’s preeminent crystallographers, published a paper in Current Science announcing the discovery of materials that exhibited decagonal symmetry. Such materials are two-dimensional QCs with periodicity exhibited in one of those dimensions.

The story of QCs is most important as a post-Second-World-War incidence of a paradigm shift occurring in a field of science easily a few centuries old.

No other discovery has rattled scientists as much in these years, and since the Shechtman-Pauling episode, academic peers have been more receptive of dissonant findings. At the same time, credit must be given to the rapid advancements in technology and human knowledge of statistical techniques: without them, the startling quickness with which each hypothesis can be tested today wouldn’t have been possible.

The analysis of the media representation of the discovery of quasicrystals with respect to Thomas Kuhn’s epistemological contentions in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an attempt to understand his standpoints by exploring more of what went on in the physical chemistry circles of the 1980s.

While there remains the unresolved discrepancy – whether knowledge is non-accumulative simply because the information founding it has not been available before – Kuhn’s propositions hold in terms of the identification of the anomaly, the mounting of the crisis period, the communication breakdown within scientific circles, the shift from normal science to cutting-edge science, and the eventual acceptance of a new paradigm and the discarding of the old one.

Consequently, it appears that science journalists have indeed taken note of these developments in terms of The Structure. Thus, the book’s influence on science journalism can be held to be persistent, and is definitely evident.