Rethinking scientific publishing in the age of AI, Pg11

Key Highlights:

• The Budapest Open Access Declaration (2002) aimed to democratize scientific knowledge by challenging paywalls.
• India's 'One Nation One Subscription' (ONOS) initiative (2025) provides access to journals for researchers in publicly funded institutions.
• Commercial publishers charge high Article Processing Charges (APCs), ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per paper, for open access.
• Authors are encouraged to use Creative Commons (CC) licences, like CC-BY, to retain control over their work.
• Major publishers are selling scholarly content to Big Tech companies for AI model training, valued at nearly $486 million in 2025.

Detailed Insights:

• Copyright transfer in academic publishing traditionally required authors to relinquish rights to publishers, but open access is changing this dynamic.
• ONOS aims to address inequity in access to research but raises questions about paying foreign publishers for knowledge produced with public money.
• Plan S advocates for authors retaining copyright to promote wider accessibility and scholarly communication.
• CC-BY licence allows sharing, reuse, and adaptation of work, even for commercial purposes, with credit to the original author.
• Authors can self-archive preprints, request contract addenda, and advocate for institutional rights-retention policies to reclaim intellectual sovereignty.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Open Access: Free, unrestricted online access to research outputs.
• Copyright Transfer: The process where authors assign ownership of their scholarly work to the publisher.
• Article Processing Charges (APCs): Fees charged to authors to make their articles open access.
• Creative Commons (CC) Licenses: Public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work.