Who Owns Publicly Funded Research?

For decades, one question has remained surprisingly unresolved:

Who owns knowledge created with public money?

If the public finances scientific research through taxes, should the public be required to pay again to read the results?

Traditionally, the answer has been YES. Researchers conduct the work using public funds, universities provide the infrastructure, reviewers evaluate manuscripts without compensation, and publishers ultimately own the final published version. Libraries, governments, and even the authors themselves often pay subscription fees or article processing charges (APCs) to access or publish that research.

This paradox has become one of the defining policy debates in modern academic research.

Recent developments suggest that governments are beginning to reconsider the existing publishing model. China's largest research funding agency has announced plans to reduce spending on expensive open-access publication fees, questioning whether taxpayer money should continue subsidizing high-cost commercial publishing. Likewise, the proposed U.S. Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2027 includes a provision titled Government-Wide Prohibition on Publishing and Subscription Fees. The proposal argues that taxpayer-funded research should be publicly accessible without requiring the government to pay publishers both to disseminate and to access the same work [1, 2].

These developments prove that the debate is no longer about open access versus subscriptions. Instead, it is increasingly about whether the current publishing ecosystem represents an efficient use of public research funding.

The Rise of the Metrics Economy

While ownership of research is one issue, an even deeper transformation has taken place within academia itself.

Academic research is increasingly shaped by the incentives created by the publishing industry rather than solely by the pursuit of knowledge. Citation counts, journal quartiles, impact factors, and university rankings create a competitive environment that often rewards visibility over scientific value [3]. In many cases, this has shifted attention away from research and academia that address fundamental questions or pressing societal needs. Although these metrics were originally introduced as evaluation tools, they have gradually become objectives in their own right.

It reminds me of Goodhart's Law, a principle proposed by economist Charles Goodhart:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Citation counts, journal impact factors, H-index, and university rankings were originally developed as indicators of performance, not as the ultimate objectives of scientific inquiry. Yet, as universities, funding agencies, and researchers increasingly optimize for these metrics, they gradually lose their effectiveness as measures of genuine scientific contribution. In other words, the very act of turning these indicators into targets changes researcher behavior and distorts the system they were designed to evaluate. Today, these metrics often force academics and researchers to optimize their careers around publishing strategies rather than scientific questions. Promotion committees reward journal prestige. Researchers, like all rational actors, respond to incentives. When careers depend heavily on publication metrics, maximizing those metrics becomes a logical strategy. Consequently, measurable visibility can gradually be mistaken for genuine intellectual contribution.

The defining question of modern academic research has quietly shifted from " What is worth publishing?" to " What is publishable?"

The problem is not the existence of metrics. The problem begins when metrics replace scientific contribution as the primary definition of success.

The Commercialization of Open Access

Inspired by the success of the open-source software movement, open access was envisioned as a way to make scientific knowledge freely accessible to everyone. It promised to democratize scientific communication by removing barriers to access. However, much of today's commercial open-access ecosystem has transformed that vision into an author-pays model, shifting the financial burden from readers to researchers and their funding agencies. What began as a movement to improve access has, in many cases, become a highly profitable commercial publishing model.

This author-pays model creates a different set of incentives. As publication volume increases, so does publisher revenue. At the same time, researchers compete for visibility in an ecosystem where citations, journal impact factors, H-index, and institutional rankings have become important measures of academic success. The commercial success of publishers and the career incentives of researchers have therefore become increasingly intertwined.

The result is a publishing market in which commercial success depends not only on disseminating knowledge but also on sustaining a prestige economy built around journals and publication metrics. More publications generate more APC revenue, more citations reinforce journal influence, and higher rankings further strengthen the perceived prestige of both journals and institutions. The ecosystem becomes self-reinforcing.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of this system are neither researchers, the public, nor funding agencies themselves, but the commercial structures built around scholarly publishing. Researchers gain professional recognition, institutions improve their rankings, and funding agencies report measurable research outputs. While these benefits can influence careers, institutional reputation, and funding decisions, they are largely indirect and mediated through performance metrics rather than direct economic value. Publishers, by contrast, generate immediate financial returns through publication fees, subscriptions, and an ever-expanding volume of scholarly output.

It raises an important policy question: Has the academic publishing ecosystem evolved primarily to maximize the dissemination of knowledge, or has it increasingly become a market driven by prestige, metrics, and commercial incentives?

It is also noteworthy that several influential organizations involved in research analytics, rankings, and scholarly publishing operate as private, for-profit enterprises. While commercial participation is not inherently problematic, it does warrant greater transparency and public discussion about how financial incentives shape the global research ecosystem and the evaluation of scientific excellence.

The Illusion of Academic Prestige

The modern academic ecosystem increasingly resembles social media—not because they share the same purpose, but because they operate on remarkably similar social incentives.

On social media, impressions, followers, likes, and views are often interpreted as indicators of influence, even though they may say little about the originality, depth, or long-term value of an idea. Academia has developed its own versions of these numbers:

• Publications counts
• Citation counts
• Impact factors
• H-index
• Journal quartiles
• Institutional rankings

These metrics undoubtedly provide useful information, but they are not equivalent to scientific significance. Highly cited papers are often influential, yet citation counts alone cannot measure originality, methodological rigor, or the long-term impact of a scientific discovery. Many of history's greatest breakthroughs were recognized only years or even decades after they were made.

The deeper issue, however, extends far beyond academia.

Modern society has become increasingly obsessed with quantifying success. Marks, followers, likes, citations, rankings, and awards have all become numerical representations of achievement.

Numbers provide convenience, but they also create a powerful illusion: that everything can be measured, compared, ranked, and ultimately converted into status.

Prestige itself became quantified.

What begins as a useful measurement gradually transforms into a social currency. People begin comparing numbers rather than ideas, visibility rather than substance, and recognition rather than contribution. The value of a person, an institution, or a piece of research slowly becomes associated with its measurable indicators rather than its intrinsic merit.

This is a collective illusion. It exists not because any individual believes the numbers perfectly represent reality, but because everyone believes that everyone else believes they do. Universities chase rankings because students value rankings. Students value rankings because employers value rankings. Employers value rankings because institutions promote them. Researchers pursue citations because funding agencies reward citations, while funding agencies rely on citations because universities report them. The system reinforces itself, creating an equilibrium that few individuals intentionally designed but almost everyone participates in.[4]

Like all collective illusions, it becomes self-sustaining.

This illusion can even shape the peer-review process itself. Reviewers may recommend citations to their own work, journals compete for impact factors, institutions celebrate publication counts, and researchers optimize their work for what is most likely to be published rather than what is most worth discovering. These behaviors are often individually rational, yet collectively, they reinforce a system in which metrics become symbols of prestige rather than imperfect tools for evaluation.

The consequence is an academic ecosystem where prestige increasingly becomes a measurable commodity. Entire industries now exist to improve citation counts, enhance publication records, optimize researcher profiles, and increase institutional visibility—much like social media agencies that build online influence through algorithms and engagement metrics. Both systems monetize attention. The difference lies only in the currency being measured.

The primary mission of universities is the creation of knowledge. Yet, somewhere along the way, the pursuit of science has been displaced by the pursuit of metrics. Metrics remain valuable tools for evaluation. The problem begins when society mistakes the map for the territory, the indicator for the achievement, or the metric for the knowledge itself.

Ultimately, science advances not through the accumulation of citations but through the accumulation of understanding. Prestige may attract attention, but only ideas move civilization forward.

Does Good Science Require Expensive Journals?

History suggests otherwise.

In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg founded arXiv, an open-access preprint repository initially created for the physics community [5]. Today, it hosts millions of research papers spanning physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics, statistics, and several other disciplines. For researchers in many of these fields, arXiv has become the primary platform for rapidly disseminating new ideas, often months before formal journal publication.

Many influential scientific works first reached the research community through arXiv. For example, the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," [6] which introduced the Transformer architecture and laid the foundation for today's generative AI revolution, was initially shared as an arXiv preprint before its formal publication. The research community began reading, discussing, reproducing, and building upon the work almost immediately, demonstrating that rapid dissemination can significantly accelerate scientific progress.

One of arXiv's greatest strengths is that it treats scientific communication as an evolving process rather than a static event. Authors can upload revised versions of their manuscripts as new evidence emerges, errors are corrected, or additional analyses are completed. This versioning system allows research to evolve alongside scientific understanding. If the primary objective of scholarly communication is the dissemination and refinement of knowledge, such flexibility is a significant advantage over traditional publishing, where the published version often remains fixed.

The success of arXiv demonstrates that rapid, global dissemination of scientific knowledge does not inherently require expensive publication fees or commercial publishing platforms. It illustrates that openness, accessibility, and community scrutiny can coexist with scientific rigor.

This is not to diminish the importance of journals. Peer review, editorial oversight, long-term archiving, and quality assurance remain essential pillars of scientific publishing. However, the success of platforms such as arXiv challenges the assumption that high publication costs are necessary for high-quality scientific communication. The future of scholarly publishing may therefore lie not in abandoning journals, but in separating the functions of dissemination, evaluation, and preservation from expensive commercial publishing models.

What Should India Do?

India recently launched the One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) initiative, committing significant public funding to provide nationwide access to scholarly journals [7]. Expanding access to frontier research is an important objective. However, recent developments in the United States and China suggest that many major economies are beginning to question the long-term sustainability of expensive commercial publishing models.

This presents India with an important strategic choice.

Should India continue investing primarily in access to international publishing infrastructure, or should it also invest in building its own sovereign knowledge infrastructure?

The question is not whether Indian researchers should publish in leading international journals, they undoubtedly should. The real question is whether India should remain dependent on commercial publishing ecosystems for the dissemination, preservation, and evaluation of publicly funded research.

Knowledge is a strategic asset.

Just as India invested in digital public infrastructure through UPI, Aadhaar, and the other national infrastructure, it now has an opportunity to build world-class public infrastructure for scientific knowledge. Such an ecosystem would not only serve Indian researchers but could also become a global model for equitable, transparent, and affordable scholarly communication.

A future-ready national research ecosystem could include:

• A national multidisciplinary preprint repository, similar to arXiv, enabling rapid dissemination of publicly funded research across all disciplines.
• A government-supported Open Knowledge Network, where neither authors nor readers pay publication fees, ensuring that publicly funded research remains a true public good.
• AI-assisted editorial screening and manuscript processing, to improve efficiency, reduce publication costs, detect plagiarism, identify statistical inconsistencies, and support editors while preserving rigorous human peer review.
• Open and transparent peer review, where appropriate, to increase accountability, improve review quality, and reduce opportunities for citation manipulation and other questionable editorial practices.
• Persistent digital identifiers, interoperable metadata standards, and long-term digital preservation, ensure that publicly funded research remains permanently discoverable, accessible, and reusable.
• Integration across Indian universities, funding agencies, national laboratories, institutional repositories, and research assessment systems, creating a seamless research ecosystem that supports scientists throughout the entire research lifecycle from idea generation to long-term preservation.

Such an ecosystem would not replace international journals. Instead, it would complement them by providing a robust public alternative that strengthens India's scientific sovereignty while ensuring that taxpayer-funded knowledge remains publicly accessible.

Scientific publishing should be viewed as a critical national infrastructure. Nations invest strategically in artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, cloud computing, and digital payments because these technologies underpin future economic growth. Yet all of these ultimately depend on one foundational resource: knowledge.

Without a strong knowledge ecosystem, scientific discovery slows, technological innovation weakens, and national competitiveness erodes. Knowledge infrastructure is, therefore, not simply another component of scientific policy; it is the foundation upon which every other strategic capability is built.

If India aspires to become a global scientific leader, it must do more than produce world-class research. It must also lead to the design of the systems that create, evaluate, preserve, and share knowledge with the world.

"A nation that wishes to lead in the world must not only produce knowledge—it must also own the infrastructure through which knowledge flows."

Returning to the Purpose of Research

Metrics are useful.

Peer review is essential.

Journals remain indispensable.

But none of these should become ends in themselves.

Science came first. Publishing followed.

Scientific publishing exists because science exists—not the other way around.

The purpose of research has never been to maximize citations, improve rankings, or optimize publication metrics. Its purpose is to expand human knowledge, challenge existing ideas, solve important problems, and ultimately benefit society.

When publication metrics become the objective rather than the means, the incentives of researchers, universities, funding agencies, and publishers gradually diverge from that purpose. Evaluation begins to replace exploration, visibility overshadows originality, and measurable success risks becoming more important than meaningful discovery. The question is therefore no longer whether research should be open access. The more fundamental question is this: Should scientific communication primarily serve the advancement of knowledge, or the business models and incentive systems that have grown around it?

"The future of science will not be determined solely by the discoveries we make, but also by the systems we build to communicate, evaluate, preserve, and share those discoveries. If publicly funded research is truly a public good, then the infrastructure that supports it should be designed first and foremost to serve science and, through science, society itself."

Further Readings

1. U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Budget of the U.S. Government: Fiscal Year 2027. Government-Wide Prohibition on Publishing and Subscription Fees (p. 23).
2. Brainard, J. Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals. Science (2026).
3. Hicks, D., et al. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics. Nature, 520, 429–431. (2015)
4. Larivière, V., et al. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0127502 (2015).
5. Ginsparg, P. ArXiv at 20. Nature, 476, 145–147. (2011)
6. Vaswani, A., et al. "Attention is all you need." Advances in neural information processing systems 30 (2017). https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
7. Chandrashekhar, V. India takes out giant nationwide subscription to 13,000 journals Science (2025).