# By defaming and branding Indian Journals as predatory, foreign publishers have been grounding huge exchequer losses to the government of India in terms of access fee, subscription charges, processing charges and Publication charges which are the immense gain for the different foreign countries, said Dr Anil Mehra.
In the global aspirations of emerging India, there is a great need to hoist the Indian Research Journals earliest as lots of foreign agencies have been working in the country against it (Indian research Journals and Indian Publishing Industry). They are on move to defame them only for their vested interests, said Dr. Anil Mehra President of Journal Association of India (JAI). “By defaming and branding Indian Journals as predatory, foreign publishers have been grounding huge exchequer losses to the government of India in terms of access fee, subscription charges, processing charges and Publication charges which are the immense gain for the different foreign countries,” he added.
According to an estimate of each day about 60 crore rupees is going out of the country to these foreign Journals in terms of different types of fees and publication charges amidst Prime minister’s ‘Make in India’ initiatives and campaign, said Dr Mehra.
Just by way of access fees and other charges, every year huge amounts of valuable foreign exchange is crossing Indian Boarders. If we see India’s imports and exports in research related work, we are a net importer by huge margins, said K. V. A. Sridhar, the editor and publisher of Yuva Engineers. “Even prominent western institutions such as Harvard and Cornell have had to cut down their access due to ever-increasing subscription costs,” he added.
Expressing deep concern over the issues Sridhar said, the most critics of Indian Journals point out the content and quality of research work published in these journals. Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society is no exception to this criticism. Despite the fact that the Philosophical Transactions comprised a large quantity of scientific content, most of the historians do not consider it to be the first true scientific journal, while the Journal published a lot of book reviews and news of interest to the scientific community as they did not publish a lot of original science, he said.
Consequently, concerns about content and quality of research work published are not limited to Indian Journals. Not just Indian printers and publishers, but all Indians should be conscious of this international conspiracy to discredit Indian media from publishing journals and scientific works. “We should broaden our perspective and come out of academic slavery. India is at the cusp of both economic and social change and it is vital that academicians, researchers and particularly Indian mainstream media should support Indian Journals, the beacon holders of emerging India”, Sridhar added.
