Unlocking Knowledge: National Mandate for Institutional Copyright Retention to Enable Open Access in India

This brief strongly advocates for implementing a mandatory institutional right-retention policy across all publicly funded institutions in India. This policy would enable immediate self-archiving by allowing authors to retain primary rights over their work. This crucial reform ensures that results from publicly funded research are made open access through institutional or national repositories immediately upon publication. It is essential to empower institutions to dismantle the prohibitive subscription barriers imposed by traditional journals, ensuring the broad dissemination of research funded by public money. Current discussions on open access predominantly focus on the APC-based gold open-access model, which introduces high costs for authors—a significant barrier in resource-constrained countries. There is an urgent need for assertive actions that guarantee unrestricted access to publicly funded research. India offers a vast landscape of opportunities to champion open access by promoting self-archiving in institutional and national repositories. However, the common practice of transferring copyright ownership to journals critically hampers the immediate implementation of such practices as well as the broader use of knowledge. To address this, it is imperative to enforce national mandates that ensure authors' institutions retain primary rights, relegating only secondary rights to publishers. Implementing such policies would catalyse a systemic transformation, reinforcing the ethos of freely accessible and utilizable knowledge for the greater societal good.