A Right to Research in India: Copyright, Text and Data Mining, and Open Science Reform

Copyright is commonly described as a system of exclusive rights granted to creators, but it also determines what others, including researchers, may lawfully do with protected works. Indian copyright law contains no explicit text-and-data-mining exception, no settled rule on whether Section 52(1)(a)(i) protects computational copying for research, and no statutory mechanism to distinguish public-interest research from commercially deployed, market-substituting AI systems. Applying a doctrinal and comparative legal methodology, the analysis examines the constitutional foundations available in Articles 19(1)(a), 21, and 51A(h), the architecture of Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957, the Delhi High Court's reasoning in Rameshwari Photocopy, and the Court's 2026 interim decision in ANI Media Pvt Ltd v OpenAI OpCo LLC. It evaluates the scientific-access crisis evidenced by the Sci-Hub litigation and the “One Nation One Subscription” scheme and critically examines the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade's proposed "One Nation, One Licence, One Payment" AI-licensing framework against the Berne/TRIPS three-step test. The proposed framework combines a non-waivable research and text-and-data-mining exception for public-interest and academic research with a separate licensing framework for commercial exploitation, machine-readable rights reservations, and a statutory Secondary Publication Right for publicly funded research. The proposed framework is a reform proposal and does not suggest that Indian law currently recognises a freestanding Right to Research.