Source: The post Knowledge access must be free for global justice has been created, based on the article “Breaking the academic paywall” published in “ The Hindu ” on 22 September 2025. Knowledge access must be free for global justice.
UPSC Syllabus Topic: GS Paper 2 –Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
Context: India produces the fourth-highest number of PhDs, yet many students lack journal access. A Delhi High Court order in August blocking Sci-Hub and LibGen reignited concerns about affordability and the right to knowledge in resource-constrained settings.
For detailed information on Significance of Open Access for Scientific Research read this article here
Why do access barriers matter?
- Scale and affordability: PhD students must read hundreds of sources but often receive only ₹20,000–35,000 as stipend. Paying $20–3,000 per paper is unrealistic for many.
- Legal blocks intensify scarcity: Free-access sites were blocked on copyright grounds after a plea by three major publishers controlling 40% of the market. This removed a crucial lifeline for students and researchers.
- Evidence of dependence: A 2021 study showed India made 8.7% of Sci-Hub download requests—over 13 million in 2017. Nineteen percent related to medical and health sciences, reflecting significant need.
How does the publishing model exclude?
- Profit without producing content: Publishers neither create the research nor review it. They benefit from unpaid academic labour funded by taxpayers or student fees.
- Gatekeeping public knowledge: Multi-billion-dollar firms restrict access to scientific outputs, limiting the world’s majority from using work largely supported by public resources.
- Narrowing what counts as knowledge
Corporate funding, patents, and IP concentrate ownership. Universities increasingly prefer candidates with high-profile publications rather than work serving underserved communities.
Why is this a justice issue for the Global South?
- Compounding crises: Communities face systemic gaps, climate disasters, displacement, and violence. Overburdened services cannot meet rising needs, so timely research access becomes a lifeline, not a luxury.
- Localised care: Drug-resistant TB and antimicrobial-resistant HIV demand context-specific regimens. Plans vary by cost, severity, geography, malnourishment, age, and co-morbidities. Without open knowledge, clinicians cannot adapt best practices.
- Unequal burdens: Two-thirds of TB cases occur in eight Global South countries. Patients already struggle to access effective, often decades-old treatments. Blocking scientific information deepens these inequities.
- Excluded voices: Grassroots insights are undervalued, and Global South researchers are under-represented in authorship. They are often confined to field roles while conceptual framing follows Global North language, miscasting local problems.
- Access and dignity: Medicine evolves with changing environments and organisms. Corporate gatekeeping restricts lifesaving tools. Ensuring open pathways to knowledge is therefore about fairness, autonomy, and health justice.
What should be done?
- Enforce open science: Operationalise the 2021 UNESCO open-science framework adopted by 193 countries, including India. Translate it into institutional policies that mandate transparency, sharing, and cross-border collaboration.
- Treat knowledge as commons: Acknowledge that science is produced collectively and should circulate freely. Replace exclusionary ownership practices with access models that prioritise public benefit over profits.
- Guarantee community access and equity: Make research conducted in the Global South available to the very communities and participants involved. Improve authorship representation so conceptual work is not confined to Global North institutions.
- Remove paywalls through collective pressure: Governments, innovators, and health experts should jointly press publishers and universities to open channels for easy access. Dismantling paywalls is essential to tackle war, climate crises, drug resistance, and entrenched inequities.
Question for practice:
Examine how paywalled academic publishing affects research and healthcare outcomes in the Global South.
