The Initiative for
Fair Open Access Publishing
in South Asian Studies

§1  As is well known, the impact of publications is very often contingent on factors independent of the quality of the research or the competence of the authors. This includes that the research is published in a renowned journal (or other publication medium), by a renowned editor, or – and this has become a major problem – by a prestigious publishing house.

§2  Most of the prestigious publication media are nowadays controlled by a small number of profiteering international publishers. These companies often sell their products at unjustifiably high prices. Much of the editorial work, on the other hand, is outsourced to researchers (or their co-workers, assistants, employees, secretaries etc.). Because they depend on the prestige capitalized on by the publishers, they generally do this without payment. This situation has led to a real crisis in academic publishing.

§3  The Open Access (OA) movement is a reaction to this development: the advance of digitization has made it easy to make the results of research freely available on the internet. OA publishing offers free access to research, regardless of an individual's financial means or affiliation with a subscribing institution. In the OA model, the individual reader does not pay (except, of course, in the case of printed works). Instead, the publication costs are borne by universities, libraries, scholarly societies, professional associations or other scholarly institutions. While in the wake of this development a number of institutions have founded in-house publishing projects, some commercial publishers have started to offer OA as well.

§4  In order to compensate for the revenue losses resulting from the free availability of OA publications, however, some profiteering publishers have begun to calculate special fees – imposed on the authors or their institutions. Most often, these fees are unjustifiably high and overcompensate for the production costs. As a growing number of academic institutions nowadays demand that the publications of their employees be OA, they are willing to pay these fees. They even regularly schedule a special budget to finance the publishers.

§5  Ultimately, however, it is the tax payers who have to pay, often several times: funding for research and researchers, library budgets for subscription fees, acquisition of overpriced books, processing costs charged by the publishers for OA publications etc. The only reason this system functions is that researchers and their institutions are dependent on the prestige that profiteering publishers have capitalized on for commercial benefit.

§6  This business model is contrary to the spirit of the sciences and the humanities, whose main task is to discover and to create knowledge and to communicate it to the tax paying public – by publishing their results in the truest sense of the word. It goes without saying that excellent scholars and institutions should work together with first-rate publishers and vice versa. But both excessive profiteering and exploitation through “voluntary” work should come to an end. If researchers and publishers are paid by tax money, then this must be done under fair conditions for all parties.

§7  We, an open and growing group of concerned scholars, are convinced that Fair Open Access (FOA) publishing is the best way out of this crisis. What FOA shall encompass is subject to open discussion. Most important is, in any case, a “separation of powers”: scientific quality and publishing services must be independent of each other. Building on the definition by the Fair Open Access Alliance (fairopenaccess.org), we suggest the following guiding principles for FOA publishing:

§8  Since profiteering publishers will not give up their business model just because we say they should, we have to take action ourselves. Scholars (especially early-career scholars without tenure) need to publish in prestigious journals and books in order to build a CV that will impress hiring committees. Editors, on the other hand, may feel that they could betray the publishers they work with and that they could jeopardize their own position. In this way, many of us are compromised. But if we collectively make the effort to take a step forward, that will make a difference.

§9  As the FOA Alliance has shown with their initiatives in the fields of linguistics, mathematics and psychology, it is best to promote FOA from within the individual disciplines. In the (relatively speaking) small setting of a single discipline, people know each other and can form networks, spread awareness and join forces in order to implement FOA. When it is possible to assess each other’s work, commercially successful publishers are not needed to guarantee the quality of the research. In a community of trusted peers, it is easier to find and recommend FOA publishers and high-quality publishing media.

§10  As scholars and researchers, we should therefore take the following measures, whenever the circumstances permit:

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Supporters

     

If you are a scholar of South Asian Studies (classical or modern, postgraduate or higher) and if you want to support the initiative, please send your name (and affiliation) to

The following publishers and journals meet many or all FOA criteria (see §7 of the FOASAS Manifesto).

The above list is updated on an ongoing basis. If you represent a FOA publisher (see §7 of the FOASAS Manifesto) and would like to see your company or institution included in the list, please write to and provide the necessary information as shown in the entries above.

The above list is updated on an ongoing basis. If you are an editor (see §7 of the FOASAS Manifesto) and would like to see your FOA journal included in the list, please write to and provide the necessary information as shown in the entries above.

The database of FOASAS publications is updated on an ongoing basis. If you would like to see a publication included in the database, please write to and provide the DOI or URL of the publication.

The database is generated using BibBase (bibbase.org) and Zotero (zotero.org) with data from external sources. For more options visit the group library at zotero.org. It sometimes takes a while for the list to be generated and displayed, and there may be inconsistencies.

The organizers of the initiative for Fair Open Access Publishing in South Asian Studies (FOASAS) are:

• Dominik A. Haas, Leiden University
• Vitus Angermeier, University of Vienna
• Chiara Livio, Utrecht University

The aim of FOASAS is the promotion of Fair Open Access in South Asian Studies through direct action of scholars affected by the present crisis in academic publishing. For more details, read the manifesto.

With the exception of external logos, all parts of the website (including the manifesto, written by Vitus Angermeier and Dominik A. Haas in 2020) are licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal – Public Domain Dedication.

To contact FOASAS please write an e-mail to