The Business of Research Papers — Time for a Rethink

The way we do research today — in this highly corporatized setup — often feels unfeeling to me. Think about any other industry: if you are in the food industry, you prepare food, you give it to people, and you get paid back — that is fulfilling. There is a clear value exchange. But in academia, we write papers, pay publishers to get them out, and then have to pay again to read the very same papers we wrote. This is the only industry where we pay to create the commodity, pay to put it into the market, and still get nothing back. Accessibility suffers the most — in a country like India, only a handful of top institutes can afford subscriptions, while millions of students and researchers are locked out. Even AI tools that summarize research hide behind expensive paywalls. And in all of this, the paper has become a currency — conversations revolve around acceptances, reviews, and counts — while reviewers remain unpaid, journals stay expensive, and knowledge remains gated.

Technology has advanced so much that we simply don’t need this many papers every year. What we need — especially in a developing country like India — is translation and application of the vast research that already exists to solve real-world problems. Industry–academia collaboration isn’t weak because industry doesn’t care; it’s weak because academia is often solving problems that don’t matter to industry or society. If we want research to be meaningful, we must break out of the publish-count-chase, make access universal, and focus on real impact — not just metrics.