Despite many details that have to be worked out, it is clear to all stakeholders that higher education has to be looked at more thoughtfully. The headline news is always that of the lack of Indian universities in international rankings. Hence the effort to rank universities, such as that of the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) is right in principle. People might rightfully dispute specific rankings but there is no doubt that some accountability in the system is overdue provided it is done in a respectful way, and is intended to help institutions improve.

But rankings are only the last outcome. What is needed is the infrastructure to help those rankings grow robust. There are many aspects to this such as pedagogy, customised and differentiated student learning, equity, internal governance of the universities and so on. But the chief duty of universities is research with a strong public-benefit mandate. The way to test research is mainly through publications, and it is publication in journals that is the nub of the issue.

Need for India-relevant research ecologies

The natural extension of governmental interest after the initial ranking frame is that of encouraging publication in respectable journals. This is where the true mettle of the government will be tested in the future—will it be able to help grow and fund an ecosystem of India-relevant, high quality publications in journals that also in time win international respect? The experience thus far has not been encouraging—regulators that came up with poorly designed Academic Performance Indicators are now trying to douse the fire lit by themselves. It is, however, gratifying that there is appreciation, at least now, of the serious threat to the Indian research ecology from low quality and predatory journals (2). The solution, as indicated earlier, is to focus on growing a high-quality research ecology. But it must first be accepted that this takes time and patience, and cannot be driven by random target numbers that regulators (and consequently, university administrators) regularly inflict on academics. Far from taking a punitive stance, it should be admitted that the failure to nurture a research ecology is primarily the failure of an enabling governmental and funding body, rather than that of individual professors. This point has already been ably articulated in an earlier editorial jointly published in IJME and other biomedical journals: “Around the world, as in many fields in our country, employees are assessed using the so-called “subjective” criteria, with sufficient reliability. Setting up such systems – though admittedly hard – is not impossible. These will surely take time, effort and commitment to set up. But if we unquestioningly accept the simplistic tools such as publication count, we will never move to a higher plane. Hence, as a profession, we need to initiate debate for moving towards better systems of assessing quality. Such an assessment system would necessarily mean a multi-pronged evaluation – by peers, students as well as administrators” (3).

The reason that it is easier to get published abroad is that many of the journals are self-evidently focused on issues of the Global North with only a token presence in issues relevant to India or the Global South. This is most obvious in cases of expensive science journals where the possibilities of commercialisation are high. In contrast, in issues that impact more Indians (either directly in terms of healthcare, or indirectly in terms of cultural knowledge) there are very few creditable sites of publication. The reasons are multi-fold. On the one hand, global indexing services are insufficiently sensitised to the types of research relevant to India (research that has great social and cultural impact, but may have lower commercial value or immediate relevance to the normative centre of knowledge ie Euro-America). In large fields of knowledge such as history, medical ethics, literature and so on, there are only the barest handful of, say, Scopus-indexed journals (one mentions Scopus as the UGC has been referring to it directly). Scholars have noted that dealing with a heavy hand in nascent fields stifles innovation: “The field of medical humanities is, as it is, poorly developed in India and such norms for the assessment of performance will further hamper its progress” (4). In the last year, there have been many controversies with regard to the high pricing of these journals, and large public university systems such as that of the University of California have withdrawn from negotiations (5) India too needs to take a strong stance, at least on issues of clear universal relevance such as public health and ethics—we need to learn to take genuine intellectual ownership of the shape, pace, direction and substance of what is uniquely relevant to India, and take charge of our journey out of widespread and avoidable morbidity and excessive commercial distortion.

On the other hand, the response in India should not be, as it has typically been, a blind, reflex “research-nationalism” that simply lists and de-lists, without credible explanation, journals on governmental indexes. Rather, one should learn from the best practices of global indexing agencies how to develop credible tools for collaboration, searchability, feedback, real time tracking and so on. These should then be used to give more significance to India-relevant research even as it manages high levels of rigour. As it stands, there is, for example, no clearly stated document laying out first principles in medical ethics in Indian healthcare. The government must initiate the conversation as only it can provide legal teeth, as well as funds, regulatory rules of access to health information for Indian citizens and so on. It must not be forgotten that the point of a journal is to serve the public interest and individual innovation—while what happens in practice is that the rigid norms of a journal distort innovative, meaningful thinking, eg: “We submitted an original article which was accepted only as a brief report. We agreed because it was the highest impact factor journal in the subject category in India” (6). Of course, this is also part of the larger question of how circulars—which have such massive consequences for tens of thousands of professionals—are simply issued with little sense of the rationale or explication of the decision-making process.