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The past weeks saw several unconfirmed reports (here and here) about the dissolution of the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) much-avowed Consortium for Academics and Research Ethics (CARE) List, attributed to internal sources within the UGC and the Ministry of Education. As observed in an earlier report, the latest draft of the UGC (Minimum Qualifications for Appointment & Promotion of Teachers and Academic Staff in Universities and Colleges and Measures for Maintenance of Standards in Higher Education) Regulations, omits the term “UGC-CARE List”, substituting it with “peer-reviewed journals,” which, perhaps, flared the initial speculative sparks. However, at the time of the writing of this post, there has been no official notification corroborating the same. In fact, the UGC website appears to be highlighting the quarterly deadline for the submission of new journals as March 2025, indicating the potential release of an updated list by April this year (though I am unable to tell when the list was last updated, some of the journals seem to have been discontinued in July 2024).
Be that as it may, scholars and academicians have strongly expressed their concerns (see, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, among others) over the impact of a possible scrapping on the country’s research ecosystem and global standing. While the list needs its own set of interventions, many believe that its discontinuation may revert the academic landscape in India back to the era when predatory, dubious and cloned journals. Some of the most overwhelming concerns revolve around the potential impact of this move in paving the way for the monopoly of private commercial databases such as Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). Additionally, its implications on the ongoing negotiations under the recently approved One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) policy (discussed in detail by Praharsh and Shravya here) have also been noticed. I dissect all these issues in this post, arguing why the road to reforming the list should not lead to its very dissolution itself.
The Origins of the UGC-CARE List
The conception of the UGC-CARE List came a part of the country’s response to the exponential global surge of “predatory journals”, first flagged by Jeffrey Beall for their notorious “pay to publish” model, non-transparency and a gross circumvention of the standard peer review process. The plague of such journals spiked cataclysmically with more than 10,000 identified by 2015, and the number said to rise to 15,000 by 2021. As per a 2018 article by Selcuk Besir Demir, and cited by Kurambayev and Freedman in their 2023 piece in The Hindu, developing countries like India, Nigeria and Turkey have seen the highest number of researchers getting their work published in such journals over time.
As also highlighted in the above hyperlinked reports, the rise of such journals was catalysed greatly by stringent policies for promotion followed across the academic systems in these regions, widely known as the “publish or perish” paradigm. In India, for instance, since 2010, the aforementioned UGC Regulations and their amendments have laid down the existing mandate of evaluation through Academic Performance Indicators (API) which are focused on the publication of a prescribed number of papers in accredited journals every year as a criteria for faculty appointment and promotion, also known as the Performance Based Appraisal System (PBAS). Similar guidelines were also made applicable for doctoral scholars in 2016, which, while discontinued in 2022, have been reintroduced in certain universities as of 2023.
The institutionalised pressure to publish a higher number of scholarly output coupled with the high barriers to entry created by more credible journals often drives scholars and professors, on their brink, towards predatory journals which deceive them by imitating reputable titles, offering fake impact factors and promising entryways to quick publication in high-impact journals. The focus on quantity rather than quality has also been widely criticised for its impact on academic integrity, pushing scholars to resort to practices such as “salami slicing”, or dividing one paper into several smaller publications to meet the prescribed quota, and for leading to a heavy increase in the number of retracted papers across the world. Moreover, the rise of predatory publishing has also been charged with exploiting open access, leading to a rise in plagiarism, data manipulation and authorship disputes, and contaminating citations.
After the first attempt at compiling a list of approved journals in 2017 failed to curb the menace by finding itself sullied by dubious journals by up to 88%, the UGC took it upon itself to remove over 4,000 journals from the said list. Post this, in 2018, the CARE List of Quality Journals was announced by the UGC, widely hailed as India’s strike against the sticky malaise. Categorising them into Group I, which includes journals qualified through UGC-CARE protocols, and Group II, comprising journals indexed in globally recognised databases, the list has been proactive in collating a list of credible journals and flagging and culling out predatory journals from the existing database.
Not a List without its Woes
The launch of the UGC-CARE List in June 2019 has enabled increased awareness on the norms of ethical publishing and has helped enhance the global credibility of quality Indian journals. Significantly, the list has attempted to include Indian language journals, with the objective to boost their visibility and legitimacy and acknowledge their value.
While CARE has been considerably successful in keeping the list free of non-credible journals, it continues to face criticism. The three-part protocol designed to evaluate journals considered eligible to be included to the list has been questioned for being non-transparent. According to Vasantha Raju N, the primary and secondary criteria which are central to the second and the third protocol for verifying the credibility of the submitted journals have not been adequately disclosed in the public domain.
Moreover, he pointed out how the approach to accept submissions through university-based internal quality assurance cells (IQAC) and not directly by the publishers, in all its good intent, makes the overall process long-drawn and arduous. He also raised the need for increased layers of scrutiny to examine the credibility of non-web-based (print-only) multidisciplinary journals and emphasised the need for mandatorily submitting the ISSN to track journal publications and further bolster monitoring against any kind of deception. Previously raised concerns by Patwardhan and Nagarkar include the delays in securing correct journal recommendation forms, inadequate peer review policies among selected journals and the unavailability of the credentials of the members of their editorial board.
From the other end of the spectrum, many research scholars and professors have called attention to the quarterly updation of the list, demanding that it be updated every three years instead. Researchers contend that while reputed journals may always find a way in the list, they tend to demand excessive processing and publication charges, driving resource-constrained scholars towards more accessible journals which they fear are prone to be removed without much of a notice, adversely affecting their research.
Others have criticised the journal-selection criteria as well as the “marketisation of academics”, pointing how some of the most reputed journals come with prolonged timelines for review and publication as well as strong “ideological” positions, compelling helpless but unwitting researchers to get their work published in clone journals in the absence of adequate alternatives. They have suggested that the researchers with pre-published work in journals, later classified and removed as predatory, should be allowed relief in the form of self-attestations or confirmations from supervisors in order to overcome any academic stigma and combat undue harassment.
Further, while the inclusion of journals published in vernacular languages has been recognised as a laudable step in the Indian context, critics like Vasantha Raju have called for their exclusion, highlighting the impracticalities of maintaining and verifying the credibility of a comprehensive database of regional language publications in India, the consequent failure of which has often led to the inclusion of substandard local journals in these languages.
The Case for Reform over Discontinuation
As evident, CARE’s listing model is not a perfect one and is obviously in a dire need for continuous monitoring and reforms. At the same time, the costs of the list’s discontinuation might be heftier than sustaining and improving it.
- Back to a Future of Predatory Journals?
Worries on the possible dissolution primarily stem from the fact that barring UGC-CARE, there are hardly any unified authoritative databases of scholarly journals capturing the Indian academic context and concerns. As previously mentioned, foremost possibility of a potential disbandment of the list, coupled with the lack of any other well-monitored, reliable and open access database, is an increased proliferation and use of predatory and dubious journals in academia. While some India-based databases do exist, such as the Indian Citation Index, J-Gate, and other discipline-specific repositories maintained by autonomous institutions, among others, they do not promise a standardised regulatory function focused on keeping a double-check on the authenticity of indexed journals at periodic intervals.
In the event the list is discontinued, the absence of any other potent resource may severely impact the Indian academic community leaving researchers, especially in their earlier stages, to their own devices for journal selection and publication. This will eventually lead to lower research credibility, diminished international recognition and hindered academic growth, impacting the country’s global standings and further mar the scope of international collaborations and funding for Indian researchers.
- Towards the Monopoly of Global Databases?
One pressing concern that has emerged out of extant discussions is that the discontinuation of the list will inevitably pave the way for the monopoly of privately-owned international databases, including Scopus, which is owned by the academic publishing house Elsevier, and Web of Science, owned by American analytics company Clarivate. The immediate shift in control for selection, recognition and gatekeeping to foreign entities may limit India’s ability to shape its own academic priorities, policies and funding strategies.
The issue runs deep as the reliability of Scopus, for one, and its ability to keep its repository credible is not untainted, given its failure to properly classify journals, the presence of fake and pay-to-play publications and its arbitrary ranking system that often elevates obscure or unrelated journals over established, high-quality ones (highlighted here and here). Further, in his article, Jonathan P. Tennant has exposed Web of Science and Scopus for their inherent systemic biases which disproportionately favour Western, English-language research while marginalising non-traditional knowledge emerging from the Global South.
The overall consequences of relying on global databases, thus, may be far reaching and multi-dimensional. These include the heightened under-representation of region-specific journals and India-focused research in international fora, increased limits to access and the widening of the knowledge gap in India owing to the subscription-based models followed by these databases, and all leading up to a weakened domestic research ecosystem both from a supply and demand perspective.
- Impact on ONOS
Given that the first phase of the ONOS scheme only recently received its approval from the Union Cabinet after three years of negotiations, it is worried that the undoing of the list may further imbalance the government’s bargaining power against profit-minded big publishers in any subsequent rounds of negotiations. As already reported by Muthu Madhan in his LSE piece and Latha Jishnu in Down To Earth, the ONOS negotiations have so far been obscured with the looming suspicion that the big publishers may have pawned the government into agreeing to unfavourable terms at higher costs.
Notably, Elsevier, which owns Scopus, is among the negotiating publishers under ONOS, and is globally infamous for lobbying against open access and imposing one-sided conditions which has led to universities in the UK and the US terminating their agreements with the publisher. With India’s own journal database discontinued and reliance on Scopus increasing, Elsevier may gain greater leverage to pressure the government in exchange for indexing Indian journals in its global repository.
The implications of the discontinuation of the list may be drastic enough to cause significant academic uncertainty, institutional maneuvering and a fractured research ecosystem in India. The list can be easily improved through proper consultations and, for instance, by improving indexing standards, increasing transparency, streamlining the selection and review process and effectively integrating the list with global research databases to enhance recognition. In the backdrop of existing global patterns, the ideal solution is not to abandon the list but to reform it; to protect India’s intellectual sovereignty, rather than letting corporations dictate our scholarly future.