Academic and scientific publishing

Scholarly publishing and its tools, from the journal to the edited paper

When professors do research, they publish it as a paper in a scientific journal. Engineering students meet these papers when they search for sources for a final-year project. Every such paper passes through a publisher. Scholarly publishing is a large and profitable business, run by a few large groups, and India is the world's centre for its production work.

The journey of a paper

Submission: the researchers send their paper to a journal.

Peer review: other experts in the field read it, check it, and recommend whether to publish it. They are usually not paid.

Editing: accepted papers are corrected for language and style.

Typesetting: the paper is laid out for print and for the web.

Publication in the journal.

Indexing: the paper is added to citation databases. A citation index records which papers cite which, so that researchers can find the work that matters.

How the money flows

Subscriptions

Universities and libraries pay the publisher for access to its journals, often for whole bundles of them.

Open access

The paper is free for anyone to read. Instead, the author or the body that funded the research pays the publisher a fee for each paper.

Where India fits. Much of the production work of the world's journals is done in India: the editing, the typesetting, and the software that manages it all. Indian companies also help researchers whose first language is not English to write their papers. There are many such researchers, in China, Japan, Europe and India itself.

A paper goes from submission through peer review, editing and typesetting to publication and indexing, and much of the editing and typesetting is done in India; it is paid for by subscriptions or by open-access fees.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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Publishers, production and help for researchers

Publishers, production and help for researchers

The large publishers

RELX

with engineers in Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi, owns Elsevier, the largest scientific publisher. Elsevier runs ScienceDirect, where its papers are read, and Scopus, a citation index. RELX also owns LexisNexis, in law. RELX has the most job postings in this Market Segment. (More on it in Market Segment 43.2, Legal research and legal AI, in Industry Vertical 43, Legaltech.)

Elsevier

RELX's scientific publishing business, has engineers in Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru. Its Indian centres run much of the production of its journals.

Taylor & Francis Group

with engineers in Bengaluru, publishes academic journals and books.

Science on video

JoVE

with engineers in Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad, publishes scientific experiments as peer-reviewed videos, and teaches science with them. (More on it in Market Segment 42.2, K-12 digital learning, in Industry Vertical 42, Edtech.)

Production for publishers

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd

with engineers in Mumbai, produces journals and courseware for publishers, and the platforms that host them.

Helping researchers write

Cactus Communications

with engineers in Bengaluru, runs Editage and the Paperpal writing assistant.

Enago

with engineers in Mumbai, runs the Trinka grammar checker.

Both edit and polish researchers' papers. They also sell publishers tools that screen the papers they receive.

One company covered mainly in another Market Segment also works here:

Clarivate

sells Web of Science, a citation index. (More on it in Market Segment 8.3, Market research and market intelligence providers, in Industry Vertical 8, Analytics and data providers.)

The paper that AI wrote.

AI models now help researchers write their papers. They also help people fake them. Paper mills, businesses that sell fake research papers, are one example. Publishers now use AI models to screen submissions for fake data, paper mills and writing done by AI without saying so. At the same time, they offer AI to researchers as a writing assistant. Keeping the scientific record honest is becoming a software problem, and much of that software is built in India.

That is scholarly publishing: a few large publishers, and the companies that produce their journals and help researchers write. Much of its production and software work is done in India.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What news, publishing and social media companies hire for.

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