No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy

PhD students in India will no longer be required to publish articles in academic journals before they are awarded their doctorates, if the country’s higher-education regulator adopts recommendations from a committee of researchers. The University Grants Commission (UGC) currently requires PhD students to publish at least one article in a peer-reviewed journal and present two papers at conferences or seminars before they submit their doctoral thesis for marking. The committee suspects the publishing requirement has contributed to a flourishing of poor-quality journals that offer to publish papers quickly for a fee, without providing services such as editing and peer review, says Padmanabhan Balaram, chair of the committee and a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.

Source: www.nature.com