India produces over 24,000 doctoral graduates every year and is ranked 4th globally; had published 1.3 Million academic papers between 2017-2022. India is one of the top 5 producers of research papers in the world, and yet, the access to international journals has been very much fragmented. To further the strength of country’s research capabilities, the Indian government has launched an initiative called the One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme. This scheme aims to provide one-portal access to academic resources for millions of students, faculty, and researchers across the country.
Before we understand this scheme and its implications, it is important to understand the contextual dynamics in which this scheme is being announced.
The global academic publishing industry had a worldwide sales amounting to more than $19 Billion USD in 2020. The industry is profitable for the large players so much so that the biggest companies in the sector—Elsevier and Springer-Nature had better profit margins than tech giants like Google, IBM etc in the year 2023. This lucrative business is possible due to the inherent flaws in the system that exploit the contributions of researchers, institutions, and governments while maintaining tight control over the dissemination of knowledge. These flaws include the monopolization of journals, exorbitant subscription fees, and the prevalence of paywalls that restrict access to publicly funded research.
Academic publishers capitalize on the unpaid labour of researchers, who conduct studies, write papers, and even peer-review submissions without compensation. Once accepted, the publishers charge institutions hefty subscription fees to access the very work those institutions helped produce, creating a closed-loop system that disproportionately benefits the publishers at the expense of academic accessibility.
Moreover, the “publish or perish” culture forces researchers to prioritize high-impact journals owned by major publishers, further strengthening their market dominance. This cycle is exacerbated by the high costs of open-access publishing fees, which often shift the financial burden onto researchers or their institutions, making equitable access to knowledge even harder to achieve.
Despite the growing calls for reforms, such as mandating open-access policies and promoting alternative publishing models, these systemic issues persist, driven by entrenched interests and the lack of unified resistance from the academic community. As an alternative, there are two types of access protocols/frameworks that are followed across the word:
- Gold Open Access provides unrestricted online access to scholarly research, typically free of charge to readers. It includes articles, books, and other academic outputs available immediately or after an embargo period, often published in open-access journals or repositories. Japan has issued a mandate that all articles resulting from nationally funded research must be made Open Access immediately upon publication as of 2025. The United States also has made a similar mandate.
- Green Open Access, a subset of Open Access, refers to the self-archiving of research by authors. Authors deposit their work in institutional or subject-specific repositories, allowing free access, even if the original publication is behind a paywall. Green Access may involve compliance with publisher policies, including embargo periods before the work becomes freely accessible.
Now what does this have to with India and it launching One Nation-One Subscription?
India has largely followed the Green Open Access model but as already stated above, this system is plagued by not only a restriction on accessing the final version of the paper but also the embargo period by the publishers. This is for the people who are publishing out of India. For those who want to see the international journals or access the articles published by journals who have restricted access—they either have to be a part of the institution which has subscribed to those journals, or they would have to be able to afford the exorbitant subscription/article price. This exclusionary system obviously keeps researchers away from accessing knowledge from across the world. Thus, through the ONOS scheme, the government pays for the subscriptions, enabling students, researchers, and faculty from publicly funded institutions to access these journals.
Understanding the current system for accessing journal articles
Before ONOS, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in India accessed journals through a fragmented system of different library consortia, each under the administrative control of various ministries. A library consortium is a group of libraries collaborating to fulfil common needs like resource sharing. For instance, the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium, managed by the INFLIBNET Centre (Information and Library Network Centre) under the Ministry of Education, provides access to selected scholarly electronic journals and databases. Besides these consortia, HEIs also subscribe to journals individually. Other than these, the science and astrophysics related FORSA with participation from premier institutes such as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research also exist. This disaggregated approach has resulted in limited access for many institutions and overlapping subscriptions leading to unnecessary expenditures. It was estimated that India’s institutions spend more than Rs.1500 Crore for the subscriptions.
Details of the ONOS scheme
ONOS seeks to address these issues by centralising journal subscriptions for nearly 6,300 government-run HEIs, including universities, colleges, and institutions of national importance. The scheme will provide equitable access to 13,000 scholarly journals under a single platform, which is set to become operational on January 1, 2025. This common platform will host journals published by 30 renowned international publishers, including Elsevier Science Direct, Springer Nature, Wiley Blackwell Publishing, Taylor & Francis, and many others. All participating institutions will only need to register on the platform to access these journals.
INFLIBNET has been designated as the implementing agency for ONOS, responsible for coordinating the national subscription and making central payments to the publishers. The central government has already negotiated a single subscription price for each of the 30 publishers. Notably, if institutions require access to journals beyond the 13,000 provided on the platform, they can still subscribe to them individually.
The ONOS scheme has been allocated a substantial budget of ₹6,000 crore (approximately US$715 million) for three calendar years – 2025, 2026, and 2027. This investment aims to benefit a vast population of 55 lakh to nearly 1.8 crore students, faculty, and researchers across the 6,300 participating institutions. It will especially benefit institutions in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that previously struggled to afford expensive journal subscriptions.
Is there a catch?
There is no catch; not immediately. While ONOS has been widely lauded for its potential to democratise knowledge access, there is a concern.
The most prominent concern revolves around the scheme’s focus on a subscription-based model at a time when the global research ecosystem is increasingly shifting towards Open Access (OA) publishing. OA publishing models, particularly gold OA, charge authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication, making the research freely accessible. Critics argue that investing in traditional subscriptions could be a short-sighted approach given the growing popularity of OA. This criticism is especially valid in 2024 when more than 50% of papers published in the last four years worldwide are open access.
Another issue is the lack of clarity on whether the portal will be accessible to only students or also to the general public, including independent researchers. While this can be incorporated as the plan rolls out, it is important for India to use its leverage to make it easier for its own research ecosystem to thrive by striking a deal for lesser APCs.
Conclusion
The scheme’s substantial budget and wide reach provide an opportunity to incorporate OA principles within this deal. The government could explore negotiating with publishers for reduced APCs for Indian researchers or invest in developing institutional repositories to promote green OA, where authors self-archive their work, making it freely accessible. This could preserve the contributions of academic worldwide to make Open Access a reality.
ONOS is undoubtedly a significant step towards democratizing knowledge access in India. While acknowledging the criticisms and potential challenges, it is crucial to recognize the scheme’s potential to transform India’s research landscape. It will have to be clubbed with much needed higher research funding and better infrastructure to realise India’s scientific potential.
(The author is a legal researcher with the organisation)
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