The story so far:
The Union Cabinet approved the Indian government’s ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) scheme on November 25. The ONOS promises to provide equitable access to scholarly journals in all public institutions.
What does the ONOS entail?
First mooted around 2018-2019, the scheme’s ambitious rollout comes with a substantial financial outlay of ₹6,000 crore over three years (2025-2027), to be paid to 30 major international journal publishers. For perspective, the Indian public and its academic institutions collectively spend around ₹1,500 crore every year on journal subscriptions. This is a rough estimate and probably includes the cost of subscription to databases as well; if so, the current total public expense to access journals will be well lower than ₹2,000 crore per year.
At the outset, ONOS’s promise to offer equitable access to research articles, irrespective of an institution’s prestige or financial capacity, which seems like a step towards democratising knowledge. But a closer examination reveals complexities that call for deeper analysis.
Is ONOS swimming against the tide?
The central question is: why is India investing heavily in a subscription-based model at a time when the global research ecosystem is increasingly embracing Open-Access (OA) publishing?
In the subscription model, a journal receives manuscripts from scientists (about their studies, etc.), evaluates them through peer review, and accepts (or rejects) them. Once a paper is accepted, the journal publishes it and makes money by charging people and institutions to access it. OA refers to papers that are published to be freely accessible. There are different kinds of OA. A common type is called gold OA, where the journal makes money by charging authors an article processing charge (APC) to publish papers in the journal. The APC for a single paper has been known to be thousands of dollars. For example, Nature Communications charges $6,790 per paper.
Scientific knowledge, as a public good, should ideally be accessible to all, especially when taxpayers fund it. The COVID-19 pandemic showed why it is important to have immediate and unrestricted access to research, not just for scientists but also for the people at large: to combat misinformation and drive informed decision-making.
Today, more than 53% of all scientific papers worldwide are open access in some way, according to data from Clarivate’s Web Of Science platform. This is a significant increase since 2018-2019, when ONOS was first conceptualised, and raises questions about ONOS’s financial prudence. If more than half of the research articles are freely accessible, should India not be paying significantly less for subscriptions than before? ONOS risks draining taxpayer money to achieve an obsolete good.
Some international developments further complicate the picture. The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy has mandated that from 2026, all publicly funded research articles must be freely accessible without any delay. Similarly, Horizon Europe, the European Union’s flagship funding program, requires peer-reviewed publications resulting from its funding be made freely available online. Considering these moves, in another year a significant fraction of research produced worldwide is likely to be freely accessible to everyone.
This timeline raises questions about ONOS’s relevance beyond 2025.
What are the challenges of commercial publishing?
The global scholarly publishing system is dominated by a handful of commercial publishers based in Western countries, and they have long been criticised for excessive subscription fees, inefficiencies resulting in prolonged delays in publishing articles, and resistance to innovation.
The scholarly publishing industry is built on publicly funded research. Researchers generate new knowledge, write their findings, and perform peer reviews — all without direct compensation from publishers. In the subscription model, these publishers charge exorbitant fees for access, creating a situation where public institutions must pay to access work they have already supported. Publisher profit margins often exceed 30%, revealing the exploitation implicit to scholarly publishing systems.
Even the shift towards OA has been dominated by gold OA and its high APCs. Many prominent journals in a few disciplines, such as biological science, have transitioned to become fully OA. Indian researchers wishing to publish in these journals will have to pay APCs since the allocation for ONOS doesn’t provide for this fee. Moreover, most subscription journals are now hybrid, so researchers — especially from the U.S. and the EU — are paying APCs to publish their articles to be OA in these journals.
India, with its immense pool of talent and resources, has the potential to reimagine this publishing ecosystem, fostering innovation in the workflow. Especially when most of the backend work in the publishing industry is outsourced to India, the infrastructure and knowhow definitely exist in the national ecosystem. But ONOS risks entrenching the status quo by reinforcing reliance on Western publishers.
What is the problem with copyright transfers?
Another significant issue with the subscription model is the need for researchers to surrender their copyrights to publishers. This allows publishers to use their work without considering the authors’ rights or consent. A recent controversy involving Taylor & Francis (T&F) and Microsoft exemplifies the extent of this problem. In early 2024, T&F had signed a deal allowing Microsoft to use its journal content to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Since authors don’t hold the copyright of their work, there is no need for permission from authors — yet they objected because the use of their work to train AI models was going unpaid. There is an urgent need for policies that protect researchers’ intellectual property.
There are ways to address copyright violation concerns. Harvard University pioneered a policy in 2008 that granted the university a non-exclusive, irrevocable right to disseminate the work of university researchers. Researchers retained the right to self-archive their work in OA repositories. Many institutes like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford followed suit. ONOS has the opportunity to emulate these models by incorporating a nationwide ‘rights retention’ policy, enabling Indian researchers to deposit their work in institutional repositories immediately after publication — a practice known as green open access.
India’s own 2014 Open Access Policy requires researchers funded by the Departments of Biotechnology and of Science & Technology to make their work openly accessible — but its implementation has been lacklustre. The ONOS could have been the ideal platform to enforce this mandate, ensuring Indian research becomes globally accessible through open repositories immediately after publication.
Is digital content preserved?
Another issue is the long-term preservation of research articles, now that almost all major journals are published online. A recent study in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication reported that 28% of articles with Data Object Identifiers (DOIs) — unique IDs to identify published papers — aren’t preserved, exposing gaps in current practices.
The discontinuation of Heterocycles, a journal published by the Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry, in 2023 left around 17,000 articles inaccessible, highlighting the risks of relying solely on publishers to preserve scientific knowledge. In this case access was eventually restored, but the delay illustrates the need for solutions like self-archiving through green OA.
Is self-reliance possible in publishing?
In an era where self-reliance (‘atmanirbharta’ in the government’s lexicon) is a national priority, it has been overlooked in scholarly publishing. While Indian researchers may continue publishing in prestigious journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc., significant potential exists to elevate Indian journals to world-class standards.
India has the resources and expertise to build a robust indigenous publishing ecosystem. Preprinting and data sharing should also be considered as an integral part of the publishing workflow (preprinting refers to a paper being published online before it has been peer-reviewed.) By investing in infrastructure, editorial processes, and global visibility for Indian journals, the country can reduce its dependence on Western publishers and attract high-quality submissions from across the world.
This is not just about the money being drained from our ecosystem: it’s also about establishing India as a leader in science and innovation.
What could ONOS have done?
ONOS can be lauded for its ambition to democratise research access, but it should have addressed deeper structural issues plaguing scholarly publishing. There should have been parallel efforts to allow authors to retain copyright, implemented OA through institutional repositories, and, most importantly, improved self-reliance in scholarly publishing.
Given the allocation ONOS has received from the Indian government, it certainly had the potential to set a precedent for equitable and innovative publishing by addressing all the issues in parallel — yet it chose to overlook them. Without addressing these systemic challenges, ONOS risks becoming a costly short-term fix. It is time to re-evaluate whether this initiative is a step forward or an expensive detour.
Moumita Koley is a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
Published – December 03, 2024 08:30 am IST
