New scheme to triple those with access to top journals

The Centre’s One-Nation-One-Subscription (ONOS) scheme will more than triple the number of State-affiliated colleges and individual beneficiaries who can access research papers — in the sciences and humanities — from the world’s top publishers. While this will double the Centre’s annual spend on subscriptions, it will also mean a 62% increase in the number of journals – that make up 95% of published research – available to students.

“In the first phase that will begin on January 1, 2025, such access will be available to all States or government institutions (including State colleges, research bodies). In 2027, after a review, we can consider private universities and colleges,” said Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) at a press conference here on Tuesday.

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The expected outlay from 2025-2027 for the scheme is ₹6,000 crore. At present, the Centre spends around ₹1,000-1,500 crore annually on journal subscriptions, according to data shared by the PSA officials.

Another initiative as part of the scheme would be the creation of an Article Processing Charges (APC) fund worth ₹150 crore. APC are charges borne by individual researchers, or their institutions, to make their peer-reviewed published research papers freely available. Typically, articles are put behind a paywall and are accessible only to subscribers. The APC charge in an apex journal, such as Nature, is €10,290 (₹9.1 lakh) – though average APC charges are around $2-3,000 (₹80,000-1,60,000).

“We will set up a process to determine which journals and who can be eligible for this,” said Mr. Sood.

The overarching sentiment behind the ONOS scheme was to expand the research literature available to students and faculty, outside of privileged Centrally funded institutes and the 171 Institutes of National Importance, said Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology.

“Think of it like getting a cable television package with access to the full bouquet of channels. This doesn’t mean we are discouraging open-access publication or giving a preference to non-Indian publishers. Individual institutions can continue their existing practices,” he added.

The nodal agency that will coordinate subscriptions will be the Information and Library Network, an autonomous inter-university centre of the University Grants Commission. This network covers more than 6,300 institutions, translating into nearly 1.8 crore students, faculty and researchers. “The student or faculty can register for the service through their institution and read and download papers, even when they aren’t physically present on campus,” said P. K. Banerjee, Joint Secretary, Department of Higher Education.

The ONOS scheme has been in the works since 2019 with India in talks with the European Union to jointly negotiate a deal with major scientific publishers to reduce the cost of access to research literature. The effort, called Plan S, however, was shelved with India choosing to begin its own negotiations. One of the major points of negotiation was trying to keep research publications, resulting from publicly funded effort, free to access. There were also negotiations to reduce APC charges. The current ONOS scheme, however, does not seem to have succeeded on that front though Mr. Sood said that “discounts” could be available if authors published in ‘select’ journals.

“One of the major challenges was getting publishers to commit to having all the journals in their stable be made accessible,” said Virandar Chauhan, senior scientist and involved with the negotiations with publishers.

Independent experts said that the ONOS scheme, in its current form, had the promise to improve access to a substantial section of faculty and students in under-served institutions. However, given that science – India and globally -- generally greatly valued publications in peer-reviewed publications, which were published by large private publishers, affordable, credible open-access publication was a distant dream.

“I still get requests from scientists in smaller universities to forward research papers. Frequently the lack of access meant they – students and professors – are unaware of emerging developments in research and the ONOS can certainly help with that,” said L.S. Shasheedhara, Director, National Centre for Biological Sciences. “However, scientists want their work to be published in high-visibility journals and that comes at a cost. Several models and approaches have been tried but we are still a long way.”