Govt. reveals more info about ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ | Explained

The story so far: On November 25, the Indian government announced the launch of its ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) plan to improve access to expensive research journals to the country’s public education and research institutes. The announcement was accompanied with scant details and broached widespread criticism from the research community, especially over what was perceived to be its disproportionate expense and lack of support for open-access publishing. On December 11, government officials conducted a press conference in New Delhi that addressed many of these concerns.

What is ONOS’s purpose?

When, say, scientists have concluded an experiment, they write up their methods and findings and publish it as a paper in a journal. The journal collects, reviews, edits, publishes, and archives these papers as a service to other scholars and the people at large.

In exchange, journals levy a fee. Subscription-based journals charge readers a fee to read papers. Some forms of open-access (OA) journals, called ‘gold’ OA, charge researchers to publish their paper. So institutes had subscribed to subscription journals through 10 or so consortia within the country.

What is the ‘One Nation One Subscription’ initiative? | Explained 

ONOS will replace these consortia as a single window through which all government-funded institutes in the country will be able to access more than 13,000 published by 30 major international publishers.

Why did ONOS provoke criticism?

At the time of announcement, a Ministry of Education press release didn’t specify which journals would be part of ONOS, how ONOS would be implemented, how its allocation of Rs 6,000 crore (for three calendar years) would be spent, and how ONOS would support efforts to make research OA. Experts on the topic also asked whether the allocation for foreign journals could have been used to support domestic publishing efforts instead.

Also it wasn’t clear whether ONOS would help scientists pay to publish in gold OA journals or whether these payments — called article processing charges (APCs) — could be discounted.

What was revealed on December 11?

The press conference was attended by officials from the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA), the Department of Science & Technology, and the Department of Higher Education.

The package: Currently students and staff at all public institutes will be able to access all papers in the journals participating in ONOS irrespective of their discipline. These include titles owned by major publishers like Springer-Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. The officials said centres of science, social science, humanities, and medical education will all be eligible and won’t have to pay any other fees. Negotiations are underway to bring more journals into the fold. Those journals that aren’t part of ONOS can still sell access separately within the country.

Phases: In her presentation Remya Haridasan, a scientist at the PSA’s office, said the government would implement ONOS in three phases. In phase I, it would merge all the consortia and work to facilitate journal access in all public institutes. The scheme will expand to include private institutions in phase II, and in phase III the government would create “universal access” to all citizens “through designated access points at public libraries”.

Open access: In a pilot, ONOS would set aside Rs 150 crore a year, out of its Rs 2,000 crore per year budget, to pay for APCs. The government has also negotiated APC discounts for researchers to publish in certain OA journals. The officials said they are aware of transformative OA models around the world and that ONOS would encompass them as it progressed. As of now, they said, 60-70% of journals in ONOS are subscription-based. They added that around half a decade ago, 75% of papers published by Indian scientists were in subscription-based journals, and that this figure has dropped to 65% today.

Dr. Haridasan said ONOS “is not a value judgment of the subscription-based model of knowledge dissemination but an adoption of the most practical India-specific solution until a sustainable OA model is achieved globally.”

Domestic efforts: Officials at the press conference acknowledged the need to support domestic publishers and journals. They said there were five repositories in the country — servers where researchers could deposit digital copies of their papers and where others could freely access them — but that scientists were using them to a less-than-ideal degree. They said other efforts need to take place, such as “enhancement, promotion, and support of Indian journals” and changes in how institutes evaluate the work of researchers, especially to reduce dependence on journal titles and increase the focus on merit of each person’s work.

A new research evaluation framework would be needed that also accounts for entrepreneurial pursuits and innovation, they added. “In a democracy, you can’t have a dictum that all research done in India should be published in Indian journals,” PSA Ajay Sood said. “Science is global.”