[This post is co-authored with SpicyIP intern Shravya Pandre. Shravya is a third year BA.LLB. Hons. student at The National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, Hyderabad.] 

By now most of our readers would have heard about the ambitious “One Nation One Subscription” (ONOS) initiative of the government. Approved on November 25 by the Union Cabinet, the momentous initiative aims to ensure access to scholarly works to nearly 1.8 Crore students, faculty members, researchers, and scientists (including the ones in Tier II and III cities).  

This will be done by creating a consortium based on a centrally negotiated and funded subscription model for e-journals. This seems to be a big improvement over the existing mechanism where institutions either access limited databases or subscribe to individual journals independently.   

Earlier, some of the aspects of the Scheme’s implementation were hazy, such as information concerning the journals that will be a part of the Scheme, and how the Scheme will assist authors in publications. The December 10 presentation by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government tries to clear the air around some of these concerns. A compilation of the key features of the Scheme, as discussed in different press releases and the government presentation, has been made here (pdf). Meanwhile, some information scholars such as Muthu Madhan have highlighted some extremely notable limitations (more below). In this post, we’ll try to understand the government’s vision for the knowledge ecosystem, and how ONOS fits in there, and then take a look at some of the benefits and shortcomings of the initiative. 

ONOS: A Make Shift Arrangement?

In the December 10 presentation, it was asserted that ONOS is an India-specific solution for expanding knowledge access till a sustainable Open Access model is achieved globally. From the vision envisaged by the government for a knowledge ecosystem in India, it seems like ONOS is the interim step, aiming to expand access to scholarly works. Subsequently, the next goal is to enhance and promote Indian journals and repositories and introduce reforms in research evaluation. The latter will focus on the impact and value of the work over the venue of publication and will also weigh in on innovation and entrepreneurial capabilities.

The vision merits appreciation however, the implementation is surely a herculean task to execute. A global sustainable open-access model is a distant dream and from the looks of it, India will take a long time, (let alone the world), to agree to a sustainable open-access model.

In the meantime, the focus needs to be on ensuring how the quality and reputation of Indian journals and repositories can be improved. (For issues concerning the quality of papers in Indian academia, interested readers can, for eg, take a look at this page at the Retraction Watch.) And this is tied up with the assessment metric employed to judge the quality of one’s work. It is no secret that research papers are essential for career advancements and universities pay special attention to different metrics- number of papers, places the paper has been cited, impact factor etc. Therefore, to attain this vision, there’ll be a need for a widespread systematic overhaul and change of attitude towards publication in Indian journals. 

The problem is the pushback from international publishers in implementing this vision, especially considering that their business model is largely based on this fear of “publish or perish”. As said above, career advancement in academia is largely dependent on the number of papers published. Leveraging the emphasis this factor has on a researcher’s career,  big publishing houses charge exorbitant amounts under the “pay to read” (charging subscription fees) (see here and here) and “pay to publish” (payment of APCs to make one’s work openly accessible) (see here and here) models.  To resolve the challenges posed by these exploitative models, the government just reached an agreement with some of these big publishing houses under the ONOS Scheme and will be paying INR 1800 Crores presumably from the exchequer. Notably, as pointed out by Muthu Madhan in his hard-hitting LSE blogpost, this payment is to access even those pieces that are already openly accessible! (see the figure below on this)

And this was just to implement the first phase of the government’s vision. Now with the government’s plan to disturb their seeming monopoly by introducing systemic changes in the assessment yardstick, the question pops up what will it cost the exchequer this time?

Inception of ONOS 

The initiative finds its first mention in the Draft Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy 2020. In 2021 after a stakeholder consultation, a detailed plan for the ONOS programme was presented before the Ministry of Education and the Department of Science & Technology. Thereafter, plans were laid out to launch the initiative from April 1, 2023, with 70 publishers (pdf) being considered. This plan didn’t materialise as over 50 percent of the original publishers were dropped from the ONOS bandwagon. 

So far, the exact terms of the agreement, or the initiative, have not been disclosed, some of the “guiding principles” (pg 11), linked in Madhan’s piece, for implementation of the Scheme give an insight into the mandate for negotiations with publishers. The key principles are listed below-

To negotiate the most optimal terms and conditions and costs for accessing e-resources with due consideration for the following aspects: 

i. perpetual accessibility of resources for paid period

ii. long-term contracts, say for 5-10 years, to ensure continuity of access

iii. access to backfiles (with current subscription)

iv. annual rates of increase in subscription

v. APC costs (Article Processing Charges for Open Access journals)

vi. copyright terms for articles to be published, in case of open access journal publishers

vii. jurisdiction applicable in case of legal issues

viii. technologies permissible for off-campus access to e-resources, etc. 

From the information present, it’s not clear whether the government was able to secure optimal deals on these points. Nonetheless, though more clarity on these principles would’ve been helpful, they do look useful at a glance. For the sake of transparency and accountability, it would have been better had, similar to the draft STIP Policy 2020, the government given the details of the terms of negotiations, list of participants in the negotiations,, and what some of these principles aim to achieve.. 

Eliminating Duplication of Subscription

Moving on, the government is projecting one of the biggest benefits of ONOS as the reduced spending on duplication of journal subscriptions across different library consortia and individual higher education institutions. However, as highlighted by Prashant and Vishal Rakhecha, in the past institutions have ended up shelling out Crores towards archival access and other additional access, despite having access to these journals through E-ShodhSindhu. Therefore, there is a need for some clarity on whether the ONOS includes access to archives (presumably principle iii in the above principles) or if institutions would be required to pay extra to access these works. 

The second stated benefit is that it will also give insights into the extent to which journals are accessed and downloaded by the educational institutions which would help in long-term planning and encouraging inactive institutions to fully utilize the platform. This may seem logical since considering the hefty sum of money that is being invested by the government in this initiative, it would like to know whether the consortium is being fully utilized or not. However, as pointed out by Madhan in his piece, the use of subscribed journals in even research-intensive institutions is suboptimal. Therefore, while it makes sense for the government to monitor how much the consortium is being used, it is also advised that it should not assess the benefit of the consortium only based on its real-time utilization through downloads, etc. 

As discussed above, the ONOS seems like a monumental step in India’s knowledge ecosystem. However, the increased corporatization in research and knowledge creation/ governance, along with the humongous amount sans accountability that has already been spent by the government on research and development makes one weary and skeptical about the successful implementation of these well-intentioned efforts. To top it up, the opacity behind the negotiations and what exactly the terms of this Scheme, would benefit from more transparency on whether the government was able to leverage its bargaining power (see page 15), based on which the ONOS model was launched, or did it get the shorter end of the stick. I guess time will tell.