Rahul Siddharthan
ONOS (One nation, one subscription) for India, a scheme by which the government centrally subscribes to journals to make them accessible to all, was announced on 25 November 2024. This idea was first proposed in a report by India’s three science academies in 2019, but it did not go into details beyond suggesting a centralised system to minimise costs. Also in 2019, the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India organised a meeting (which I attended) to discuss a “National framework for open access of scientific literature”, where it was recommended that a team of negotiators negotiate with publishers for national subscription packages starting January 2021 “for universal access of scientific literature to Indian citizens” (from the minutes of the meeting).
The COVID pandemic intervened, but work on this pressed ahead. The then PSA, K VijayRaghavan (a developmental biologist), emphasised the importance of all citizens, including school students and teachers, journalists, independent researchers, and the general public, being able to access the scientific literature without paywalls. Another thorny question was of article processing charges (APCs) increasingly levied by journals for making publications “open access”, running to several thousand dollars/euros per paper. Most Indian researchers don’t have resources in terms of grants to foot these expenses, and journals increasingly decline waivers to Indian authors. I and others argued for ONOS to include APC waivers for Indian authors.
Negotiations continued, with some publishers more receptive than others. Prof VijayRaghavan retired as PSA, and Ajay Sood, a condensed-matter physicist, took over. After over two years of presumed committee meetings, a version of ONOS was finally announced on 25 November. This is an agreement with 30 publishers of academic journals to enable access via a common platform to about 13,000 journals from these publishers for users in 6,300 government-run higher educational institutions (HEIs).
While this falls short of the access to all Indians that was envisioned, it is nevertheless a one-of-its-kind agreement globally: a welcome first step but hopefully not the end of the story. In a press conference on 10 December, the PSA clarified that extensions, to non-government HEIs and to cover APCs, are being worked on and will be implemented in later phases. These extensions are important.
Even in 2019, author-pays APCs (which were invented in 1999 by open access advocates) were getting co-opted by large publishers, including Elsevier and Springer-Nature. This trend has accelerated to the point that most biomedical research is now APC-based open access, rendering ONOS moot in several fields of science, at least for contemporary research (archives are still paywalled). APC-based open access publishing is a double-edged sword. It increases public access to research, which is beneficial for knowledge dissemination and societal progress. But it disproportionately disadvantages researchers from lower-income countries, who often struggle to afford APCs, limiting their ability to contribute to the global scientific discourse. It has exchanged inequity at the consumption level for inequity at the production level. The Indian government and other developing countries must address this, ideally as part of an expanded ONOS package that includes APC waivers for authors from their countries, and must conclude agreements with the more receptive publishers as and when they can.
Moreover, the original justification for country-wide access remains valid. ONOS as announced this week is a budgetary and logistical optimisation that enables expanded access to thousands of government colleges, universities and institutions, but still excludes the rest of the country. In the short term, all public HEIs should open their libraries to the general public (as many already do) to be able to access this research; in the long term a truly inclusive ONOS is needed. In the December 10 press conference, it was mentioned that access to the public in phase 3 will be provided via access points in public libraries. This should not be the end goal: everyone geographically in India, as identified by their IP address, should have access. Contrary arguments from the Publishers about VPN users from other countries can be countered with numbers.
There are reports that universities have been asked to stop individual subscriptions to journals and route them via INFLIBNET, the ONOS implementing agency. But only 30 publishers and 13000 journals are covered; there is a legitimate worry that researchers that require highly specialized journal titles will be forgotten, and this fear should be dispelled or addressed.
The outlay for ONOS is ₹2,000 crore (₹20 billion, or about US$ 250 million) every year for three years. This may seem enormous but, according to the 2019 academies’ report, India was already spending ₹1,500 crore a year on subscriptions that failed to benefit most HEIs. So ONOS has indeed expanded access at a not much greater cost; nevertheless it would not be surprising if publishers see it as a locked-in windfall, especially given the move towards open access (another reason to include APCs in the ambit of ONOS).
Madhan Muthu, Director of Global Library at O. P. Jindal Global University and a visiting scholar at the DST Centre for Policy Research at IISc, Bengaluru, argues that the deal is “too big to fail”, and that increased access at the same or slightly higher cost is not worth the price, pointing out that in most institutions researchers read only a handful of the journals that they subscribed to. He also argues that a pay-per-view system would be more economical than mass subscriptions. Both points are true, but in an ideal world we should be able to access literature without jumping through hoops. For example, a couple of years ago I needed to access two papers published in the 1990s in a journal called Growth, Development and Aging. The journal no longer exists and has no online archives; I wrote to the library of the (deceased) lead author, at the University of Missouri, and they declined to share a copy with me for copyright reasons! Luckily I eventually found it on archive.org – but this should not be necessary. A pay-per-view model may save money, but largely, I suspect, by most people not bothering at all. That said, the current ONOS model should be aggressively renegotiated every few years.
In the press conference of 10 December, it was mentioned that a fund is being set up to cover APCs for Indian authors in “selected good quality journals” and that APC discounts would be negotiated “as far as possible”. This is a good start, but the devil is in the details. The government should move quickly to set up payment mechanisms for the selected journals such that the authors do not have to worry about this at the time of submission. It should not happen that the author submits a paper, which is accepted, and then the author has to beg the government for coverage! Anyway, this scheme is described as a “pilot”, and hopefully the government prioritises it.
Just as the author-pays OA movement arose as a backlash against the exorbitant subscription costs of journal publishers, there is increasingly a backlash against APCs and an argument for a “diamond OA” world, where journals are funded by governments, societies and philanthropies (as repositories like arXiv and bioRxiv already are), free to read and free to publish in. In such a world, journals would be overlays of reviews on publicly-accessible preprints. The old system is broken and India and other developing countries should lead in creating a new system. It could be argued that ONOS is, instead, entrenching the old system for another few years. However, scientists have to work in the publishing landscape as it exists now, even while working to change it. ONOS is an incremental change, and in many ways a welcome one. Much more is required, globally, and maybe India can contribute more fresh ideas.
One concrete idea to change things is for India to set up a high-quality, APC-free open-access journal family. This is not for nationalistic reasons but because the world needs it. Prof Sood (PSA) said on December 10 that in a democracy Indian scientists cannot be asked to publish only in Indian journals, and science is a global enterprise. Quite so. One solution could be for India to set up a truly global family of journals, with global editorial boards, that scientists around the world will want to publish in. We certainly have the technical and scientific expertise and the resources.
All in all, though ONOS should be seen as a first step and not the end, I am optimistic about the noises being made. Here’s hoping.
Rahul Siddharthan is a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. This piece first appeared in his blog at horadecubitus.wordpress.com, and is reproduced here with permission.
Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Confluence, its editorial board or the Academy.
