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

The ONOS initiative will provide access to journal articles to all individuals in India for one “centrally negotiated payment”. It will replace individual institutional journal subscriptions.

The story so far: The Union Cabinet on Monday, November 25, 2024, approved the ‘One Nation One Subscription’ (ONOS) initiative for centralised access to research articles and journal publication for government higher education institutions and research and development (R&D) laboratories of the central government.

The central government has allocated ₹6,000 crore for ONOS until 2027. All higher education institutions under central or State governments and R&D institutions of central government can avail the benefits of the initiative through a national subscription.

ONOS is a plan to consolidate researchers’ subscriptions to prominent academic journals and other similar publications. Once in place, the ONOS initiative will provide access to journal articles to all individuals in India for one “centrally negotiated payment”. The ONOS will replace individual institutional journal subscriptions.

Subscriptions to scientific journals are a costly affair. According to research conducted by S. Chakraborty of the National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi, and other researchers and published in Current Science in April 2020, India spent around ₹1,500 crore on subscription for electronic and print journals in 2018. Institutions also spent around ₹30-50 crore on access to SCOPUS and Web of Science, which are popular citation databases.

“One is looking at very large numbers in terms of financial outlays,” the paper noted.

In a response to a query raised in the Lok Sabha in August 2023, Subhas Sarkar, then Minister of State for the Education Ministry, said the Indian government spent around ₹995 crore on journal subscriptions in 2022. This included “the spending by the ten library consortia funded by different ministries/departments and self-subscriptions by individual government academic and R&D institutions”. Overall, the total expenditure for 2019-2022 was estimated to be around ₹2,985 crore, Mr. Sarkar said.

The ONOS initiative is also expected to include concessions on fees that authors have to pay to have their work published in open access journals.