The One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, which was approved by the Union Cabinet in November last year, came into effect on Wednesday (1st December).
ONOS is an initiative of the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) to the Government of India. The scheme is aimed at providing access to research e-journals to all individuals in the country.
The research articles from prominent publishers will cover the disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM), medicine, management, humanities and social sciences.
The One Nation One Subscription scheme is set to transform access to quality higher education in India by improving research opportunities and supporting national goals such as Viksit Bharat 2047 and NEP 2020.
— DD News (@DDNewslive) January 1, 2025
This initiative will empower students and researchers across the… pic.twitter.com/Kff59hjrDl
The unique scheme is set to benefit 6400 institutions spread across the country. These include central and state universities, colleges, and Research and Development institutions.
One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) will further benefit 1.8 crore students, researchers and faculty members. They will have access to more than 13000 journals from at least 30 publishers.
These publishers include the ACM digital library, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and others.
Timeline of the ‘One Nation One Subscription’ Scheme
- June 2022: The One Nation One Subscription initiative was approved by a Committee of Secretaries (CoS), led by the Cabinet Secretary
- August 2022: The Planning and Execution Committee (PEC) and the Cost Negotiation Committee (CNC) were formed.
- Dec 2022 – May 2024: Four rounds of negotiations were carried out with the publishers by the CNC, supervised by the Core Committee.
- Nov 2024: Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) memo was approved in a meeting chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Expenditure. The One Nation One Subscription note is approved by the Union cabinet.
- Jan 2025: The first phase of ONOS commences with nationwide access to research articles.
Key features and benefits of ONOS
The Modi government has allocated a capital of ₹6000 crores for the years 2025-2027 to implement the One Nation One Subscription initiative. It plans to promote research culture in Tier-2 and Tier-3 educational institutions.
ONOS has successfully consolidated institutional subscriptions and is providing central funding to researchers to pay for Article processing charges (APCs) for high-quality Open Access (OA) journals.
India has the potential to become a global leader in research and innovation. However, addressing the challenges and developing a collaborative research ecosystem is important.
ONOS supports national goals such as Viksit Bharat 2047 and National Education Policy 2020.
According to reports, India ranks 4th globally in terms of the number of scientific publications. The research output of the country has grown by about 54% between 2017 and 2022. India produced 1.3 million academic papers in those 5 years.
QS research director Ben Sowter however pointed out, “When it comes to impact of the research produced, in citation count, India falls behind, placing ninth in the world for citations generated between 2017 and 2022, indicating that effort and funding would be best directed towards high-quality, relevant research and ensuring this research is disseminated among the scholarly community.”
It must be noted that India’s R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is relatively low i.e around 0.7% in recent years.
This is significantly lower than many developed countries, such as the United States (which spends around 3% of its GDP on R&D) and South Korea (which spends about 4.5% of its GDP on Research and Development).
ONOS has the potential to be a game-changer by making access to research journals easy and affordable.