India was the third largest producer of research papers globally last year—yet thousands of Indian students and researchers cannot read many of them because their institutions can’t afford subscriptions to the journals in which many appear. But that is about to change: Last week, the Indian government announced a giant deal with multiple publishers that will allow an estimated 18 million students, faculty, and researchers free access to nearly 13,000 journals, including some top-tier ones, through a single portal.
Under the One Nation One Subscription scheme, which kicks in on 1 January 2025, India will pay a total of about $715 million over 3 years to 30 global publishers, including some of the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. (AAAS, the publisher of Science, is also part of the deal.) The average annual amount exceeds what government-funded institutions have been paying for separate subscriptions—about $200 million in all during 2018, by one estimate. But because it covers more journals and readers, “India got a good deal,” says Devika Madalli, director of the Information and Library Network Centre, the coordinating agency for the initiative.
The product of 2 years of negotiations between India and the publishers, the deal is the world’s largest of its kind, surpassing others in Germany and the United Kingdom; those were negotiated with only a single publisher at a time and cover far fewer institutions.
India’s is expected to encompass some 6300 government-funded institutions, which produce almost half the country’s research papers. Currently, only about 2300 of these institutions have subscriptions to 8000 journals. Under the new arrangement, “universities that aren’t so well funded, and can’t afford many journals, will gain,” said Aniket Sule of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. Specialist institutes that only subscribe to journals relevant to their field will benefit from accessing work outside their silos, he added. Colleges that want to subscribe to journals not included under this initiative can use their own funds to do so.
Some part of the $715 million will cover the fees some journals charge to publish papers open access, making them immediately free to read by anyone worldwide when published, Madalli told Science. Details of that component have not been worked out yet, but the amount will be calculated based on the country’s current spending on these fees, known as article-processing charges (APCs), which are paid by authors or their institutions, Madalli says.
Rahul Siddharthan of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, who chaired a group on open science, is pleased the agreement will reportedly cover APCs. At a global average of about $2000 per article, they are unaffordable for many scholars in India, he says.
Some scholars criticized the deal for continuing to spend public money on journal subscriptions at a time when many countries have been shifting to other business models that provide articles open access, including some that do not charge author fees. “At best, this is a short-term measure” as those alternatives expand, says Sridhar Gutam, a scientist at the ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research and founder of Open Access India, which advocates for them. Already, an estimated 50% of all new articles worldwide appear open access. That growing prevalence makes the price tag for India’s deal too high, says Muthu Madhan, director of the Global Library at O.P. Jindal Global University, adding that the money would be better spent on research stipends and laboratories.
Gutam says India should embrace the “diamond open-access” business model, in which the government or other funders cover costs and authors, and scholars and their institutions do not pay to publish or read articles. Although government institutions—including his own—have tried to promote free-to-access repositories for scientific papers, comparatively few researchers use them. Gutam says many prefer to boost their chances for career advancement by publishing in prestigious journals from European and U.S. publishers, which some reformers have criticized as unreliable and overly restrictive gatekeepers of quality papers. “The current plan fills a short-term goal,” he says, “but the larger system needs reform.” (Science.org)
