One Nation One Subscription comes at a huge cost

You could be forgiven for thinking that the much bandied about “One Nation One Subscription” is another of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rallying calls, a catchy political slogan, like “One Nation One Election”. It is actually an initiative, ONOS for short, to widen access to the latest scientific knowledge (and hopefully spur innovation here) by signing a single deal with 30 of the biggest names in the global scientific publishing industry. It will provide access to scholarly research articles in 13,000 journals published by the industry to an estimated 18 million students and researchers in government universities and public laboratories. For this access India has agreed to pay a single subscription fee of US $715 million, which works out to slightly over Rs 6,000 crore, for a three-year period starting January 1, 2025. Is it “a game changer”, as Modi describes it?

The price, hammered out in protracted negotiations—the initial number of 70 publishers was whittled down to 30—over almost three years, is, according to the official view, a great bargain because the single national purchase has brought down the cost to the country. Earlier individual institutions or consortia of libraries negotiated the price for the journals they wanted. Now, through a common ONOS digital platform, students, faculty and researchers across 6,300 government universities, colleges, research organisations and Institutions of National Importance will be able to access the costly journals. A decided benefit of ONOS is that it would eliminate duplication and waste of resources through overlapping subscriptions. But how costly was this method? There many figures floating around of how much India was earlier paying the publishers, an oligopoly often described as predatory. One figure doing the rounds is Rs 1,500 crore per year, an estimate made in 2019 when India’s three major science academies prepared a report on the need to reduce expenditure on scientific journal subscriptions by universities and research institutions. The expert panel set up by the academies recommended a single, national subscription to rationalise the outflow of Rs 1,500 crore, a figure that some library consortia thought was an exaggerated estimate of what was actually spent, since the budgets of university and research institution have been declining.

What is inexplicable is the official hoopla over the big, single deal. The fact is that in rich nations, especially in the US, an increasing number of universities have refused to renew their subscriptions with the top commercial publishers, not just because of the cost but because these deals hindered the goal of ensuring open access to their research. The rejections have hit the whole caboodle from Wiley, Elsevier, American Institute of Physics (AIP), American Society of Civil Engineers and Cambridge University Press to the Institute of Physics (IOP), Springer Nature, American Chemical Society, SAGE, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis. These are the very names that the Department of Science and Technology is taking pride in bringing into the ONOS fold. The trend started in the early 2000s, when Harvard University cancelled its bundled agreement with Elsevier and reduced its outlay for the publisher’s titles. That was in 2004. Since then, at least 90 universities and libraries in the US, Canada and Europe have cancelled their subscriptions—and not all of them because of financial constraints.

Open access is the key concern. Many of them did not approve of Big Publishing’s attempt to keep research behind walls to boost their ever escalating profits. Incidentally, the profit margins in the scientific publishing industry are extraordinarily high. A strong indictment of the publishing corporations came in 2019 when the University of California (UC), US, decided not to renew its subscription with Elsevier. The university revealed that despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals. “In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC’s 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier,” read a statement from the university. A year later, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) followed suit, because Elsevier did not meet its framework for publisher contracts, “which aims to ensure that scholarly research outputs are openly and equitably available to the broadest possible audience”.

Did India’s expert committee that pushed for a single subscription study these developments and look at similar alternatives that researchers and institutions could pursue? Have enough safeguards been put into place to ensure open access? For a country that claims that the primary objectives of its Science, Technology and Innovation Policy or STIP 2020 is to “create a forward-looking Open Science Framework to provide access to knowledge, information, and resources to everyone in the country on an equal partnership basis”, not much has been done in this regard. Librarians and scientists say the government should have promoted adoption of the various models of open access—which are green, gold and diamond—that ensure public access. Another question that arises is why the government has not done enough. True, the panel did recommend that preprints—preliminary research papers before peer-review—be archived along with the “accepted” versions of papers in repositories at taxpayer cost. Shelling out a huge amount to foreign publishing corporations is hardly the best way to go about it.

The lack of transparency over the negotiations means we know very little of the fine print of this subscription agreement, and the devil is always in the details. Since many publishers are moving to a model where researchers pay to ensure free access online to their research papers—this is the gold model—the subscription policy means there will be double payment to these corporations. There is no clarity on how the government proposes to deal with this complication. A critical aspect of the gold model is the article processing charge (APC) or the publication fee which can be prohibitive for the authors. Reports indicate that India is yet to start negotiations with publishers on APC. There are too many loose ends here for ONOS to become a game changer.

This was first published in the 16-31 December, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth