A One Nation One Subscription system that will allow central government-run higher education and research institutions to digitally access 70 top science and technology journals worldwide at lower expense is set to be delayed further.

ONOS was expected to start a year ago.

Currently, these institutions subscribe individually — or as consortiums — to journals of their choice, with many forced to cut down on subscriptions as the Centre looks to reduce its expenditure on education.

The proposed ONOS system seeks to provide all these institutions with digital access to journals from some 70 publishers at a government-negotiated price, thus reducing the total annual subscription costs while expanding access to institutions that could not afford certain journals.

However, a core group’s negotiations with publishers have remained incomplete till the end of 2023, the office of the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India has said in response to an RTI application filed by The Telegraph.

“A core committee has been constituted to oversee implementation of ONOS, along with planning and execution committee and a cost negotiation committee,” the January 12 reply from chief public information officer Vikas Srivastava said.

“The three committees for ONOS are undertaking the process as per their
terms of reference and negotiations with publishers are ongoing.”

In November 2022, higher education secretary Sanjay Murthy had written to the vice-chancellors of all central universities and directors of centrally funded technical institutions, informing them about the proposed ONOS policy.

Under this, the government is to sign “national licences” with most of the prominent STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) publishers and database producers across the world.

The letter requested the institutions to put on hold the renewal of their subscriptions to 70 publishers for the calendar year 2023 as long as the negotiations were under way.

The negotiations were expected to be over by December 2022. When that did not happen, the education ministry wrote to the institutions on January 20, 2023, asking them to continue their subscriptions for 2023.

In the RTI reply, the government said the institutions had been allowed to renew their subscriptions for 2024 too. “Consortia and institutions have been directed to proceed with renewal of subscriptions for the year 2024 only,” it said.

The list of the 70 publishers includes the American Association for Cancer
Research, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Mathematical Society, American Society of Microbiology, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Harvard Business Publishing and citation databases like the Web of Science and Scopus.

Institutions such as IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay now spend Rs 20 crore to Rs 25 crore a year on journal subscriptions.