India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) is a ₹6,000-crore central sector scheme that replaced much of the country’s fragmented journal purchasing with a single national licence. The Union Cabinet approved it on 25 November 2024. Access opened on 1 January 2025 through the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre in Gandhinagar, which acts as the implementing agency. The official enrolment list covers roughly 6,300 publicly funded higher education institutions and central government research and development laboratories; the government puts the user base at about 1.8 crore students, faculty members and researchers, with 30 publishers and more than 13,000 journal titles under the first-phase contract.
Those figures are large enough to make the scheme sound like an infrastructure project, and in procurement terms it is one. The quieter negotiation story is narrower: a national licence can settle who may read, for how long, at what price, and on which publisher’s platform. It does not, by itself, settle who pays to publish.
Before ONOS, Indian institutions bought access through a mixture of individual subscriptions, state-level arrangements and the e-ShodhSindhu consortium run by INFLIBNET. Well-funded institutes held thousands of current titles; many undergraduate and state-government colleges had little or no paywalled journal access. A single portal with IP-based authentication at the institutional level was meant to flatten that unevenness, and the early rollout did at least give every designated public college a legitimate path to the same literature.
The phrase ‘IP-based authentication’ is doing practical work here. A user’s institution must be on the beneficiary list, and the user must come through the campus network or a configured remote route. That means the subscription is a property of institutions, not of individuals. A postdoctoral researcher who moves from a central university to a private one mid-year does not take portal access along.
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What the 30-publisher deal resolves, and what it leaves open
The Ministry of Education has described the package as read access rather than a publishing deal, and that distinction carries more weight than any number in the cabinet note. Beneficiaries can read paywalled journals. The contract does not include article processing charges (APCs), the fees publishers charge authors for open access publication. Publishers have spent years bundling reading and APC coverage into read-and-publish arrangements in Europe and Australia. India’s first national deal stopped at reading, which keeps the initial bill predictable but leaves the author-side question unanswered.
That is not a minor omission. A researcher in a state university can now read the literature that was previously behind a paywall; the same researcher must still find APC money, often from a grant that makes no provision for it, before their own work becomes freely visible to other Indian institutions. The Ministry of Education and the Press Information Bureau describe the access terms without announcing a separate publication fund.
The UK’s standoff with Elsevier over a read-and-publish contract, which this site covered in UK vs Elsevier open access contract disputes, shows how much of the fight is about what gets bundled into the fee. India started from a different position. Its buying side is broader and the number of research-intensive institutions is much smaller, so the pricing discussion turns less on publishing volume and more on how many previously unserved readers a publisher can now count as customers.
| Element | ONOS national read licence | Read-and-publish agreement |
|---|---|---|
| Main service | Reading paywalled content across about 6,300 institutions | Reading plus APC coverage for selected authors |
| APCs | Not included | Usually bundled into the institutional fee |
| Cost basis | National population of eligible readers | Historical subscription spend plus publishing output |
| Institutional breadth | Very wide, including many undergraduate colleges | Typically narrower, concentrated at research-intensive universities |
Who gets in, and who remains outside
The beneficiary list covers central universities, state public universities, government colleges, Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology, and central government research and development laboratories. Private universities, private colleges, industry laboratories and a number of independent research bodies are not part of the first phase. That is a deliberate public-funding line, but it produces a familiar discontinuity: the same researcher can have access at a public campus and lose it immediately upon moving to a private employer.
Infrastructure is the second boundary. A national licence lowers the price of the subscription to zero at the point of use; it does not upgrade bandwidth, computer labs, library staffing or the real condition of many state college networks. At some state colleges, the limiting factor is not the licence but the shared machine room, the intermittent connection and the absence of anyone on campus whose job includes explaining how to search the portal. INFLIBNET Centre has run orientation sessions, but outreach at the scale of 6,300 institutions is an operational problem of its own.
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The negotiation stakes after 2025
The scheme runs for calendar years 2025 to 2027. Usage data from the first two years will become the evidentiary base for the next round of publisher negotiations, whether the government calls it renewal or re-procurement. If usage stays concentrated in a few hundred research-intensive institutions, publishers will push to tier the price by usage rather than hold a flat national figure. If use spreads across thousands of colleges, the government’s argument for one simple price becomes stronger.
Libraries now have a budget decision that the press releases do not mention. Institutions that dropped individual subscriptions have money that used to go to vendor invoices. Spent on connectivity, training and institutional repositories, those savings could turn a reading licence into a research system. Spent on nothing, they simply retire the line item, and the benefit stays mostly with the publisher that now sells to the centre instead of to the campus.
The question the press release avoided
ONOS improves reading access for a very large number of students and academics, and it rationalises a procurement mess. What it does not change is where Indian research gets published and who pays to make it public. Under a read-only national licence, the Indian state pays publishers to read the papers its own researchers produce. It does not pay for those papers to be open to everyone else. That arrangement is easier for publishers than a read-and-publish deal would have been. Whether it is the right arrangement for a scientific system trying to expand is a question that belongs on the table long before the next negotiation begins.