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Mahesh

13/12/24 15:29 PM IST

One Nation, One Subscription

In News
  • The Indian government announced the launch of its ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) plan to improve access to expensive research journals to the country’s public education and research institutes. 
Purpose of ONOS
  • When, say, scientists have concluded an experiment, they write up their methods and findings and publish it as a paper in a journal.
  • The journal collects, reviews, edits, publishes, and archives these papers as a service to other scholars and the people at large.
  • In exchange, journals levy a fee. Subscription-based journals charge readers a fee to read papers.
  • Some forms of open-access (OA) journals, called ‘gold’ OA, charge researchers to publish their paper. So institutes had subscribed to subscription journals through 10 or so consortia within the country.
  • ONOS will replace these consortia as a single window through which all government-funded institutes in the country will be able to access more than 13,000 published by 30 major international publishers. 
About ONOS
  •  Currently students and staff at all public institutes will be able to access all papers in the journals participating in ONOS irrespective of their discipline.
  • These include titles owned by major publishers like Springer-Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis.
  • The officials said centres of science, social science, humanities, and medical education will all be eligible and won’t have to pay any other fees.
  • Negotiations are underway to bring more journals into the fold. Those journals that aren’t part of ONOS can still sell access separately within the country.
  • ONOS would set aside Rs 150 crore a year, out of its Rs 2,000 crore per year budget, to pay for APCs.
  • The government has also negotiated APC discounts for researchers to publish in certain OA journals.
  • The officials said they are aware of transformative OA models around the world and that ONOS would encompass them as it progressed. As of now, they said, 60-70% of journals in ONOS are subscription-based.
  • They added that around half a decade ago, 75% of papers published by Indian scientists were in subscription-based journals, and that this figure has dropped to 65% today.
  • There were five repositories in the country — servers where researchers could deposit digital copies of their papers and where others could freely access them — but that scientists were using them to a less-than-ideal degree.
  • They said other efforts need to take place, such as “enhancement, promotion, and support of Indian journals” and changes in how institutes evaluate the work of researchers, especially to reduce dependence on journal titles and increase the focus on merit of each person’s work
Source- The Hindu

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