Challenges and Opportunities of Scholarly Publishing Landscape: A Case Study From India

Scholarly communication of scientific and technological research has had a complex global journey, specifically in India. Post 1947, with the rise of universities, the development of the research ecosystem, and science and technology research in India has progressed to a space that makes it today the no. 4 country in terms of production in research publications (The Times of India 2023) just below the most developed countries. However, the scholarly publication infrastructure has not kept pace with publishing output from universities across the country; while the complex colonial and post-colonial reasons are beyond the scope of this study, the study will focus on the unique challenges of the scholarly publishing landscape in India.

In recent decades, academic publishing has shifted at high speed from conventional print media to electronic forms, and scholarly publishing is now becoming almost entirely in digital formats with various models of subscriptions. APC and digital access have also undergone many changes. In developing nations, such as India, escalating subscription fees have rendered it progressively challenging for institutions of learning to receive fundamental scholarship materials. Only a few major institutions can afford such subscriptions, while other higher education institutions suffer significantly (Kadam 2025).

Given this background, India has launched the ‘One Nation One Subscription’ (ONOS) initiative. This is an ambitious policy whose objective is to make academic knowledge accessible without barriers for every Indian citizen using a centralized national approach through public institutions (Aspesi and Brand 2020; Suber 2012).

Conventional subscription-based models can enable paywalls, narrowing access to knowledge, while open-access models transform discipline by eliminating worldwide barriers to knowledge and making scientific information available for all. A study by Koley and Lala (Koley and Lala 2024) identifies subscription-based journals still possess salient relevance, highlighting requirements for a balance shift toward open-access models. International cooperation, such as Ibero-America, can facilitate better mechanisms for dealing with predatory publishing and enhancing quality scholarship (Wiley Newsroom 2025). Such partnerships can promote an ideal of a diamond open-access approach with equitable quality scholarship. Therefore, although India's ONOS policy is a key short-term objective, constant investigation and adjustment become fundamental for meeting future challenges related to scholarly communication and accessibility in a sustainable manner.

With the ONOS program launched on 1st January 2025 (Kamerlin et al. 2021; The Times of India 2023), India is embarking on a transformative journey to democratize access to knowledge for all its citizens. The plan is simple but revolutionary: to make the efforts of government ministries, universities, and research institutions, library consortia create a unified system of access. It empowers academics inspire researchers to innovate and students to dream big (Suber 2012). India's higher education system is a vast and dynamic system, the second largest in the world, with more than 58,000 institutions (British Council 2024). In 2022, AISHE1¹ report (The Company of Biologists 2024) reveals that the country is home to 1113 universities, 43,796 colleges, and 11,296 standalone institutions, with a total enrollment in higher education of 43.3 million students (India Science, Technology and Innovation 2024; Kamerlin et al. 2021). The ONOS scheme has allocated 6000 crore (The Company of Biologists 2024) (approximately $723 million) for 2025 to 2027. The implementation will occur in three phases: phase one focuses on merging all library consortiums and adding more institutions; phase two incorporates private academic institutions; and phase three will be established public libraries as access points. The first phase of the initiative aims to give access to 18 million students from public universities and more than 6300 government-managed higher education institutions located in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, ensuring equitable access to knowledge (Press Information Bureau, Government of India 2024). It promises free access to 13,137 STEMM², management, social sciences and humanities journals from 31 renowned publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and so on, including CSIR–NIScPR³ journals (Indian open access journals), revolutionizing access to global knowledge. Significantly, ONOS also situates India as a Global South leader charting its own path in the international scholarly communication landscape, diverging from Eurocentric models like cOAlition S (Science.org 2024). It can potentially to influence other developing countries by offering a large-scale, state-negotiated model of scholarly access (Kadam 2025).

Examining the effective impact of ONOS and the challenges associated with its implementation requires the broader context of scholarly publishing in India and beyond. Digital publishing has moved to a fundamental transformation, a ‘disruptive innovation’ (Eve and Gray 2020) that breaks as radically from its past as Gutenberg's printing press. Scholarly communication has adopted digital technologies with excellent efficiencies across disciplines. The metaphor of ‘page of codex’ to ‘scrolling’ (Eve and Gray 2020) has radically changed the publishing industry. This revolution paved the way for the OA movement, which presented two key challenges: (i) structural infrastructure (journal infrastructure including open access repository), and (ii) financial challenges. While access to content is essential, ONOS must also evolve to support AI-driven discovery tools and semantic search systems to ensure knowledge is not only available but meaningfully discoverable in an information-rich environment (Kadam 2025). The OA movement traces its origins to the 1990s (Press Information Bureau, Government of India 2024), a period marked by the proliferation of digital publishing technologies and escalating subscription costs of scholarly journals. Recognizing the inequity in access to scientific literature, early OA advocates, including organizations like SPARC⁵ laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift. Scholarly communication took a pivotal turn in 2002 with the introduction of ‘triple-Bs’—the Bethesda, Budapest, and Berlin statements (Press Information Bureau, Government of India 2024). The rise of open-access publishing and e-journals has increased publishers exploiting the OA model. Central to our discussion is the interplay between the foundational milestones of the OA movement and cOAlition S's transformative impact and slow progress in transitioning to Diamond OA models. The ONOS scheme must consider how integrated analytics and global journal rankings may unintentionally steer institutional priorities away from locally relevant or interdisciplinary research (Aspesi and Brand 2020).

cOAlition S is an initiative that has significantly influenced global conversations about Plan S principles to achieve full open access to publicly funded research outputs. cOAlition S, launched in 2018, includes the European Commission, 17 national funders, and 7 charitable foundations, covering only a small share of global research (Madhan 2024). According to the 2024 Nature Index, China, US, and Germany lead in research output, with India ranked ninth. However, China, Germany and India are not part of cOAlition S, and three non-profit organizations represent the US. Other countries are not interested in part of this initiative because cOAlition S has a limited choice of publication venues (Madhan 2024).

Economically, scholarly publishing is big business, especially within the natural sciences, where only a few large commercial publishers now dominate. From an economic point of view, cOAlition S has been crucial in steering international debates about equitable access to publicly funded research (cOAlition S 2019; Sultan and Rafiq 2021). cOAlition S announced that it would cease financial support for Transformative Arrangements (such as Transformative Agreements and Transformative Journals) from 2025, thereby hindering efforts in establishing sustainable open access (OA) models, ultimately deterring countries from participating in this initiative.

Countries have individually developed diverse structural and financial models to balance open access demands with their researchers' needs and the growth of sustainable publishing infrastructure. For example, US science funding agencies recently rolled out policies on free access to journals at the end of 2025, initiated by the OSTP⁶ (Brainard 2024). Another example is Germany's Project DEAL ‘publish and read fee’ (PAR Fee) model (MPDL Services gGmbH 2024), a transformative open-access publishing agreement. India is not far from this; India's Principal Scientific Adviser took a major step to give everyone access to knowledge through ONOS, which was first proposed in 2020. Before this, in 2019, Vijay Raghavan told The Wire, ‘We are not joining Plan S. Plan S is itself evolving, and the terms that we are trying to push is something that we will ask Plan S to push for in their format’ (Mukunth 2019). India has recognized the challenges of how the Eurocentric nature of scholarly publishing shapes the market and restricts academic freedom (Springer Nature 2025b). The ONOS model is the short-term model that promotes access to knowledge production and its boundaries.

India's growing reliance on Western publishers makes us question why India has not developed its journal and digital infrastructure. Commercial publishers from the west are being welcomed into Indian research institutions to guide researchers on publishing in their journals, often requiring payment of APCs and surrendering copyright. This approach raises concerns about over-reliance on external entities, the loss of ownership over taxpayer-funded intellectual work. It is puzzling that a nation grappling with high inequality chooses to allocate scarce resources to pay APCs for research publication. While initiatives like ONOS offer a promising and comprehensive model, it remains an open question whether such efforts can be scaled sustainably without long-term institutional and policy support.

Suman Das: conceptualization, writing – original draft, software, formal analysis, methodology. Nirmala Menon: conceptualization, writing – reviewing and editing, methodology.

The authors have nothing to report.

The authors have nothing to report.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.