The Indian government set the country’s research community aflutter when it announced the launch of a long-awaited plan to improve research access without announcing many of its salient details as well.
On November 25, the Ministry of Education published a press release saying the Union Cabinet had approved the plan — called ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) — at a total value of Rs 6,000 crore over three years. This release was so low on details as to be deeply polarising in the public sphere. In fact, its reception was only saved by its offer to bring access to prohibitively expensive research journals to students at poorly funded public colleges and universities. As speculation and debate swelled to fill the information gap, many experts unsurprisingly concluded the government shouldn’t have adopted ONOS in its current form. Their arguments were that it spent too much for too little gain, didn’t make room for open-access (OA) publishing, and had no arrangements to support domestic publishers of scholarly journals.
But on December 11, after criticism in the press, the government organised a press conference with officials of the Department of Science & Technology, Department of Higher Education, and the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor, and they revealed many more details about ONOS — often enough to allay suspicions that ONOS was an attempt by the government to take the easiest way out of a difficult problem. The officials even acknowledged the importance of supporting domestic publishers of scholarly journals (which are likely to be more mindful of local contexts of research), rooted for changes in the way professional scholars are evaluated for promotions (to focus less on journal names and more on the quality of work), and called ONOS part of a plan to “bring about OA transformation”.
However, after the press conference, the discussions in many OA communities (of which I am part) still indicated a significant degree of dissatisfaction. Chief among critics’ complaints was that the government’s decision to set aside Rs 150 crore per year for researchers publishing in ‘gold’ OA journals (where the publisher charges researchers to publish a paper rather than a reader to read it) was a waste. They were also unhappy about the authors of papers having to sign their copyrights over to the publishers and about the ‘lost opportunity’ to use the Rs 6,000 crore to make the ‘green’ OA publishing model (whereby researchers self-archive copies of their papers that can be availed freely) a national priority.
Between November 25 and December 11, an important source of disgruntlement with ONOS was the scheme amounted to paying research journals a sum so researchers in the country could access their output for free, without addressing any of the issues associated with the country’s research publishing and evaluation culture. This version of ONOS effectively maintained the status quo at a small discount. But the details revealed on December 11 refocused what criticism still remained to a different form — and one that Remya Haridasan, a scientist at the PSA’s office and one of the officials present at the press conference, inadvertently captured. She said, “ONOS is not a value judgment of the subscription-based model of knowledge dissemination but an adoption of the most practical India-specific solution until a sustainable OA model is achieved globally.”
In this paradigm, the government is simply responding to what the country’s scientists are asking for while keeping the door open to change whereas critics want the government to (help) change what it is that scientists want altogether. Put another way, the conflict now is between what a country can do in the face of a world-order that is still far from assuming a more ideal state versus what a country ought to do.
ONOS was necessitated by subscription-based journals charging higher and higher subscription fees, over time guzzling an increasingly non-trivial fraction of the research expenditures of various countries. Yet many scientists wished to keep publishing in these journals because the world’s oldest journals belong to this group and have carefully cultivated a great reputation for themselves. A paper published in their pages ensures it is read by all scientists in that field. In fact, because these journals have also been highly picky about what they publish and there is a global competition to be featured in their pages, to be published with them has itself become a mark of success. The journals’ publishers took advantage of their products’ desirability to increase subscription fees further.
To break the stranglehold of subscription-based journals, then, is also to break the research publishing culture wherein publishing in XYZ journals is the crowning aspiration. And this is what those who remain critical of ONOS are fighting for, and probably expected ONOS would do as well. Their contention is that rather than passively responding to whatever the country’s research community wants, the government should actively reshape what the community wants. For example, it could ensure a scientist’s career prospects in academia are not affected by the name of the journals in which they publish and only by the quality of their work. Doing so would nudge the community to favour green OA, or that’s the expectation, and move away from ‘prestige’ journals. This is the context in which the quality and resourcefulness of homegrown journals would matter as well.
In many ways, this line of inquiry constitutes the essential criticism of ONOS, the fundamental substrate upon which more material concerns — like how its allocation will change and how it will prevent paying for already freely-available papers — stand. If we go by the press conference alone, the government has staved this criticism off for now by moving its object into the future. The “OA transformation” is the ultimate outcome one must ensure the government’s plan for ONOS achieves, otherwise what the country is prepared to do will allow subscription-based journals to flourish at the expense of our academic publishing culture.