One nation one subscription scheme to benefit over 5000 state colleges and universities

New Delhi: Students and faculty from over 5,000 colleges and state universities will be benefited by the Union government’s one nation one subscription scheme that will provide them with access to 13,400 academic journals on science and social sciences, top officials said here on Tuesday.

With most of the state-level universities and colleges earmarking a small amount of money for journal subscriptions, the new Rs 6,000 crore programme, is expected to aid Indian researchers even in smaller cities to keep abreast of research findings and developments in the academic world.

“Most of the institutes have either limited budget or no budget for journal subscription. Because of the limited budget, they are stingy about subscriptions and access to journals are limited,” said Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology.

Currently, government institutions spend around Rs 1,000 crore on subscription every year, which would be increased by an additional Rs 850 crore annually for the next three years.

This will benefit nearly 1.8 crore students, an increase of over 200% from the current level of 57 lakh students who can access research journals.

In addition, Rs 150 crore has been set aside to support publication of important research papers in top journals because in a majority of the journals, the scientists have to bear the publication cost (article processing charges).

While central government funded research institutions, IITs and IISERs set aside enough budget to pay for the subscription of high-end journals, most of the state government run universities and colleges are short of money and can barely make such allocations.

The ONOS scheme, officials say, will benefit 6,380 beneficiary institutions including 4,864 colleges and 451 state universities. Approved by the Union Cabinet last month, the scheme will come into effect from January 1.

“After three years we would like to expand the scheme to include private institutions for which we will have to negotiate fresh with the publishers,” said Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Union government.

It took almost two years for Indian officials to bring 30 major global publishers like Elsevier, Springer-Nature and AAAS on-board.

“Taken together, these publishers account for 90-95% of important journals,” said V S Chauhan, a former UGC chairman who negotiated with the publishers.

In the existing system even in the IITs or IISc, students get access to the journals related to his/her area of research. But under the ONOS scheme, they will get access to all types of journals.

“If a student from Dharwad or Jadavpur University wants to know about the HIV vaccine, he/she will get the access,” said Chauhan.

The beneficiary institutes will have to register themselves with a UGC run library network portal (InfLibNet) following which legitimate students and faculty can access the journals through the portal.