One Nation, One Subscription Scheme
#GS-02 Education
For Prelims
One Nation, One Subscription Scheme
- One Nation, One Subscription is a proposed Open Access program by the Ministry of Education to improve access to scholarly works.
- It was proposed in India’s fifth draft of Science Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) 2020.
- Its aim is to give people in India access to scientific publications at a fixed and centrally negotiated cost that the government will pay publishers directly.
- The proposal seeks to buy 3000 to 4000 high-impact journals at an estimated budget of 2000 crore to 3000 crores.
- The Science, Technology and Innovation Observatory will be set up by the Ministry of Science and Technology to store the generated data.
- This data will be provided to public funded research through ‘FAIR’ (Fair, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
- The primary beneficiaries of ONOS are government institutes, government-funded academic institutes, and research and development institutions.
For Mains
The need of ONOS scheme:
- Duke University in an analysis in 2018, found that 59 of the 100 “most highly cited articles ever published are behind a paywall.”
- The “average cost of one of these articles for an unaffiliated researcher was found to be $33.41” equivalent to ₹2,285 in 2018.
- The people of India spend about Rs 1,500 crore in 2018 for journal subscriptions.
- This can be reduced substantially by the introduction of the scheme.
Alternatives to Subscription method:
- A growing alternative to the subscription method is the use of preprints.
- A preprint is the manuscript of a paper which has not yet been submitted to a journal.
- Preprint papers are not peer-reviewed in the conventional sense, but one can use some workarounds such as post-publication peer-review.
- Another alternative is the Gold OA where the journal charges an article processing charge (APC) from the author instead of the reader.
Source “The open access movement, to make academic papers accessible for all“
