The Indian government is proposing a "One Nation One Subscription" plan to make scholarly literature freely accessible nationwide by negotiating with major publishers for a single subscription. The proposal is being developed by the Principal Scientific Advisor's office and Department of Science and Technology. Success will depend on publisher willingness to negotiate and providing access cheaper than individual subscriptions. The plan favors open access through repositories ("green route") over full open access publishing ("gold route"), and some advocate using public funds to support gold open access for authors who can't afford publication fees.

1. The plan will make scholarly
literature accessible for free to
everyone in the country

2. The proposal
The government will negotiate with the world’s
leading scientific publishers to set up a nationwide
“One nation one subscription” journal-access plan
to make the scholarly literature available to
everyone for free which is currently limited to the
scholars of individual institutions subscribing to
it.

3. The proposal
The proposal is being developed by the Office of
the Principle Scientific Advisor to the Government
of India and the Department of Science and
Technology (DST). After being approved by the
Cabinet, it is likely to happen before the year’s end.

4. Success of plan will depend upon
 The willingness of publishers to negotiate
nationwide subscription.
 If the government could make it cheaper to give
access to the paywalled literature to all citizens.

5. The idea of plan emerged from
 The discussions about whether the country should join
a global open access initiative “Plan S”.
 According to Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, the
principal scientific adviser to the Government of
India, the government is not going to join Plan S.

6. What is Plan S ?
 Making full and immediate Open Access a reality.
 Plan S is an initiative for open access publishing
launched in 2018, with the aim of making full and
immediate access to the research publications a reality
by January 2020, It is supported by an international
consortium "cOAlition S”.

7. “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the
results from research funded by public or private grants
provided by national, regional and international research
councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open
Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made
immediately available through Open Access Repositories
without embargo.”
(https://www.coalition-s.org/about/)
The main Principle of Plan S

8. Plan S supports Gold route
 Gold route of Open Access in which the articles are freely and permanently
accessible to everyone, immediately after publication. These articles are
published under creative commons license and also available to reuse as long as
the authors are given proper acknowledgment as the copyrights to their work
are retained by authors. These articles can be published in two types of
journals.
 Fully open access journal, in which articles are freely available online to
everyone to read, usually after the author have paid Article Processing Charges.
 Hybrid journals, which are subscription-based journals and have the option
for Gold open access also if an author wish to publish in this category.
 DOAJ (Directory of open access journal) is an online directory of fully open
access journals (https://doaj.org/)

9. One Nation one Subscription favours
Green route
Green route of Open Access is all about the self-archiving
permission provided by the publishers to their authors so
that they can submit either the preprint or the postprint
version of their articles (but before publication in a
journal) in institutional repository making it freely
accessible to everyone. The copyrights are retained by the
publisher and the articles are freely accessible when the
embargo period is over ( though the embargo period will
not apply in all cases.) However, there is a limited
restriction on the reuse of work.

10. Researchers’ rights
 Here also the researchers has to wait for the embargo
period is over ranging from few months to years to
publish in repositories.
 “Rights-retention” policies that ensure researchers
keep the right to share their work in repositories
without breaching copyright agreements. A growing
number of institutions like Harvard University and
funding agencies behind Plan S have introduced
similar policies to keep the researchers rights safe.

11. Researchers’ rights
 But according to Rahul Siddharthan, a computational
biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in
Chennai, India, and a member of the advisory group,
“Existing repositories in India aren’t very popular, so
there’s a risk researchers won’t get behind green open
access unless policies are enforced”.

12. Ongoing debate on proposal
 One group of members in the advisory group wants
that government should pay Article Processing
Charges (APCs) in reputed Open access journals for
the researchers who are unable to bear these charges to
publish. “Paying to publish is not good for countries
like India, where resources for research are scarce,”
says Madhan Muthu, a librarian at Azim Premji
University in Bengaluru, who is part of the advisory
group.

13.  Rahul Siddharthan, a computational biologist at the
Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India,
and a member of the advisory group, also supports
establishing a central government fund to pay APCs for
reputable open-access journals.
 On the other side some members are against the use of
public funding for paying APCs. According to Muthu
and Arul Scaria, an intellectual-property researcher at
the National Law University in New Delhi and an
advisory group member, “public funding should not be
spent on publishing fees, in addition to subscription
costs”.

14.  Some members suggest that India should be the part of
global initiative to reform publishing system, but they are
not against the proposal of national subscription if at
reasonable rates.
 According to Dominique Babini, an open-access advocate
with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences in
Buenos Aires, “Funding agencies should invest more in
local and regional open-access journals that do not require
authors to pay to publish, which make up about 70% of
those listed in the international Directory of Open Access
Journals”

15. References
 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4
 https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2019/05/gold-and-
green-open-access-copyrights.html
 https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2019/09/open-access-
leading-to-goal-of.html
 https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-develops-rights-
retention-
strategy/#:~:text=The%20Rights%20Retention%20Strategy%20i
s,with%20a%20CC%20BY%20license