Thanks for this update and also opening the debate on this topic, Arun. It is really a sad state of affairs that India under ONOS is following this path. Fundamentally Article Processing Charges (APCs) is a flawed approach to Open Access. Why has India not only failed to reimagine and transform the traditional models of scholarly publishing, but instead adopting outdated ones such as *Big Deals* and allocating as much as INR 150 crores for paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) to commercial publishers? The notion of funding APCs is an outdated concept and practice. It is now widely recognized as unsustainable and regressive. Leading funding agencies and global initiatives have already moved away from this model: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has completely discontinued support for APCs; the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has significantly restrained such payments; and other major funders — including the Wellcome Trust, Plan S coalition members, and several European research councils — now restrict APC funding to fully Open Access (Gold OA) journals, explicitly excluding hybrid models. Across Europe and parts of North America, the policy direction has decisively shifted toward building infrastructures and community-based platforms that advance Diamond Open Access publishing — a model that removes both reader and author fees, ensuring equitable access and sustainability. In this context, the One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative could have been a bold and visionary step toward transforming the scholarly communication landscape. ONOS had the potential to position India as a global leader in rethinking access, affordability, and equity in scholarly publishing — by negotiating national-level access while simultaneously investing in indigenous open infrastructure and capacity for Diamond or community-driven publishing. Instead, it appears to replicate legacy subscription-based “Big Deal” arrangements, locking the country into the very systems that perpetuate dependence on commercial publishers and constrain the growth of open, self-sustaining knowledge ecosystems. We seem to continue to be in the "long shadow of Oldenburg" -- as our friend and OA sage Jean-Claude Guédon says. Rather than seizing the opportunity to pioneer a transformative model aligned with global shifts toward open and equitable science, India seems to have chosen the path of least resistance. The result is a missed opportunity — not just to catch up with international best practices, but to lead in shaping a more just, accessible, and future-ready scholarly publishing system. It is ironic that we seem to adopt APC, when others are moving away and rethinking the APC. Another troubling aspect of the One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative is its underlying assumption that providing access to all — across approximately 13,000 journals — is inherently fair and equitable. While this sounds appealing in principle, the critical question to ask is: *Do researchers and institutions in India really need access to all these journals?* Empirical studies of journal usage have consistently demonstrated the validity of Bradford’s Law, which shows that a relatively small core of journals accounts for the majority of actual use and citations, while the vast remainder sees minimal engagement. In this light, a blanket-access model may create the *illusion* of comprehensiveness and inclusivity, but in practice, it offers diminishing returns — a symbolic rather than a substantive gain. In this context the MIT model (subscribing to a small number of core journals) only appears to be a more sensible approach. More importantly, given that India’s expenditure on research and development remains well below global averages, allocating such a large sum to journal subscriptions raises serious concerns about policy priorities. Instead of investing heavily in access to content that may go largely unused, resources could be more wisely directed toward strengthening national research infrastructure, building open-access repositories, and supporting indigenous journals and publishing platforms that enhance visibility and impact of Indian research globally. These are my views on this issue of APC and ONOS. Shalini -- Dr. Shalini Urs Executive Director Emerita International School of Information Management University of Mysore Mysuru 570006 India On Wed, Oct 8, 2025 at 3:35 PM Subbiah Arunachalam < subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com> wrote:

Friends,

Here is a message posted in the NKRC WhatsApp group.

*"APC Support* Article Publishing Charges /Article Processing Charges (APC) is one of the components of the ONOS scheme. APCs for selected good quality open access journals will be centrally funded through the executing agency for ONOS. As decided by the Core Committee, ONOS, fully open access journals which are in top 1% as per any of the 3 indicators: CiteScore, SNIP or SJR published by SCOPUS are eligible for payment of APC from ONOS. The Open Access journals can be either from the 30 publishers providing access to their published journals in ONOS or other publishers."

***

What a waste of taxpayers' money meant for research. Even if one doesn't pay APC, many journals will publish the paper, only they will not make the paper IMMEDIATELY Open Access.That can be overcome by either placing the final author version in a global repository like Zenodo (CERN, Geneva) or HAL (CNRS, Paris) or placing the preprint in a preprint server such as arXiv/ bioRxiv/ ChemRxiv ..., even before the journal publishes the article. Also, one can always send a reprint (or a link to the reprint) to potential readers. The Rs 150 cr allocated annually for the next three years for APC can be better invested. For example, when Dr R Chidambaram was India's PSA, crystallographers proposed the setting up of at least one synchrotron. Dr Chidambaram was seriously considering setting up a synchrotron facility in Kolkata. The PAC's office almost cleared the proposal but subsequently it got derailed. [A synchrotron may not be a good example as it would cost a few thousand crore rupees (!), but one could think of many other ways of spending scarce resources to maximize benefit. Actually, I have several suggestions.

Several years ago my colleagues and I wrote a paper on the subject of paying for publication in a journal: *https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf <https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/112/04/0703.pdf> *.

As far back as 1988, James C Thompson, then Librarian of the University of California at Riverside, said, "*The commercial publishers are in the information conduit for historical and anachronistic reasons; there is no technical or economic reason why they must remain a part of it.*" He also said this about commercial publishers, "*These publishers are not really in the business of education; their business is making money*." In fact, in the same year Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born immigrant who minted money as a publisher in the UK boasted that he had "set up a perpetual financing machine." And in 2025, we are paying the commercial publishers huge sums of money not only towards subscription but also APC, and on top of it, we are surrendering copyright to original work performed by us! Doesn't it sound ridiculous?

With warm regards,

Subbiah Arunachalam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009

-- Dr. Shalini Urs Executive Director Emerita International School of Information Management University of Mysore Mysuru 570006 India