One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) and Open Access in Indian Agricultural Sciences: First-Year Outcomes for Access, Publishing Participation and Equity

Abstract

Purpose. India’s One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) scheme was approved by the Union Cabinet in November
2024 and began on 1 January 2025, with ₹6,000 crore set aside for 2025–2027. It replaces a patchwork of consortia
with one national licence covering more than 13,000 journals from about 30 publishers, and it pays article processing
charges (APCs) in a selected set of open access (OA) journals. We examined what the first year of the scheme meant
for access, OA publishing and research visibility in Indian agricultural sciences.
Design/methodology. We used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design. The data were ONOS usage and APC
records for 2025, a bibliometric analysis of ICAR and State Agricultural University (SAU) output for 2014–2024
drawn from Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions and OpenAlex, policy documents, and semi-structured interviews
with 45 researchers.
Findings. ONOS logged 11.3 crore (113 million) full-text downloads in 2025, and we estimate that agricultural and
biological sciences made up 18–22% of them. For agricultural institutions, the mean number of accessible journals
rose from 145 to 640 per institution (+341%), and mean monthly downloads rose by 215%. Of the 847 APC
applications approved across all disciplines, 31% came from agriculture. Seven agricultural and veterinary universities
were among the top 20 institutions by downloads, yet only four SAUs reached the top 100. International gold OA
articles drew 42% more citations than subscription articles, although this is an observational difference. Awareness of
APC support was low (27% had not heard of it). Multi-level approvals, society journals outside the licence and the
lack of agricultural databases (CAB Abstracts, AGRIS, FAOSTAT) held uptake back.
Conclusions and implications. In its first year ONOS widened access and eased the financial barrier to OA publishing.
Turning that access into active participation, and spreading the benefit evenly, will need subject-level usage analytics,
capacity building for SAUs and ICAR institutes, agricultural databases within the licence, links to FAIR data
repositories and monitoring over a longer period.
Originality. To our knowledge, this is the first baseline evaluation of ONOS that focuses on agricultural sciences.