One Nation One Subscription Comes at a Huge Cost
Latha Jishnu | 16 December 2024 | Down To Earth
You could be forgiven for thinking that the much bandied about “One Nation One Subscription” is another of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rallying calls, a catchy political slogan, like “One Nation One Election”. It is actually an initiative, ONOS for short, to widen access to the latest scientific knowledge (and hopefully spur innovation here) by signing a single deal with 30 of the biggest names in the global scientific publishing industry. It will provide access to scholarly research articles in 13,000 journals published by the industry to an estimated 18 million students and researchers in government universities and public laboratories. For this access India has agreed to pay a single subscription fee of US $715 million, which works out to slightly over Rs 6,000 crore, for a three-year period starting January 1, 2025. Is it “a game changer”, as Modi describes it?…