From the journal Science, December 2:
Deal allows scholars to read paywalled articles for free and will cover open-access fees
India was the third largest producer of research papers globally last year—yet thousands of Indian students and researchers cannot read many of them because their institutions can’t afford subscriptions to the journals in which many appear. But that is about to change: Last week, the Indian government announced a giant deal with multiple publishers that will allow an estimated 18 million students, faculty, and researchers free access to nearly 13,000 journals, including some top-tier ones, through a single portal.
Under the One Nation One Subscription scheme, which kicks in on 1 January 2025, India will pay a total of about $715 million over 3 years to 30 global publishers, including some of the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. (AAAS, the publisher of Science, is also part of the deal.) The average annual amount exceeds what government-funded institutions have been paying for separate subscriptions—about $200 million in all during 2018, by one estimate. But because it covers more journals and readers, “India got a good deal,” says Devika Madalli, director of the Information and Library Network Centre, the coordinating agency for the initiative.
The product of 2 years of negotiations between India and the publishers, the deal is the world’s largest of its kind, surpassing others in Germany and the United Kingdom; those were negotiated with only a single publisher at a time and cover far fewer institutions.
India’s is expected to encompass some 6300 government-funded institutions, which produce almost half the country’s research papers. Currently, only about 2300 of these institutions have subscriptions to 8000 journals. Under the new arrangement, “universities that aren’t so well funded, and can’t afford many journals, will gain,” said Aniket Sule of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. Specialist institutes that only subscribe to journals relevant to their field will benefit from accessing work outside their silos, he added. Colleges that want to subscribe to journals not included under this initiative can use their own funds to do so....
....MUCH MORE