KarunaNews Story

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: recently, 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. 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.