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A number of activities are underway in the global scholarly publishing policy space. Within a span of 18 months, from late 2024 to mid-2026: the United States has placed the economics of academic publishing under Congressional scrutiny, Australia has mandated immediate open access to all publicly funded peer reviewed research, Europe has launched a publicly owned publishing platform called Open Research Europe, and China has begun building an integrated domestic scholarly publishing ecosystem explicitly designed to redirect research prestige and publishing revenue away from foreign publishers.
India, meanwhile, committed ₹6,000 crore over three years to pay those same publishers for access to knowledge — a considerable part of which was generated by its own researchers.
The contrast is not incidental. It reflects an essential divergence in how the world’s major research-producing nations are thinking about knowledge sovereignty. And it raises a question India’s science policy community has not yet answered with sufficient seriousness: what comes after ‘One Nation One Subscription’ — and are we really building towards it?
Building sovereignty
As Ashutosh Ghildiyal, Ning Zhang, Gareth Dyke, and Yanli Wang wrote in The Scholarly Kitchen, China’s strategy is elaborate. In its vision, the country is no longer simply a major contributor to global research output but is increasingly a central actor shaping the future of scholarly publishing.
To that end, China is changing research evaluation practices by discouraging metrics like the ‘impact factor’, investing in journal infrastructure, instituting a credible peer-review system, and increasing international visibility. (A journal’s impact factor is meant to show its impact on the field based on how much the papers it publishes are cited.) As a result, China wishes to position its domestic journals to compete globally.
The country has also made policy choices to encourage Chinese researchers to publish in domestic journals. They include evaluating research by its quality rather than by the journal it appeared in and paying attention to whether research is addressing national needs.
As part of this upgrade, the second phase of its Journal Excellence Action Plan, China is building an integrated scholarly publishing ecosystem in which funding, publication venues, evaluation systems, editorial networks, and policy incentives reinforce one another. As a result, it plans to create more than 400 world-class Chinese-owned journals, capture publishing revenues currently flowing to foreign publishers, and establish Chinese platforms as credible alternatives to the likes of Nature, Science, and Cell.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has more than 50,000 researchers across 100 institutes, also announced in early 2026 that it would stop paying article processing charges (APCs) for more than 30 high-cost international journals, explicitly including Nature Communications, Science Advances, and Cell Reports. The APC is a fee levied by journals to publish open-access papers; the fee is supposed to ‘compensate’ the revenue the journal will lose since others won’t have to buy the paper to read it. Each of these three journals charges over $5,000 per paper in APCs.
The message to publishers is clear: China will not subsidise the prestige economy of foreign publishers while building its own. The message to its researchers is equally clear: publishing in domestic journals will count for career progression and should not be treated as a second-class choice.
Checking expenses
The situation in the U.S. is more volatile and ideologically complex. A congressional hearing in April brought together lawmakers, researchers, and publishing industry representatives to examine the rise of paper mills and the costs of open-access publishing. The questions included whether the U.S. government is getting enough value for the billions it spends annually on journal subscriptions and APCs, and whether the current system serves the public interest.
“The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s budget request also says it will no longer use federal funding to pay for journal subscriptions or publication fees,” Physics Today reported. The NIST administrative HQ in Gaithersburg is shown here.
| Photo Credit:
NIST
The Office of Management and Budget proposed curtailing the subscription and journal publication costs, including APCs and other fees, and suggested disallowing them under federal awards. While policy has yet to be changed, the fact remains that the U.S. government is viewing journal publishers’ profits — and whose margins rival those of Big Tech — as a fiscal and transparency concern rather than solely as an open-access one.
This scrutiny offers both a policy opportunity and a cautionary tale for India. If the world’s two most powerful research-funders are reconsidering what they are paying for scholarly publishing, the negotiating environment that has kept publisher pricing confidential and non-negotiable is beginning to shift.
A clear new mandate
As it happens, Australia has moved with the least ambiguity of any major research system. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Open Access Policy, especially the v2026.1 update, takes effect on July 1, 2026, and requires journal articles and conference papers arising from ARC-funded research to be made openly accessible immediately upon publication, with no exceptions.
Crucially, the compliance burden falls on the organisations administering the grants — i.e. the universities and research institutions. The policy is aligned with large international funding bodies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust in the U.K. This matters because it means that when Australian researchers co-author with U.S. or U.K. colleagues, a single rights-retention approach serves all funder requirements simultaneously, reducing the transaction costs that have previously allowed publishers to exploit policy fragmentation across borders.
The ARC first introduced its policy in 2013, and the 2026 version represents the culmination of a decade-long trajectory from encouragement to hard mandate. It is also careful to mention green open access: once ready, a copy of the paper will be archived in an openly accessible repository. Aside from guaranteeing access, doing so will also allow the paper’s authors to retain the rights to it.
Publicly owned infrastructure
Europe’s approach is also ambitious and relevant to what India should be building towards. Instead of negotiating with existing publishers — including the ‘One Nation One Subscription’ scheme — or requiring researchers to publish their papers to be open access by paying an APC, the European Commission has concluded that the long-term solution is to create publicly owned publishing infrastructure that removes commercial publishers from the equation entirely.
Open Research Europe, which is the European Commission’s own publishing platform, is entering a new phase backed by a nearly €17 million budget for 2026-2031, co-funded by the European Commission by up to €10 million. The operating platform will be provided by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN). The platform is expected to begin operating as a collectively supported publishing service later this year. Once it is live, researchers from 11 participating national research systems — Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland — will be able to publish without paying.
This is open access but it is also the European research ecosystem taking back the publishing function that it had outsourced to commercial publishers over the last four decades.
The typical publishing workflow for an academic journal (as in 2020).
| Photo Credit:
Thomas Shafee (CC BY)
In parallel with Open Research Europe, Europe has operationalised the diamond open access model at scale. In this paradigm, a journal publishes open access papers without levying an APC; the costs are instead borne by the funders and the research institutions. With some support from the French National Research Agency, the European Diamond Capacity Hub needs to strengthen diamond open-access publishing infrastructure across Europe.
What ONOS does and does not do
India’s ‘One Nation One Subscription’ (ONOS) scheme, which has been operational since January 2025, was a genuine step forward in addressing a real and urgent problem. ONOS provides access to more than 13,000 journals from 30 publishers to approximately 6,300 government, academic, and research institutions at a total committed budget of ₹6,000 crore over three years (2025-2027). For researchers at tier-2 and tier-3 institutions who have never had access to the journals their fields require, this is transformative.
However, while ONOS solves the reading problem, it does not address the publishing problem. ONOS comes with an APC fund of ₹150 crore per year, replenished from what India allocates for research, which is already dwindling. Further, with more than half of research worldwide already being freely accessible, a significant proportion of what ONOS is paying to access is already available at zero cost. That is, India is partly paying ₹6,000 crore to access content that is already free and partly to subsidise a subscription model whose foundations are being dismantled everywhere else in the world.
The structural problem runs deeper. ONOS is opaque on publisher pricing, protection against future cost inflation, investment in Indian journals, and a post-2027 strategy. Every future negotiation is to be conducted from a position of demonstrated dependence, with journal publishers aware that India has no credible alternative — and that the political cost of losing ONOS access is too high for any government to bear.
In this sense, ONOS should be seen as a bridge, not a destination.
India’s stated ambition to become more self-sufficient is inconsistent with indefinitely subsidising a small group of foreign commercial publishers to access knowledge produced by Indian researchers with Indian public funds. A better strategy would be to combine immediate green open-access mandates for publicly funded research, rights retention policies for researchers, more investments in Indian journals and publishing platforms, transparent APC expenses, and participating in international efforts to develop community-governed publishing infrastructure.
Window is now
The geopolitics of scholarly publishing has shifted more in the last 18 months than in the last two decades. China is building sovereignty. The U.S. is scrutinising costs. Australia is prioritising immediate access. Europe is building public infrastructure. Africa is also moving forward with local infrastructure, and Latin America was and still is the leader in self-reliant, community-governed local publishing infrastructure.
The direction of change across every major research system is the same: away from commercial dependencies and towards public ownership, public access, and public benefits.
In this context, India has both an opportunity and a time constraint. ONOS has established that the Government of India recognises knowledge access as a public good worth funding at scale. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation also has a mandate to reform the conditions in which Indian science reports its findings. Thus, India has the political legitimacy to push back against publishers’ pricing in ways that would have seemed radical five years ago.
Moumita Koley is a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
