The Scientific Journals, available on the internet wants a subscription to access till now. For those who already have the subscription or planning to get access, good news for you all. The Indian Government is planning to make the journals freely available to everyone, without any subscription.
The government wants to negotiate with the world’s biggest scientific publishers to set up nationwide subscriptions, rather than many agreements with individual institutions that only scholars can use, say researchers consulting for the government.
To do so, the Indian Government is preparing to take a yearly subscription of all the important scientific journals available across the world in bulk amount. Obviously, for that, the government has to spend a few hundred crores on yearly basis.
The proposal is expected to be part of the government’s latest science, technology and innovation policy, which is being developed by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India and the Department of Science and Technology.
A draft is likely to be released in the coming weeks, and will need to be approved by the cabinet, which is likely to happen before the year’s end.
The move by the Indian Government is named “One Nation, One Subscription” and expected it could be the game-changer for the scientists and researcher community in India as they can save a huge amount and utilize that in other parts.
You need to know that there are over 3,000 to 4,000 scientific journals with a very high impact on the field.
The Ministry of Science and Technology, the publisher of the policy, further proposed to form a new Science, Technology, and Innovation Observatory which will be responsible as a repository for all data generated from the Indian researches.
The success of the proposal is also heavily dependent on publishers’ willingness to negotiate nationwide subscriptions.
But if successful, India would become the largest country to strike deals that give access to paywalled articles to all citizens — more than 1.3 billion people — say researchers. “If India could do it, and make it cheaper, many countries will be interested,” says Peter Suber, the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
