One Nation One Subscription as Managed National Knowledge Infrastructure: A Conceptual Framework and Governance Analysis
Abstract
Inaccessibility to peer-reviewed literature has long constrained Indian scholarship, especially given the rising cost of access, sectoral consortia, multiple points of procurement, and libraries’ inability to keep pace with these changes due to limited budgets. The One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, which was approved by the Union Cabinet in November 2024, stands as the Government of India’s answer to these structural weaknesses, with a cost amounting to INR 6,000 crore over 3 years and an annual amount of INR 150 crore for Article Processing Charge (APC) support from January 1, 2025. This study aims to step out of the descriptive narratives of ONOS and theorise ONOS as a managed national knowledge infrastructure. This study proposes a five-layered conceptual framework to connect policy inputs and outputs vis-à-vis access to public goods, governance and market mediation, institutional mediation, access outcomes, and system-level effects, with explicit feedback loops as a function of public goods, resource-based and diffusion of innovations theories, and the political economy of scholarly publishing. Data analysis was conducted through a qualitative and interpretive documentary approach by focusing on official policy instruments, government communications, and peer-reviewed literature obtained from Scopus during the period 2010-2025. This analysis suggests that there is substantial potential in ONOS for access equity, bargaining power, and national research capacity, while there are unanswered tensions with regard to disciplinary coverage, integration with open access, concentration of publishers, financial sustainability, institutional autonomy, and the digital divide. The framework shows that the legitimacy of a national license hinges on governance quality and is shaped by the role of Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals. Directions for policy refinement and an empirical research agenda based on the framework are also provided in this study.