India never signed cOAlition S’s Plan S open access mandate. Instead of committing its funders to author-pays gold open access, India built two parallel instruments: the UGC-CARE journal-quality framework (2018) and the centrally negotiated One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme (live since January 2025) — a divergence that leaves authors publishing across India and Plan S jurisdictions navigating two incompatible compliance regimes.
Plan S is a funder mandate, launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S, requiring that research funded by its signatory agencies be made immediately open access on publication, either via a compliant open access journal/platform or a no-embargo repository deposit. India’s Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research were courted as potential signatories in 2019 — and none joined.
Table of Contents
- What is Plan S, and who are cOAlition S’s funders?
- Why did India decline to sign Plan S?
- India’s alternative: UGC-CARE and One Nation One Subscription
- What the fragmentation means for the Global South
- Implications for authors publishing across jurisdictions
- Common questions about India and Plan S
What is Plan S, and who are cOAlition S’s funders?
Plan S requires grantees of its backing funders to publish immediately open access, with no embargo, either through a compliant journal or platform or via deposit in an open repository. The original compliance deadline of 1 January 2020 was pushed back to 1 January 2021 after publisher and researcher pushback.
cOAlition S has grown from twelve founding European funders in 2018 to a network of 28 funders spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa and Australia. The European Commission is among them, and Horizon Europe grant conditions are aligned with Plan S principles. Notably absent: any major national research funder from India, China, or the United States federal system — a gap that limits Plan S’s claim to be a global standard rather than a European-anchored one.
Researchers checking which funders carry a formal open access mandate — inside or outside cOAlition S — typically cross-reference the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP), maintained by the University of Southampton, which logs institutional and funder policies worldwide, including those that predate or sit outside Plan S entirely.
Why did India decline to sign Plan S?
India’s then Principal Scientific Adviser, K. VijayRaghavan, confirmed in October 2019 that India would not join cOAlition S, reversing earlier signals of interest. The decision rested on three concerns documented in Indian open access scholarship, notably Madhan et al.’s 2019 analysis “Open access developments in India and why India skipped Plan S”:
- Author-pays cost exposure. Plan S’s default gold-OA route relies on APCs, which policymakers judged would shift cost onto a far larger, more resource-constrained author base than in signatory countries.
- Publisher concentration risk. Flipping subscription journals to APC-funded gold OA was seen as likely to entrench, not weaken, large commercial publishers’ pricing power — the opposite of Plan S’s stated goal.
- Domestic infrastructure preference. India already had a head start on public open repositories and chose to strengthen those alongside new national licensing, rather than import a mandate built for a different publishing economy.
This was a deliberate policy choice, not neglect — India kept engaging with open access on its own terms, culminating years later in convening a major international summit on its own soil.
India’s alternative: UGC-CARE and One Nation One Subscription
In place of a Plan S-style mandate, India built two separate instruments that address different problems in the same publishing ecosystem — one aimed at journal quality, the other at nationwide access.
UGC-CARE: a quality gate, not an access mandate
The University Grants Commission’s Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (UGC-CARE) was established in 2018 to maintain a “Reference List of Quality Journals,” curbing predatory publishing and anchoring promotion and funding decisions to vetted venues. It was never an open access policy — it never required immediate OA. The UGC itself discontinued the static list, confirming the decision at its 584th Commission meeting on 3 October 2024 and issuing a public notice in July 2025, replacing it with a 36-parameter, 8-criteria evaluation framework.
One Nation One Subscription: access without an APC mandate
ONOS takes the opposite approach to Plan S: instead of mandating author-side gold OA, the Government of India centrally negotiates nationwide “read” licences. The Union Cabinet approved ONOS as a Central Sector Scheme on 25 November 2024, with a ₹6,000 crore budget for 2025–2027, going live on 1 January 2025 under INFLIBNET Centre (UGC). It now covers more than 13,000 journals from 30 publishers — including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley — for roughly 6,400 institutions and 1.8 crore users, plus a dedicated ₹150 crore-per-year APC support fund.
| Framework | Core model | Scope | Key dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan S / cOAlition S | Funder mandate: immediate gold OA (often APC-funded) or no-embargo repository deposit | 28 funders, mostly Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, Australia | Launched Sept 2018; compliance from Jan 2021 |
| UGC-CARE list | Curated journal-quality reference list for career and funding recognition | All UGC-recognised Indian higher education institutions | Established 2018; discontinued Oct 2024 / July 2025 |
| One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) | Centrally negotiated national read licences plus a separate APC fund | ~6,400 institutions, ~1.8 crore users, 13,000+ journals, 30 publishers | Approved Nov 2024; live from Jan 2025 |
What the fragmentation means for the Global South
India’s path is not isolation from the open access movement — it is parallel infrastructure-building. The clearest evidence came in February 2026, when the 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access was held in Bengaluru, substantially convened by Indian research institutions and science academies. The summit produced the Bengaluru Roadmap and Action Plan on Diamond Open Access, spanning six priority areas: embedding Diamond OA in national policy, redirecting publishing spend toward community-governed infrastructure, reforming research evaluation, strengthening technical standards, recognising publishing labour, and protecting linguistic diversity.
That summit built on earlier editions in Toluca, Mexico (2023) and Cape Town, South Africa (2024) — evidence the Global South is not waiting on cOAlition S’s APC-funded model but coordinating its own no-fee, non-commercial “Diamond” open access track, independent of European funder mandates.
Implications for authors publishing across jurisdictions
For authors with joint funding — a Horizon Europe grant alongside an Indian institutional affiliation, for example — the two regimes do not cancel out; they stack. A Plan S-funded co-author must still satisfy the funder’s immediate-OA and licensing requirements regardless of what ONOS or UGC-CARE recognise domestically in India.
- Check the funder mandate first: ROARMAP and the funder’s policy page determine Plan S compliance, independent of an Indian co-author’s institutional access.
- Do not assume ONOS access satisfies a Plan S deposit requirement — ONOS is a subscription-access and APC-support scheme, not a cOAlition S-recognised compliance pathway.
- UGC-CARE’s discontinuation means Indian institutions are moving toward locally defined, multi-parameter evaluation rather than a single reference list — expect institution-specific guidance going forward.
Research administrators managing multi-jurisdiction grants need to track funder-level mandates and institutional recognition lists separately, since neither India nor cOAlition S recognises the other’s framework as equivalent.
Common questions about India and Plan S
What is Plan S in open access?
Plan S is a funder mandate launched in 2018 by cOAlition S requiring that publications resulting from funded research be made immediately open access on publication, either through a compliant journal or platform, or via a no-embargo repository deposit, with compliance required from January 2021.
Is India a signatory to Plan S?
No. India has never signed Plan S. Its Principal Scientific Adviser confirmed in October 2019 that Indian funders would not join cOAlition S, citing concerns over author-pays cost exposure and publisher concentration, and India built domestic alternatives instead.
What did India build instead of joining Plan S?
India built UGC-CARE (2018, a journal-quality reference framework, since discontinued and replaced) and One Nation One Subscription (live from January 2025), a ₹6,000 crore centrally negotiated national licensing scheme covering over 13,000 journals.
Looking ahead: convergence or continued divergence?
Nothing on either side’s roadmap points to India joining cOAlition S. ONOS is a three-year scheme running through 2027, and its renewal terms — not Plan S accession — will determine India’s next move. The more consequential trend is the Diamond OA coordination behind the Bengaluru Roadmap: Global South research systems building a non-commercial, funder-independent open access track in parallel to cOAlition S, not inside it.
For institutions managing multi-funder compliance, CASRAI’s research administration resources track how funder mandates intersect with institutional reporting obligations, and the CASRAI Dictionary defines terms such as APC, Gold Open Access and Diamond Open Access referenced throughout funder policy documents.