One Nation One Subscription as a National Knowledge Commons: a Critical Policy Analysis of India’s Journal Access Model

Abstract

India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, approved by the Union Cabinet on 25 November 2024 and operational from 1 January 2025, consolidates ten pre-existing library consortia into a single centrally negotiated national licence backed by an outlay of ₹6,000 crore for the calendar years 2025 to 2027. A substantial descriptive and SWOT-based literature on the scheme has already accumulated. This paper makes a different contribution: it applies the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, in the knowledge-commons formulation developed by Hess and Ostrom, to treat ONOS as the deliberate construction of a national knowledge commons, and analyses the scheme’s rules-in-use rather than merely its provisions. The method is documentary policy analysis conducted through a transparent selection protocol yielding a corpus of 74 documents, coded deductively against the framework and assessed for authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning. Reported first-year performance is examined, including the concentration of downloads by publisher and by institution. ONOS is then compared against a typology of national access arrangements distinguished by eligibility basis and by whether the licence secures reading alone or reading and publishing, with Brazil’s CAPES Portal de Periódicos rather than Germany’s Projekt DEAL adopted as the primary comparator on grounds of scale, developing-country context and institutional longevity. The analysis identifies seven structural gaps, each expressed as a defect in the boundary, position, choice, payoff or information rules of the commons. It is argued that ONOS equalises the ability to read while leaving the terms of publication and the underlying enclosure untouched, and that the scheme is best understood as a transitional instrument whose principal risk is the weakness of India’s renewal position after 2027. Twelve recommendations follow, together with the empirical studies required before the Phase I review