Jul 2026· Journal of Information and Knowledge· pp. 157-171· 0 citations
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.
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
Dheeraj Dheeraj, Sapna Sharma· International Journal for Sc...· 0 citations
Higher education is being required to contribute more directly to national development, yet most instruments through which the state currently measures university performance are originally designed for other purposes. Not many are designed to steer the intermediate space between minimum compliance and frontier research performance, where most universities in an absorption-stage economy compete. This paper reframes the problem as one of governance rather than measurement, and develops a governance theory of policy-instrument portfolios organised around distinct governance objects. Drawing on that theory, the Vietnamese Multidimensional Impact Assessment Framework (V-MIAF) is derived as a steering instrument for the currently under-occupied governance space. Five domains are specified, namely workforce skill fit, economic value of knowledge, venture sustainability, collaborative integration, and institutional integrity, with integrity operating as a substrate that conditions the legitimacy of contribution generated elsewhere. Documentary analysis of 2024 institutional reporting from four Vietnamese universities illustrates the analytical visibility the account creates, and a two-gate design couples V-MIAF to Circular 20/2026 and the Autonomy Decree. The contribution is a governance-theoretic account of university impact assessment, an integrity-substrate design, and a portable conceptual logic.
Hang Tran, Hong T. M. Bui· Vietnam Journal of Education· 0 citations
Abstract The sustainability of digital research infrastructures (RIs) beyond project-based funding cycles poses significant structural and economic challenges for memory institutions. In particular, the asymmetry between locally incurred operating costs and globally distributed utility (local costs, global benefits) often leads to a legitimacy deficit within hosting institutions and fosters the emergence of funding graveyards. This article introduces the Association for Research Infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (GKFI). The legal form of a registered association (eingetragener Verein) enables the transition from individual institutional responsibility to a collective framework, distributing the burden of infrastructure provision and maintenance. Using the GKFI as a case study, we demonstrate how a curated service catalogue, the coordination of national nodes for European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), and binding governance contribute to the stability of the research landscape (even without a financial budget). The association functions not as a replacement for project-based innovation, but as a complementary anchor of stability, ensuring the long-term availability of scholarly services independent of rigid funding durations. Thus, the GKFI serves as a blueprint for the sustainable provision of digital common goods in the humanities and cultural studies.
Stefan Buddenbohm, Aline Deicke, Daniel Kurzawe et al.· BIBLIOTHEK Forschung und Pra...· 0 citations
Ethiopia has entered a pivotal moment in the evolution of its higher education system. The University Autonomy Proclamation No. 1294/2023 redefines the relationship between the state and its 47 public universities by granting academic, administrative, and financial self-governance within a performance-accountability framework. Addis Ababa University (AAU), designated in August 2023 as the country’s first formally autonomous institution, now serves as the system’s prototype. This article analyzes the governance, leadership, financial, data, and cultural conditions under which autonomy can advance Ethiopia’s knowledge-economy aspirations. Drawing on global higher education governance frameworks, it argues that autonomy is not a legal status but an institutional design challenge requiring coordinated reform across multiple domains. Ethiopian Airlines Group is used as an analytical analogy—“a wholly state-owned enterprise that has achieved global competitiveness through professional leadership, diversified revenue, long-term strategy, and embedded performance accountability”—to illustrate how state stewardship can coexist with operational independence. The article concludes with design principles, implementation risks, and a research agenda for African higher education autonomy.
Anna M. Waterman· Journal of Leadership, Accou...· 0 citations
Indonesia's decentralized government relies on collaboration across ministries, regional agencies, villages, public-service units, businesses, universities, civil-society organizations, and communities. This review analyzes how such coordination is converted into integrated policy, joint implementation, and public value. A PRISMA-aligned search of indexed journal literature published in 2020-2025 identified 74 records; 35 articles remained after duplicate removal, screening, full-text assessment, and index verification. The corpus comprised 26 qualitative case/process studies, four mixed or quantitative studies, and five review, policy, or conceptual articles. Because designs and outcomes were heterogeneous, the study used structured extraction, design-sensitive methodological appraisal, and hybrid deductive-inductive thematic synthesis rather than statistical pooling. The synthesis indicates that collaboration is warranted when authority, knowledge, implementation capacity, and legitimacy are distributed across organizations; hierarchy remains necessary for legal authority, minimum standards, rapid command, and accountability. Five conditions repeatedly distinguish substantive collaboration from ceremonial participation: an authoritative mandate linked to resources, facilitative and boundary-spanning leadership, explicit roles and decision rights, integration of plans-budgets-data-workflows, and accountability for citizen outcomes. The proposed Indonesian Collaborative Government Management Cycle connects problem interdependence, actor architecture, shared intelligence, policy integration, joint delivery, and public-value learning. Its theoretical contribution is to position policy integration as the conversion mechanism between collaborative process and service outcomes, while treating mandated participation, decentralization capacity, power asymmetry, cultural legitimacy, and digital interoperability as contextual conditions.
Sustainable infrastructure transformation demands the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles into public sector business strategies. The Ministry of Public Works has issued a number of centrally designed policy instruments the Building Management Information System (SIMBG), the Green Building Mandate (BGH), the Domestic Component Level (TKDN) obligations, and State Property grants to local governments but their implementation at the regional level remains uneven. This research questions how governance asymmetry between the central and regional governments affects the adoption of sustainable infrastructure standards, through what mechanisms policy instruments are distorted into administrative compliance, and what kind of governance models can position ministries as strategic orchestrators. The study uses a qualitative plural case study design based on document analysis on secondary sources available to the public, for the period 2021–2025, with four purposively selected policy cases. The evidence relies mainly on regulations, official evaluation results, and the findings of state audit bodies; data are coded deductively using the Technology Organization Environment (TOE) framework and inducively for emerging mechanisms, followed by cross case synthesis. One diagnostic pattern anchored the analysis: The 2024 National SPBE Index reached 3.12 on a scale of 5 and exceeded the medium term target, while only 48 of the 615 agencies evaluated achieved the highest predicate, an aggregate achievement that conceals a highly uneven distribution. In all four cases, the instrument establishes compliance thresholds that can be administratively verifiable but independent of substantive outputs. The resulting pattern is interpreted as means ends decoupling, with a self reinforcing form called a compliance trap, understood not as a new concept, but as a domain specific manifestation of isomorphic mimicry in ESG policy. The article proposes a tiered governance model equipped with tiering indicators, the role of actors, two way transition mechanisms, resource needs, and enforcement limits. Because the evidence base is documentary, the findings are presented as propositions that can be generalized analytically and are open to testing, rather than as a causal claim that has been validated.
Ayu Purnamasari Asih, Mohamad Rizan, Muhammad Awaluddin· Journal of Digital Business...· 0 citations