I have spent a working life moving between anthropology, library science, and the National Informatics Centre. An odd trio, I’ll admit. But each one taught me a version of the same truth: own the pipes, and you decide what flows through them. Coming to India’s scholarly communication strategy, it has been shaped for decades by two models, and both of them leave the pipes in someone else’s hands.

The first is the subscription model, now consolidated at national scale through One Nation One Subscription (ONOS). The second is the Article Processing Charge, or APC, model, where authors or their institutions pay publishers to make a single article openly accessible. Each solves a real problem. ONOS gives Indian researchers access to the world’s literature. APCs let Indian researchers publish openly instead of hiding their work behind a paywall.

But look closely and both models share the same weakness. They send public money outward, year after year, into systems India does not own and cannot govern.

Where the current approach runs out of road

ONOS helps a researcher read. It does nothing to build Indian publishing capacity. When the subscription cycle ends, India is exactly where it started: dependent on external publishers for access to knowledge, including knowledge India itself produced.

APCs have the opposite problem. They help a researcher publish, but they do it one paper at a time, transferring public research money to a publisher with every article. As India’s publication output grows, so does the bill. The model rewards volume, not sustainability, and India, being a very large producer of research, ends up paying for its own success.

Put the two together and you get a continuous outflow of public funds, with almost nothing to show for it once the money has left the country. This is the paradox I keep returning to: India is one of the largest producers of research in the world, and yet the infrastructure that carries that research to its readers belongs to someone else.

There is a third path. I want to make the case for it here.

Diamond Open Access

Picture a scholarly ecosystem where authors publish without paying an APC, readers read without a subscription, and the journals themselves are owned by universities, scholarly societies, and public institutions rather than commercial publishers. Publishing is treated as public infrastructure, funded the way we fund roads or electricity, not billed to authors and readers as if it were a private service.

That is Diamond Open Access: neither author nor reader pays, and the cost of running the system is carried by institutions, government, and scholarly bodies acting together. The shift in thinking is small but consequential. Instead of paying for articles one at a time, India would be investing in the plumbing.

A national framework, pillar by pillar

1. A National Diamond Publishing Mission. Someone has to hold this together, and I don’t think it can be one ministry acting alone. The Ministry of Education, the Department of Science and Technology, UGC, AICTE, ICSSR, ICMR, and INFLIBNET would need to coordinate policy, standards, and funding under a single mission.

2. A National Scholarly Publishing Platform. Every university trying to run its own journal hosting, peer review, and DOI infrastructure is reinventing a wheel it does not need to build. A shared, publicly funded platform, offering journal hosting, editorial workflow, peer review support, DOI assignment, ORCID integration, metadata services, long-term preservation, and usage analytics, would let institutions focus on the scholarship instead of the plumbing.

3. Strengthening Indian journals. Not more journals, better ones. A national programme could identify quality Indian journals and back them with technical infrastructure, editorial training, indexing support, and publishing standards, so they compete on merit rather than merely existing.

4. Reviving the university press. Look at the great universities elsewhere and you find a press attached to almost every one of them. India’s universities largely lack this. Digital university presses, open access monographs, textbooks, conference proceedings: every major Indian university should have the means to publish its own intellectual output rather than sending it elsewhere to be published back to us.

5. A national repository network. Shodhganga, institutional repositories, datasets, preprints, government-funded research: all of it should sit in an interoperable network so that publicly funded knowledge stays permanently and freely accessible to the public that paid for it.

6. AI-assisted publishing infrastructure. This is the part closest to my own current work, and I think it is underrated. Used well, AI can bring down the cost of publishing considerably, handling language polishing, metadata generation, reviewer matching, accessibility checks, reference validation, and translation into Indian languages, while editorial judgement stays firmly with human editors.

7. Reforming research assessment. None of this works if institutions keep counting publications and chasing impact factors. Assessment needs to move toward research quality, reproducibility, data sharing, and societal impact, so that researchers are rewarded for what they contributed, not for which journal’s masthead carried their name.

Can India afford it

I would put the question the other way round. The real question is not whether India can afford to build this infrastructure. It is whether India can afford another decade of not building it.

Even a modest redirection of the money currently spent on subscriptions and APC reimbursements could fund national publishing platforms, repository services, journal modernisation, editorial capacity building, and AI-enabled publishing tools. Subscription fees and APC payments buy access for a year and then vanish. This kind of investment buys an asset that stays inside the research ecosystem.

The choice in front of us

India’s digital transformation already taught this lesson once. Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker: these succeeded because India chose to build shared public infrastructure instead of renting someone else’s. Scholarly communication deserves the same ambition.

The choice is not between access and openness. It is between paying, indefinitely, for access to systems owned by others, and building a publishing ecosystem the academic community owns for itself.

ONOS may improve access today. APC funding may enable publication today. Diamond Open Access offers something that outlasts today: a scholarly communication system that is equitable, sustainable, nationally owned, and built for the public purpose research is supposed to serve in the first place.

For a country that wants to be a global knowledge leader, that may be the one investment that matters most.