A story of India’s misplaced investment priorities in R&D
Why metascience matters
by Moumita Koley and Chandan G.Nagarajappa (DST-Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Science)
India spends only about 0.6% of its GDP on R&D, a figure that has stagnated for years and is far below that of countries it aspires to compete with, which spend upwards of around 2.5%. While the low Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (GERD) is a concern, the core issue is not the scale of government investment. Rather it is the structural policy challenge of increasing industrial R&D activity, since India’s GERD is dominated by public spending (around 65%) while its private sector contributions remain low (about 35%) compared to most major economies where, roughly speaking, these proportions are reversed.
When investment is this scarce, every policy choice matters. In a resource-constrained system, science policy should harness metascientific expertise to ensure it is evidence-based, incentive-aware, and aligned with national capacity building. Unfortunately, India’s science policy shows few if any of these traits.
The One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) policy is a case in point. Under this scheme, the Indian government has committed roughly ₹20 billion (approximately $241 million) per year to subscription deals to access the academic journals of large commercial publishers in the Global North. This is not a marginal expenditure. To put it in perspective, the annual budget of India’s primary biotechnology funding agency, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), is ₹2,276 crore ($274m). In effect, India is choosing to spend as much on accessing journals as it does on funding an entire national research agency!
This is a staggering policy choice for a country that has one of the highest disease burdens in the world. Instead of directing additional resources toward vaccine development, health research, food systems, or other public-interest science, a huge tranche of public money is being funnelled into journal subscriptions.
One implication of the ONOS deal is quite clear. No matter how much the Government of India increases its investment in science and technology, it is fiscally unsustainable to subscribe to even a substantial fraction of the 22,000+ research journals indexed in Web of Science, a number that continues to grow.
When it was conceived in 2017, the aspiration of ONOS was commendable, as the initiative aimed to provide 6500+ public institutes, colleges, and R&D labs across India with access to the journal articles needed for their research. But before rolling out the policy, it is unclear whether any assessments of infrastructure-readiness were conducted, particularly in smaller cities or remote areas. Nor has there been much improvement over the last eight years. Given the inadequate internet infrastructure remaining at many colleges across India, even though the government has paid the full ONOS subscription for 2025, many Indian researchers still do not have proper access to the research literature. In practice, only researchers in well-resourced public institutions with reliable digital infrastructure are likely to benefit, but even in these institutions, awareness of ONOS remains low. Although journal access has undoubtedly increased under the ONOS scheme, it is far from clear that it represents good value for money. The value to the nation is further diminished because private institutions and the general public are excluded from the deal. The government has yet to engage in any serious metascientific thinking.
Worse still, while India is paying an extraordinary price to make global research accessible within its borders, albeit only to public institutions, Indian research remains locked behind paywalls, inaccessible to the public that largely paid for it. The public’s money flows outward to multinational publishers, while their access to knowledge that they have also paid for remains an afterthought.
That may be about to change. The government has recently announced that under the ONOS scheme, it will pay the article processing charges (APCs) on behalf of Indian researchers who publish in selected open-access journals that are free to read. On paper, this looks like a big step toward greater access. But it also means more public money will be channelled into paying exorbitantly high APCs to publishers in the Global North. To give just one example, the APC for Nature Communications, published by Springer Nature, is around USD $7,000 - almost double the annual stipend of a Ph.D. student in India.
Although lower-priced OA journals are more commonly used by Indian researchers, these are still costly and raise other concerns. Among these, Scientific Reports (Springer Nature) and IEEE Access, which each publish around 5000 articles a year from India, charge USD $2000-3000 per paper, resulting in a total cost of around USD $10-15 million. Yet both journals have faced repeated criticism over quality control, and Scientific Reports was recently embroiled in controversy over a paper containing an AI-generated “garbage” image.
Similar concerns have arisen at two of the journals in which Indian researchers have published most papers in recent years. One (Materials Today: Proceedings) was discontinued in 2024 due to significant quality issues, while the other (Cureus Journal of Medical Science) was delisted from Web of Science over concerns about questionable peer-review practices and the publication of low-quality research. In addition to cost concerns, there seems to have been a lack of consideration of research integrity issues – likely driven by incentive structures that reward volume over quality – in the decision to extend India’s ONOS scheme.
The situation in India shows some marked contrasts with the policy landscape in China, which faces similar challenges of high publishing costs and concerns about the quality of domestic research. The Chinese authorities have, in recent years, explicitly acknowledged research integrity problems and the distortions created by quantity-driven incentives. The government is now making efforts to crack down on low-quality and fraudulent research by tightening evaluation metrics and penalising misconduct. Moreover, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has announced this year that it will no longer pay APCs for publishing in high-priced gold open-access journals, including in Nature Communications and Science Advances. While the effectiveness of these measures remains to be seen, the fact that the issue has been recognised at the highest policy levels is significant.
The relative lack of action in India highlights the fact that its policy choices are not merely technical flaws or transitional problems. They reflect a structural weakness in science governance in India and raise difficult questions about how metascience expertise is incorporated into policy design. ONOS appears to be supply-driven (publisher-bundle logic) rather than demand-driven (researcher-usage logic). It is a subsidy to a costly publishing system, paid for at the expense of research capacity, public health, and long-term national priorities. In a country where public R&D resources are scarce, this is exactly why metascience matters: as a tool for identifying system-level distortions, strengthening institutional accountability, testing major investments before they scale, and ensuring that limited public funds are aligned with quality and societal needs. Without that capacity, even well-intentioned reforms risk reproducing existing weaknesses rather than correcting them.
From RoRI
We’re launching a new Research on Research seminar series for early career researchers: a space to share completed work, discuss projects in progress, and explore new ideas for advancing metascience. More details here.