Publication fees for authors in India
India is on neither Wiley’s nor Taylor & Francis’s waiver lists and is not eligible for Research4Life. What pays for open access is One Nation One Subscription (ONOS).
Checked 3 October 2026
No country waiver for India — but a national APC fund
Waivers that publishers tie to Research4Life or to World Bank income lists do not reach India. The reductions below come from national agreements and publisher pilots.
One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Checked on publishers’ and national bodies’ own pages, 3 October 2026
- ONOS includes central APC funding of ₹150 crore a year for authors publishing in selected open access journals; the whole scheme has ₹6,000 crore for 2025–2027.
- Only fully open access journals on the ONOS selected list qualify.
- The first or corresponding author applies on the ONOS portal (onos.gov.in/apc) after the article is accepted. The institution verifies the author, and INFLIBNET pays the publisher.
- Private universities and colleges cannot join ONOS Phase I, so their authors cannot use the fund.
- Through ONOS, authors at participating institutions can publish open access in ACM journals and proceedings with no APC.
Sources for this section
Publisher discounts that do reach India
Checked on publishers’ and national bodies’ own pages, 3 October 2026
- Taylor & Francis: 40% off the APC in 57 selected open access journals, under ONOS.
- Oxford University Press: 25% in fully open access journals.
- Springer Nature: authors in India pay 25% of the APC in the 64 journals of its country-tiered pilot.
- Elsevier: in its pricing pilot of about 300 gold open access journals, India is in the lower-middle income band and pays 20% of the list APC.
Outside these, Wiley and Taylor & Francis give no country reduction to India; Taylor & Francis accepts discretionary requests.
Sources for this section
- Taylor & Francis — ONOS APC support
- Oxford University Press — APC waiver policy
- Springer Nature — Country-tiered APC pilot
- Elsevier — Pricing and Geographical Pricing for Open Access
- Wiley — Open access waivers and discounts
- Taylor & Francis — Eligible countries for APC waivers
- Research4Life — Eligibility
UGC-CARE has been discontinued
Checked on publishers’ and national bodies’ own pages, 3 October 2026
- The University Grants Commission decided on 3 October 2024 to stop listing journals in UGC-CARE and announced it in a public notice of 11 February 2025. The list was last updated in October 2024.
- A UGC notice of 16 July 2025 adopted “suggestive parameters” instead: authors and institutions now judge a journal themselves on its ISSN, peer-review policy, editorial board, transparency about APCs, indexing and similar signals. The same notice published a reference list of 1,474 journals that were on UGC-CARE.
Free-to-publish journals from India
DOAJ lists 416 journals published in India; 274 of them charge neither an APC nor any other fee.
Sources for this section
Related
Compare publisher policies
Waiver rules differ between publishers — who counts as the eligible author, whether hybrid journals are included, and whether you need to apply or it happens automatically.
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