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Combined: a journal shows if it sits in at least one group you ticked.
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Nothing on the ONOS APC list matches that.
A journal absent from this list cannot get ONOS-funded APC, whatever its impact factor.
Eligibility check
Answer for one accepted article. The first block is hard gates — a No there ends the claim. The second is paperwork you need before opening the ONOS portal.
What ONOS pays for
ONOS is a central sector scheme under the Department of Higher Education, running since 1 January 2025. Besides subscription access to 30 publishers, it centrally funds negotiated APCs for selected fully open access journals, paid by INFLIBNET. The eligible list is set by subject expert groups and rebuilt each year.
Who can claim
- 2.1
Regular faculty, students, researchers and PIs of HEIs and R&D institutions with active ONOS registration; the institutional nodal officer certifies bonafide status.
- 2.1.1
You must be first author or corresponding author.
- 2.1.2
Documentary evidence of acceptance goes with the application.
- 2.1.3
Head of Institution authenticates the application.
- 2.1.4
Significant intellectual contribution, with a combined declaration signed by all authors in the prescribed format.
- 2.1.5
One claim per article.
Access model, metrics and quartile
Every journal on this list is fully open access by definition — clause 2.2 admits only fully OA titles, and clause 3.2 pays only for fully OA mode. A hybrid journal cannot appear here, and an optional-OA fee in a subscription journal is never reimbursed, whatever the journal's standing.
Eligibility needs the journal to sit in the top 10% of its Scopus subject area on CiteScore, SNIP or SJR. Top 10% of a subject area reaches well into Q1 and across part of Q2, so quartile and eligibility are no longer near-synonyms the way they were under the old 1% rule. A journal can also read Q2 or lower on a different indicator or a different subject area, since Scopus assigns several.
Each journal row carries its SJR value, SJR best quartile, citations per document over two years, h-index and per-category quartiles, taken from the Scimago Journal Rank 2025 release and matched by ISSN. Citations per document is Scopus-based and behaves like an impact factor, but it is not one — the Clarivate JIF is licensed and is not included. If you need the JIF, or the APC amount a publisher charges, the DOAJ and Scimago links on each row take you to the source.
Under the old top 1% rule almost everything was Q1. At top 10% the spread is wider, so the quartile badge now tells you something: filter on Q1 if that is what your committee counts. Journals drawn only from the AIIMS partial-support list are not bound by the ONOS rule at all. Where Scimago's 2025 release carries no open access flag the row says so, and the DOAJ link settles it.
The APC amount does not affect eligibility. ONOS pays the negotiated charge for an eligible article from one common pool, first come first served, so a costly journal does not weaken your claim — it only draws more from the pool.
The base list and the two updates
The base list is the eligible-journal file published on the ONOS site, revised 10 October 2026 and carrying 945 journals across every Scopus subject area, not medicine alone. A national full-support update states where ONOS pays the whole charge, and a separate AIIMS Bhubaneswar list adds publisher-specific partial waivers, bringing in journals the base file does not carry. Every journal here therefore shows one of three badges.
- Full
Full APC support. 164 journals, from the update headed Medical Journals for APC Support under ONOS. All but one were already on the base list; ONOS pays the negotiated charge in full, subject to fund availability.
- AIIMS
Partial support — an AIIMS Bhubaneswar arrangement, not national ONOS. 317 journals where a publisher has agreed a percentage for this institute: Elsevier 80%, Springer 75%, Wolters Kluwer Lippincott 50%, Taylor & Francis 40%, Oxford University Press 25%. The balance falls to you or your project. Researchers at other institutions should not assume this applies to them. The row shows the share and the publisher behind it.
- Base
On the base eligible list. 738 journals that meet the top 10% fully open access rule and sit on the published eligible list, but are not named in either update. Mostly the non-medical half of the list — engineering, environmental science, social sciences, materials, computing — which is what you would expect of updates that are organised by clinical department. They are eligible to apply for; the updates simply do not state a support level, so confirm it on the portal before submitting.
Some titles appear in both; those rows show the full badge and note the AIIMS partial offer underneath.
Where the documents disagree, the order of precedence is: the ONOS base list decides whether a journal is here at all, full support outranks partial, and a journal named on the full-support update but no longer on the base list survives only if the AIIMS partial list still carries it. On the October 2026 revision that rule rescued two titles as partial — International Journal of Surgery and Journal of Migration and Health — and dropped two, Micro and Nano Systems Letters and Pulmonology.
One thing the documents do not settle: whether the updates add to the base list or replace part of it. They carry no date or revision note. Nothing here assumes either way — the base-list badge records what the published file says and nothing more.
The AIIMS partial list is also where the clinical breadth lives. Paediatrics, nephrology, ophthalmology, dermatology, respiratory medicine, obstetrics and neurosurgery barely appear on the main list; on the partial list they do, through the BMC, Wolters Kluwer and Elsevier specialty series. The trade is a share of the charge rather than the whole of it.
PubMed indexing
ONOS eligibility runs on Scopus, not PubMed, so the two lists do not have to agree. A journal can be top 10% on CiteScore and still not be indexed for MEDLINE, and that matters for anyone whose department, promotion committee or thesis rules count PubMed-indexed papers.
Every journal here has been checked against NLM's own journal list, matched by ISSN and by title, and the row says which way it went: 1019 of 1219 are listed in PubMed. The badge carries the MEDLINE abbreviation, so you can also see the form your citation will take.
One caution the badge cannot carry: NLM's list marks journals that appear in PubMed, and a title can be there through a PMC deposit rather than current MEDLINE indexing. If your committee counts MEDLINE specifically, open the NLM Catalog link on the row and read the indexing status on the record itself.
Which journals qualify
- 2.2
Fully open access journals in the top 10% on any one of CiteScore, SNIP or SJR, computed within each of the 27 Scopus subject areas. The threshold was 1% when the scheme opened and was widened to 10% in the October 2026 revision, which is what took the list from 431 journals to 945. A modest-looking specialty journal can qualify while a famous hybrid one does not, and the publisher need not be an ONOS publisher.
- 2.2.1
INFLIBNET republishes the list yearly with DHE, on the ONOS website.
- 2.2.2
A journal dropped in a later year still covers articles accepted while it was listed, even if payment happens afterwards.
- 2.3
Only research articles count. Case reports, letters, editorials, commentaries and review-only formats are outside the definition as written.
How the claim moves
Register on the ONOS APC page with your institutional email, verified by OTP.
Select the journal from the drop-down; enter submission and acceptance dates and article details.
Affiliation verified by ONOS or your institute.
You and every co-author declare no other APC claim exists anywhere, Indian or foreign, public or private.
Invoice or payment details routed through the central account to the journal.
ONOS accepts subject to fund availability, or rejects with intimation.
INFLIBNET pays the publisher; TDS and other taxes deducted at source.
You are told what was paid, then confirm publication.
What still stops a valid claim
- 3.1
First come, first served from one common pool across all subjects. No quota is reserved for medicine.
- 3.2
Only fully open access mode is paid. Hybrid OA fees in subscription journals are not.
- 3.4
If a funding agency or government grant can pay the OA fee, or the APC is a budgeted project component, the article is not eligible. False declaration invites administrative and legal action.
- 3.5
The Core Committee may cap articles funded per author or institution.
The declaration you sign
The Declaration of Author's Contribution asks for the accepted title; each author's type of authorship, name as per the article and as per Aadhaar, nationality, affiliating institution and country; acceptance date; journal name and online ISSN; the journal's main Scopus subject area and the article's; publisher; and CRediT-style roles mapped to named authors.
You accept personal liability to return the whole APC if the article is retracted, or if the charge turns out to have been paid by another agency or shown as a project component. The Head of Institution certifies your status and undertakes institutional recovery if you do not repay.