Building Institutional Engagement in India

In our previous article, we explored the strategic implications of India’s ONOS programme. This second piece looks at the operational realities of supporting publishers in one of the world’s most complex and fast-evolving scholarly publishing markets.

Part 2:

India is often discussed as a single growth market for scholarly publishing. In practice, it is far more complex than that.

Academic priorities, institutional structures and decision-making processes vary significantly across regions, institutions and disciplines. Navigating the market effectively requires more than visibility or occasional regional presence. It requires long-term relationships, local understanding and consistent engagement.

That is the environment Accucoms has been working in for nearly two decades.

Relationships that have grown with the market

Chandrima Roy and Yogesh Zope, who are responsible for Accucoms’ marketing and sales efforts in India, have both worked in the industry since 2009. Many of the librarians, heads of department and faculty members they engage with today are people they have known throughout that time, building relationships that have developed alongside the market itself.

That longevity matters because purchasing decisions in India are rarely straightforward. Librarians often facilitate the process, but recommendations typically originate with researchers and faculty, move through departmental leadership, and then reach the library with institutional support behind them. Understanding how those conversations develop, and who influences them, is an important part of working successfully in the market.

For publishers launching new titles or expanding existing portfolios, that means identifying the right institutions and departments, understanding where content is most relevant, and engaging directly with the academic communities most likely to benefit from it. For renewals, it means maintaining those relationships consistently over time and staying closely connected to institutional priorities and changes. In India, renewals often require as much active relationship management as new sales activity and so they are the subject of significant focus for the Indian team.

Understanding Institutions, Not Just Markets

What distinguishes Accucoms’ approach in India is the depth of its institutional engagement. Rather than relying solely on broad campaigns, the team works closely with publishers to understand their content in detail and identify where it is most likely to resonate.

That preparation shapes outreach strategies at every stage, from which institutions are prioritised, to which departments are approached, to how content is positioned for different academic audiences. It is a deliberate and highly targeted approach that reflects the complexity of the market itself.

Accucoms also participates selectively in industry events across India, focusing on those where publisher content can be showcased most effectively and where engagement opportunities are strongest.

In practice, the team operates as an extension of each publisher’s own regional marketing and sales function, combining local market knowledge with long-standing institutional relationships.

Driving ONOS awareness and engagement

For the five publishers Accucoms represents within India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) consortium, there is an additional layer of responsibility: ensuring that researchers and institutions are fully aware of the access now available to them.

With 32 publishers participating in ONOS and access extending across more than 7,000 eligible institutions, awareness remains an important challenge. Many researchers and students are still unfamiliar with the full range of content now available through the programme.

To support engagement, Chandrima co-moderates a series of user awareness webinars organised jointly with INFLIBNET, bringing together publishers and consortium coordinators to discuss content, access routes and new developments. Invitations are distributed across ONOS institutions, with encouragement for participation from faculty, researchers and students.

While registration numbers regularly exceed 150 attendees per session, the real audience is often considerably larger, as institutions frequently share sessions internally with wider research groups and classrooms.

Alongside awareness activity, there is also significant operational work taking place behind the scenes: checking IP access, verifying institutional eligibility, coordinating with publishers and INFLIBNET, and resolving access issues as institutions join or expand within the consortium. Much of this work is invisible when systems function smoothly, but it remains essential to the programme’s success.

What it means to know a market

India remains one of the most important and complex scholarly publishing markets globally. Opportunities continue to grow across subscriptions, renewals, open access publishing and national initiatives such as ONOS. But realising those opportunities requires more than market presence alone.

Accucoms’ India team is strategically positioned across the country’s North, South, East, and West regions, bringing deep local market knowledge and multilingual expertise. Given India’s vast geographic scale and linguistic diversity, this regional presence enables us to engage effectively with institutions and stakeholders in their preferred languages and cultural contexts.

Accucoms works closely with publishers and institutions to help them understand and navigate the complexities of India’s taxation framework, providing guidance and support to ensure compliance and operational efficiency.

Ultimately, “knowing a market” depends on understanding how institutions operate, how decisions are made, and how relationships are maintained over time.

That long-term, locally grounded approach is what Accucoms continues to build in India.