Analysis of Economic Issues Related to Open Access to Scientific Publications

"A number of individual, yet uncoordinated activities related to OA in Poland is currently funded through different means. These include the funds described above, as well as own funds of institutions or European Funds such as the Programme Innovative Economy grants. In particular, the OA infrastructure costs are commonly funded by the individual institutions, European Projects or European Funds. Certain coordination actions as well as enabling and promotional activities are funded through the Ministry’s of Science and Higher Education Virtual Library of Science grant scheme. Since 2010 the above mentioned Springer Open Choice programme has been funded from the same source. As for Polish scientific publishers, no specific incentives are currently available within the Science Dissemination Activities or Statutory Activities grant schemes neither for Open Access journals nor traditional journals for making their publications available in OA mode.

The generally available Polish sources for funding OA in research are mostly confined to one-time or short term grants. This setting, coupled with the lack of coherence of OA related funding leads to a situation where it is difficult for any stakeholder institution to assume a long term OA strategy.

A possible, more sustainable funding could be set up as a dedicated programme of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Such programme could cater for different types of OA-related actions, including e- -infrastructure development and maintenance, support for migration to OA, support for OA journals, APCs, coordination or promotional activities.

It seems also possible to adjust the currently available funding schemes to provide better support for implementing OA, by specifically enabling and promoting the related kinds of expenses. For example, the current “automatic” way of assigning Statutory Activities grants means that any possible expenses related to OA for a given institution have to compete with its other more immediate costs within the same grant’s budget, thus not providing any real incentive for promoting OA. Similarly, APCs could be considered as eligible costs in research grants but they should not compete with other costs in a given grant’s budget.

Additionally, Polish research funding institutions could include provisions to promote OA publishing as well as OA to research data produced.

To summarise, besides the currently available fund sources, a dedicated programme focused on supporting OA in research could be created, while the other research funding schemes could be adapted to explicitly promote implementation of OA policies."