Still a long way to go for OA? - Analysis & News - Research Information

"According to conservative estimates, the UK’s higher education institutions are paying £160m per year for subscriptions to peer-reviewed academic journals; Research Libraries UK (RLUK) puts the figure even higher, at £192m. These are significant ongoing costs that reflect the central importance to UK research of having the widest possible access to articles in scholarly journals. The steady advance of open access is changing journal publishing models irrevocably, but not evenly, across the globe. Things are moving particularly fast in the UK, where government, research councils’ and research funders’ policies are accelerating the move towards publishing publicly-funded research outputs in open access, sometimes with a preference for gold open access under CC-BY licences. Here, especially since 2012, more and more research outputs are being published in the open access sections of hybrid journals so that they are available to read and use, for free, from day one of publication. Though these articles are free to read and use, the costs associated with getting them to publication still have to be paid – and, in many cases, publishers are recouping them via article processing charges (APCs), usually paid by the authors’ institutions. In this rapidly changing environment, where all parties are trying to develop practical new processes quickly, it has become increasingly difficult to track the cost of APCs. It is not easy because the market is not transparent and price comparisons are difficult: list prices for subscriptions and APCs sometimes bear little relation to what institutions are actually paying. But there is a pressing need for institutions to understand the true cost of publishing in open access, so that they can manage transition from a position of authority and monitor their costs effectively. As things stand currently, the true total cost of hybrid journals for institutions engaged in research is made up of subscription charges, APCs and also the significant (but hard to quantify) administration costs associated with making and managing APC payments and then reporting on compliance with funder open access policies. So the real cost is probably higher than many have realised and it also seems that the majority of APCs are being paid to the largest, traditional journal publishers who are also receiving a substantial proportion of universities’ total subscription payments. In one recent year, one institution we spoke to spent more than £28,000 in subscriptions with just one publisher, and also published 12 journal articles with the same company. Those 12 APCs amounted to an extra £21,000 paid by the university – a 71 per cent increase in charges from that publisher ..."