Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-07-05

Summary:

Use the link to access the full text of the report. The following is an excerpt from the Executive Summary: “The purpose of this work is to provide information to UK universities and policy makers on the likely cost impacts of Gold OA, where the costs of peer review, editorial work and other publishing services are covered by fees paid per article... The model explores the various scenarios under the assumption of: (i) worldwide Open Access (i.e. where the alternative model explored is assumed to be universally in place), and (ii) unilateral Open Access (i.e. where the alternative model is adopted by the institution alone, all else remaining the same). The latter is intended to shed light on the issue of transitioning to Open Access. We have run the new model using both the current average APC (GBP 571) and the average APCs for different disciplines according to the disciplinary mix of articles published from each university (see Methodology section). We have also explored a range of article charges up to GBP 2500. Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and [2] publication charges fall to the reprint author’s home institution, [3] all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4] research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs... Only when the average level of APC rises above GBP 2000 per article would any university face increased costs, and then only the few most research-intensive institutions.Addressing the issue of transitioning to Open Access, we have also modelled the cost impacts of an institution unilaterally adopting OA publishing for its article output, while remaining a part of the current scholarly publishing system (i.e. maintaining subscriptions). Under these conditions, we find that all universities would face additional costs for Gold OA publishing charges, and the more research-intensive universities would face higher costs. As publication charges rise, these costs become substantial, and may in some case exceed current subscription costs.We have also calculated the costs and savings that would accrue from the various ‘Green’ OA scenarios (i.e. Open Access provided by authors self-archiving their articles in repositories while journals remain subscription-based). We find that all universities would face additional repository-related costs if they were to unilaterally adopt Green OA. However, for all the sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust.”

Link:

http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.journals oa.new oa.green oa.universities oa.libraries oa.uk oa.costs oa.librarians oa.prices oa.funders oa.fees oa.wellcome oa.rcuk oa.jisc oa.benefits oa.budgets oa.economics_of oa.oaig oa.reports oa.repositories oa.hei

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/05/2012, 22:40

Date published:

07/05/2012, 23:09