Modelling scholarly communications options: Costs and benefits for universities
Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd (February 2010)
An in-depth look at the costs of open access - and the potential savings its adoption could make for individual institutions and the UK as a whole.
The report looks at four institutions, varying in size from a small post-1992 university to a large research-intensive university. It aims to provide information about the costs and benefits of open access and to produce a methodology that can be used by other universities to model some of the economic effects of adopting different approaches to open access in their own institution.
Various costs related to scholarly communications were worked out (such as library handling time, publisher costs and copyright clearance charges), and then calculations were made about the different types of savings the institutions could make using a variety of open access models. The author models costs and benefits of open access by various routes and looks also at costs of moving from hard copy to electronic copy. There is also an investigation of other kinds of data (such as handling time) involved with various kinds of journals (toll access, print, open access electronic) and also information about research activities, such as time spent discovering and reading articles.
Other potential financial benefits are highlighted, such as those accruing from the greater impact open access will bring to their research since more people are likely to read it (and cite it). It also suggests that although switching to open access is likely to cause “complications” in the short term because to do so disrupts current systems, it is likely to simplify scholarly communication systems and cut down on handling time and have significant other benefits in the long run.
The author presents calculated savings of £537,067 up to £3,382,000 for the different universities in “an all open access world”. The report also lays out a broad series of potential savings (and extra costs) depending on the adoption of a wide variety of open access models. Under some models (notably those where journals charge large article handling fees) research-intensive institutions are liable to incur extra costs (although where the research is grant-funded (as much is) then many funders will make money available to cover these costs), but the report also asserts that there will always be benefits to the nation as a whole and suggests further research into the benefits open access to non-academic audiences.
Read the report in full