A move to open access could bring significant system savings

A move to open access publishing could potentially bring system savings of around £215 million per annum in the UK, according to a report on the costs and benefits of alternative scholarly publishing models. An online model provided by the report authors runs as an executable application for those wishing to calculate national or institutional costs and benefits elsewhere.

John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University is the lead author of the January '09 JISC commissioned report Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits.

Three publishing models are analysed and costed per article (e-only):
1) subscription or toll-access publishing (reader pays) : £2337
2) open access publishing (author pays to publish in an open access journal) : £1524
3) self-archiving with overlay services (author self-archives in an institutional or subject repository, with overlay services provided by the publisher to include peer review management, editing, production and proofing) : £1125

Open access self-archiving with overlay services would result in a saving of over 50% on subscription publishing. Significant additional savings could be made if acquisition cost savings were to be included.

Potential savings of 30% per title for open access monograph publishing are calculated, but a recommendation is made for more research as that area develops.

The report further recommends that:

• Appropriate metrics should be used when evaluating research.
  
• Institutions and funding bodies should ensure the availability of funding for author or producer side fees. (The analysis suggests that “under the rather conservative modelling assumptions, funding agencies or institutions might be able to divert up to 3.5% of research funding to author-side payments before net benefits were exhausted.”)
  
• The development of institutional and subject repositories should be encouraged and supported.

The report, including an Addendum, the online model, and commentary, can be found at http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/. Under ‘Commentary’ see especially the JISC response to the joint comments issued by the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

SFI and Open Access

From 1 February 2009 Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) joined with other research funders worldwide to mandate that research publications arising in whole or in part from their funding must be lodged in an open access repository as soon as possible (maximum 6 months) after publication. See funder policies here.

The SFI policy
• confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first wherever they feel is the most appropriate.
• allows that the protection of intellectual property arising from the publication takes precedence over open access depositing and indeed over any form of publication.
• recommends that institutional and disciplinary repositories should be used in preference to an author’s own website.
• specifies that the publication to be deposited is to be the publisher’s version, if permitted, or the author’s final version. See publisher permissions here.
• Where a publisher charges an author to enable open access, SFI will allow this as an Eligible Cost and it should be charged against the Miscellaneous budget line. See publisher charges here.

Because authors prefer the publisher copy to the ‘author’s own’ version allowed by most publishers, there is a natural reluctance to lodge work in an open access repository. However, policies like the one above make the necessity for some culture shifts in interactions between authors, publishers and librarians clear.

UL researchers can meet the SFI requirement by lodging their work in the University of Limerick Institutional Repository (ULIR).