Abstract
This paper reports on a study — overseen by representatives of the publishing, library and research funder communities in the UK — investigating the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisher-led delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, the comparisons between them, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options over the next five years. Our conclusion is that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed circa £2,000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.
Highlights
Before the last two or three years, there had been few attempts to delineate the most basic features of the economics of the scholarly communications landscape
That began to change in 2008 and 2009 when the Research Information Network (RIN) published a report[1], based on work done by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates (CEPA), which analysed the activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system
The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) published a report commissioned from a consortium of researchers — led by John Houghton — at Victoria University in Australia and Loughborough University in the UK.[2]
Summary
Before the last two or three years, there had been few attempts to delineate the most basic features of the economics of the scholarly communications landscape. The organisations involved in the discussions — the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Publishers Association (PA), the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) from the publishing side; the British Library, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) and SPARC Europe from the library side; and Research Councils UK (RCUK), the Wellcome Trust, and Universities UK (UUK) from the funder and institutional sides — all share an ambition for significant improvements to access They have not achieved a consensus on. The findings and conclusions are well-founded in those terms as a basis for further work and policy discussion
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