Open Access – What are the economic benefits?

Die Main Points, die dem Report vorangestellt sind, fassen die Kernpunkte des Vergleichs von OA-Publikationsmodellen in den UK, den Niederlanden und Dänemark zusammen:

"Building on previous work, this summary looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative open access models for scholarly publishing in the UK, Netherlands and Denmark – giving a sense of the implications for one of the larger, a mid-sized and a smaller European country.
Analysis focuses on comparing three alternative models for scholarly publishing, namely: subscription publishing, open access publishing and self-archiving. To ensure that meaningful comparisons could be made, the self-archiving models explored include the peer review, certification and quality control functions necessary for formal scholarly publishing.
We estimate that in an open access world:

• Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles (i.e. ‘Gold OA’) might bring net system savings of around EUR 70 million per annum nationally in Denmark, EUR 133 million in the Netherlands and EUR 480 million in the UK (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity);
• Open access self-archiving without subscription cancellations (i.e. ‘Green OA’) might save around EUR 30 million per annum nationally for Denmark in a worldwide ‘Green OA’ system, EUR 50 million in the Netherlands and EUR 125 million in the UK; and
• The open access self-archiving with overlay services model explored is necessarily more speculative, but a repositories and overlay services model may well produce similar cost savings to open access publishing.

The cost-benefits of the open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing model are very similar across the three countries. In terms of estimated cost-benefits over a transitional period of 20 years, open access publishing all articles produced in universities in 2007 would have produced benefits of around 2 to 3 times the costs in all cases, but showed benefits of 5 to 6 times costs in the simulated alternative ‘steady state’ model for unilateral national open access, and benefits of around 7 times the costs in an open access world.
The most obvious difference between the national results relates to the self-archiving and repositories models, which while promising substantial net benefits in all countries do not look quite as good in the Netherlands as they do in the UK, and nothing like as good as they do in Denmark. This is due to the implied number of repositories, each with operational overheads.
Notwithstanding this difference, the modelling suggests that more open access alternatives are likely to be more cost-effective mechanisms for scholarly publishing in a wide range of countries (large and small), with ‘Gold OA’ open access or author-pays publishing, the deconstructed or overlay journals model of self-archiving with overlay production and review services, and ‘Green OA’ self-archiving in parallel with subscription publishing progressively more cost-effective."

Gliederung:

INTRODUCTION
APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY
DATA SOURCES AND LIMITATIONS
SUMMARY OF COSTS
The cost of alternative models
Publisher costs per journal article
THE IMPACT OF ALTERNATIVE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING MODELS
COMPARING COSTS AND BENEFITS
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
CONCLUSIONS
ANNEX I MODEL PARAMETERS AND ASSUMPTIONS
REFERENCES

Der Report ist veröffentlicht unter der Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY).