The UK’s Joint Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems Com­mit­tee (JISC) has com­mis­sioned a new research project to study the eco­nomic and social impli­ca­tions of new mod­els for schol­arly pub­lish­ing. Accord­ing to the find­ings of the research, shar­ing research infor­ma­tion via a more open access (OA) pub­lish­ing model would bring mil­lions of pounds worth of sav­ings to the higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor apart from ben­e­fit­ing cor­po­rate UK. Prof. John Houghton from the Cen­tre of Strate­gic Eco­nomic Stud­ies at Melbourne’s Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­sity and Prof. Charles Oppen­heim at Lough­bor­ough Uni­ver­sity were asked to lead the research.

The research cen­tred on three mod­els — sub­scrip­tion or toll access pub­lish­ing which involves reader charges and use restric­tions; OA pub­lish­ing where access is free and pub­li­ca­tion is funded from the authors’ side; and OA self-archiving where aca­d­e­mic authors post their work in online repos­i­to­ries, mak­ing it freely avail­able to all Inter­net users.

The research and find­ings reveal that core schol­arly pub­lish­ing sys­tem activ­i­ties cost the UK higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor around £5 bil­lion in 2007. Using the dif­fer­ent mod­els, the report shows what the esti­mated cost would have been. When con­sid­er­ing costs per jour­nal arti­cle, the researchers believe that the UK higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor could have saved around £80 mil­lion a year by shift­ing from toll access to OA pub­lish­ing. They also claim that £115 mil­lion could be saved by mov­ing from toll access to OA self-archiving.

In addi­tion to that, the finan­cial return to the UK indus­try from greater acces­si­bil­ity to research might result in an addi­tional £172 mil­lion per annum worth of ben­e­fits from gov­ern­ment and higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor research alone.

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, Jan. 29, 2009