The costs of open access for an institution?

Consultant Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd, leading delegates through the open access costing model at Woburn House, London.

The Research Communications Strategy project is continuing its set of workshops looking at the cost of open access for institutions. This uses an extension to the economic model produced as part of the Houghton Report last year, which identified over £110,000,000 of savings per year for the Higher Education sector as a whole from an Open Access model, and even more significant benefits.

These workshops are seeing how these changes would translate for individual institutions, which will achieve different sets of costs and benefits according to their research profile, library subscriptions, internal structures and other factors. Although individual results are confidential to the institutions, it can be said that the range of costs and savings is significant and varies widely according to the particular open access model which is adopted. This modelling has been valued by delegates and will play a part in individual institutional plans for an open access future.