Open Access—What Are the Economic Benefits? A Comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark

"[...] 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. [...]"

(source: Knowledge Exchange, 23/06/09 / via DigitalKoans, 01/07/09)