As a member of the Finch Working Group I would like to make a quick comment about the estimated costs of this transition.
First of all, let us remind ourselves of the different elements that lead to the headline figure of £50m - £60m pa: · £28m on OA publishing costs (i.e. publishing is fully OA and hybrid journals) · £10m estimate for "stickiness" (i.e. though we expect subscriptions costs to fall as the amount of content published via gold increases increase, there will be some "stickiness" in costs to subscriptions) · £10m on extensions to licences (i.e. providing better access to e.g. health sector - for content not authored by UK researchers; the 94% figure) · £3m-£5m on repositories [some of this money may already be in the system in the form of funding e.g. from the JISC] · £5m transition cost As is evident, the biggest component of this is the £28m for OA publishing costs. To arrive at this figure, the report made a number of assumptions: · APC's would be 20% higher than the "central case" (i.e. £1740, rather than £1450. For information, the average APC paid by the Trust in the first quarter of 2011 was £1422) · UK gold uptake would be 50% of all UK authored articles (i.e.61,797 of the 123,594 articles published per year by UK authors, get routed via gold) · Rest of the world uptake of gold is 25% (i.e. the RoW moves more slowly in favour of gold) · UK pays for 75% of articles containing UK authors As is already evident, trying to model these costs is a complicated task and as the report clearly states "there is considerable room for debate about the assumptions on all these issues, and that variations in them could bring significant changes in our estimates, both upwards and downwards". The report (Annex E) does then model a number of different scenarios, and in the "central case" the cost to academic institutions to move to gold OA is "cost neutral", whereas for the UK as a whole, savings of £5.2m might be realised. And that is before we start to calculate the other benefits which will result from this content being fully open, where it can not only be read, but re-used. The key point I am trying to make is that, yes, there will be costs in this transition, but what they might be (and where they may fall) is very difficult to estimate. I would strongly urge all readers of the list who are interested in understanding the cost element of Finch Report to read Annex E of the report. This Annex, prepared by CEPA, is a follow-up to the analysis they prepared for the Heading for the Open Road report. Regards Robert Robert Kiley Head of Digital Services Wellcome Library 183, Euston Road, London. NW1 2BE Tel: 020 7611 8338; Fax: 020 7611 8703; mailto:r.ki...@wellcome.ac.uk Library Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk The Wellcome Trust is a charity, registered in England, no. 210183. Its sole Trustee is the Wellcome Trust Limited, a company registered in England, no 2711000, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. This message has been scanned for viruses by Websense Hosted Email Security - www.websense.com
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