Page:Finch Group report.pdf/100

 would be significant cost savings to a wide range of organisations and individuals outside the HE sector. For the HE sector itself, the picture is more complex.

8.39. Under optimistic assumptions about levels of take-up, with adoption of open access publishing at the same levels in the UK as in the rest of the world, and with other countries meeting a reasonable share of the costs of APCs for articles resulting from international collaboration, the costs to the HE sector would be minimal. There could even be cash savings, so long as the average level of APCs is £1450 or lower. As we noted in Section 7, however, under more pessimistic assumptions about levels of take-up, where the UK is significantly ahead of the rest of the world in adopting publication in open access or hybrid journals, and with APCs on average at a higher rate, the additional cost to the HE sector could be over £70m a year.

8.40. A mid-range set of assumptions is based around APCs on average at c£1,750, adoption in the UK at twice the level in the rest of the world, and the UK meeting half the costs of APCs where there is at least one overseas author. In that case, if half of all articles produced by UK researchers were to be published in open access or hybrid journals, we estimate that—allowing in addition to the figures presented in Annex E for some ‘stickiness’ as universities have to sustain high levels of expenditure on subscriptions even as their expenditure on APCs rises—the additional costs to the HE sector would be of the order of £38m a year.

8.41. The costs to individual universities will depend on all the factors outlined in paragraph 8.37 above, but in addition on each institution’s size and research-intensity, as well as its subject profile and the proportion of its research activity that is funded from external sources. The latter will be critical in underpinning a university’s ability to meet the costs of APCs out of the research grants and contracts it wins (see Section 7).

Licence extensions

8.42. The costs of extensions to the current range of licences will depend, as we noted in Section 7, on the number of additional people and organisations, and of journal titles, covered by the extensions. Our estimate of the cost of extending and rationalising current licences to cover the whole HE and health sectors is around £10m a year. We have not attempted to estimate the cost of extensions to other sectors, though we believe they could be relatively high, given the relatively low levels of licensed access at present outside HE and health. As we noted in Section 7, the public library initiative implies at present no substantive cost to the public purse.

Repositories

8.43. The costs of establishing institutional repositories in most universities in the UK have largely been met already. But developing the repository infrastructure in the ways we have outlined (with better interoperability, linking and so on), and further development of individual repository platforms, will require significant additional