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 Funding Councils. Such top-slicing would run counter to the policies—supported by successive Governments as well as by universities themselves—of funding universities in full and allowing each of them to manage expenditures as it sees fit. In the absence of top-slicing, other arrangements might involve universities’ agreeing—as they have done in Scotland—to put amounts equal to their current expenditure on journals into a central pot.

7.35. Publishers have indicated that they could provide licences for the whole HE sector for access to all the content currently accessible only to large research-intensive universities. They estimate that such licences would cost an additional 5-10% on top of the amounts currently being paid by the sector. The additions to current prices charged by individual publishers in order to extend their licences in this way would depend, of course, on the extent of their current coverage, as well as on any modifications to current rights of use and re-use. An extension of licensed access across the whole sector, however, would bring undoubted benefits to researchers in less-well-endowed universities, although the Open Road report suggests that the unit costs of the increased amounts of access (for a sector which already enjoys high levels of access) are high compared with other possible routes.

The health sector

7.36. The provision of licensed access to journals for the NHS is complex, with a range of local as well as central initiatives; and we noted in Section 4 the estimate that on average across the NHS, only about a third of relevant journals are available free at the point of use.

7.37. Many people in the NHS—doctors and other medical staff but also student doctors and nurses—also have an affiliation to a university; and a significant proportion of the content purchased for them by the NHS is available to them also via their university, though usually on a different platform, with different arrangements for access. On the other hand, the amount of content accessible through NHS licences is significantly lower than that for the HE sector.

7.38. There would be undoubted benefits from increasing and rationalising arrangements for licensed access across the health sector, with greater co-ordination between the NHS and the HE sector. There have been attempts over many years to achieve greater co-ordination, but the different procurement systems in the two sectors present a challenge for those seeking that end. Nevertheless, the two sectors in Scotland are currently planning to work together to examine the scope for collaborative purchasing as a key step towards creating a unified access system.

7.39. Estimates provided by publishers for the Open Road study indicated that licensed access to relevant journals for the whole NHS could be provided at