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 7.51. The costs of extensions to current licensing in the UK would depend on the scope of the extensions. Our estimate is that licences for access to the great majority of journals for the whole HE sector in the UK would cost £6-12m a year on top of what is currently being paid by universities and other HEIs; and that licences for relevant journals for the whole NHS would cost £1-2m in addition to what is currently being paid.

7.52. We have not attempted to estimate the additional costs—on top of the c£35-40m currently being paid by organisations outside the HE sector—of licences to cover other sectors such as Government and the public sector; voluntary organisations; or business in general and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular. We believe, however, that the costs could be relatively high, not least because publishers would seek in their pricing for sector-wide licences to protect themselves against the loss of potential for additions to their revenues from individual organisations within the relevant sectors. Hence it is important that key representative bodies for the public, business and voluntary sectors should work with publishers to identify the business case for sector-wide licences, including the possible sources of funding to support them. And we believe that there may be scope for negotiating trade-offs between increased revenues for publishers from extended licences on the one hand, and the amounts paid in APCs for articles published open access on the other. (See Section 8)

7.53. The costs to the public purse of the two proposals that have emerged from our discussions, however, would be minimal. For the provision of access to micro enterprises via universities, individual universities would be able to recoup the cost by charging a fee for access that would be free at the point of use. For the public library initiative, most of the costs would be borne by the publishers, but there would be a need to produce some guidance and promotional material to raise awareness of what is being provided.

Repositories

Institutional repositories

7.54. Repositories come in a number of forms, as we noted in Section 4. Most universities in the UK now have an institutional repository, though there are considerable differences in size and scope of holdings, and levels of usage. The policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories as a matter of routine: levels of deposit as yet remain low, and for journal articles in particular, most of the records in institutional repositories tend to consist of metadata rather than full text.

7.55. Hence the impact of institutional repositories in increasing access to research publications has so far been limited, despite the best efforts of repository managers and others; and without further active measures from funders and universities, that seems unlikely to change. Such measures could well be warranted, however, since