Total cost of ownership: reducing the cost of gold open access - Jisc Digital Festival 2015

Total cost of ownership

Reducing the cost of open access

» Describe the situation

» Explain the task Jisc Collections has to undertake to address the situation

» The actions taken so far

» The results so far

» The work still to be done

This presentation will:

09/03/2015 Jisc Digital Festival, 9-10 March 2015, ICC Birmingham 3

» The Government announced on 16 July 2012 that it has accepted the recommendations of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch

» But it recommended a clear policy direction in the UK towards support for ‘Gold’ open access publishing, where publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication

» Research Councils UK also announced on 16 July a new open access policy to come into effect for all research articles submitted for funding from 1 April 2013

The situation


“future discussions and negotiations between universities and publishers (including learned societies) on the pricing of big deals

and other subscriptions should take into account the financial implications of the shift to publication in open access and hybrid journals, of extensions to licensing, and the resultant changes in

revenues provided to publishers”

Recommendation viii:


» Research Libraries UK estimates the UK academic sector spends £192m per year to publishers for journal and database access

» equivalent to almost a tenth of the total QR grant

» Research Councils UK estimated that 31,000 published papers came out of research that it funded in 2010. At the average APC of £1,727 used in the Finch modelling, that's a total cost of £53.5m, and around 3% of the grant funding it provides

Why this recommendation is important


The Hybrid journal


“A hybrid open access journal is an subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing

charge or APC) to the publisher.”

From Wikipedia:

Pinfield, S., Salter, J. and Bath, P. A. (2015), The “total cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. doi: 10.1002/asi.23446

APC charges


Table 2. Comparison of APCs charged by types of journals providing OA

YearOA journals—published by nonsubscription publishers (mean)

Full-OA journals—published by subscription publishers (mean)

Hybrid journals—published by subscription publishers (mean)

2010 £1,141 £1,154 £1,842

2011 £1,281 £1,148 £1,905

2012 £1,227 £1,121 £1,873

2013 £1,106 £1,152 £1,857

2014 £1,068 £1,216 £1,799

5-year mean £1,136 £1,164 £1,849


The Total Cost of Ownership of Scholarly Publication

Subscription fees for non-open content in

hybrid journals

Cost of Article Processing Charges for Open Access

(APCs)

Total Cost of

Ownership+ =


some examples from data we have collected

Institution A’s annual subscription expenditure with publisher 1 in 2014

£28,895

Publisher 1’s average Article Processing Charge (APC) £1,800

Number of Open Access article published by authors from Institution A in 2014

12

Total expenditure for APCs with Publisher 1 in 2014 £21,600

Overall increase in the Total Cost of Ownership (subscription + APCs) compared to capped subscription fees

73%


some examples from data we have collected

Institution B’s annual subscription expenditure with publisher 2 in 2014

£810,975

Publisher 1’s average Article Processing Charge (APC) £2,000

Number of Open Access article published by authors from Institution A in 2014

66

Total expenditure for APCs with Publisher 1 in 2014 £132,000

Overall increase in the Total Cost of Ownership (subscription + APCs) compared to capped subscription fees

16%

» Map the landscape and collect the data, what is the Total Cost of Ownership and how will it increase without mitigation

» Model offset systems to understand how they might work to mitigate increases

» Negotiate with publishers to introduce offset systems that will mitigate increases to the Total Cost of Ownership

The task


» We modelled a number of systems:

› Vouchers based on subscription spend – to be spent of APCs

› Credits against spend on APCs against subscriptions

› Capped extra payment for unlimited APCs

Effectiveness varies depending on the nature of the publisher

Must be able to administrate

Agnostic on which offset model is implemented – as long as we have one!

Offset systems


What some of the publishers said at first:


Actions: Negotiations with publishers

What we did:

» There is no connection between subscriptions and APC: they are different services

» You have no mandate

» You have no data

» We don’t double dip

» Collected evidence including a Government minister’s open letter

» We got a mandate

» We collected the data

» We talk about Total Cost of Ownership

The Government “….looks to the publishing industry to develop innovative and sustainable solutions”

“….a meaningful proportion of an institution's total [article processing charges] with a publisher to be offset against total subscription payments with that publisher.”

"Government welcomes efforts by Jisc Collections to develop sustainable funding models that establish a relationship between the payment of APCs (and the costs of administering them) and subscription feesfor an institution.”

In January 2014, Rt Hon David Willetts MP published an open letter to Dame Janet Finch. In this letter he said:


Institute of Physics: Wiley:


Results so far: Some successes!

» A three year pilot agreement running from May 2014 means that IOP Publishing will offset 90% of a university’s expenditure in one year on APCs, or the total cost of their subscriptions, whichever is the greater

» From January 2015 to December 2017, the agreement provides credits for APCs to universities that subscribe to Wiley journal content

Taylor & Francis: SAGE Publications:


Results so far: Some successes!

» A three year pilot offsetting system running from January 2015 to December 2017. The offsetting agreement offers discounted article processing charges via a voucher system determined by expenditure on subscriptions

» UK institutions which subscribe to the SAGE Premier collection continue to receive a significant discount on Gold OA fees in hybrid titles. The discounted article processing charge is currently reduced to £200

The work still to be done: data collections and monitoring


Aggregated APC and subscription data for 20 UK HEIsNumber of APCs

2013Number of APCs

2014APC expenditure

2013APC expenditure

2014Percentage

change

Total1963 6059 £3,253,127 £9,042,753 278%

Publisher 1 343 1048 £ 702,412 £1,453,615 207%

Publisher 2 320 987 £ 86,671 £1,602,814 273%

Publisher 3 81 349 £154,231 £579,630 376%

Publisher 4 91 317 £122,981 £ 419,616 341%

Publisher 5 222 347 £241,739 £347,302 144%

Publisher 6 117 283 £218,600 £567,471 260%

Publisher 7 63 157 £ 145,403 £465,071 320%

Publisher 8 60 311 £ 117,481 £ 477,464 406%

Publisher 9 92 280 £ 164,519 £498,703 303%

Publisher 10 48 146 £ 78,991 £116,951 148%

Publisher 11 40 135 £55,244 £245,501 444%

Publisher 12 16 43 £31,191 £84,984 272%

Publisher 13 20 232 £ 16,426 £ 89,298 544%

» Systems should operate in the context of a transition to fully gold open access and support that transition. To meet this principle, a system should be inclusive, remove barriers (both to authors and their institutions) to open access and ensure that all the outputs of a subscribing institutions are immediately open on publication under licences and other conditions which meet funders’ mandates and other requirements

» Systems should ensure that publishers do not charge the same institutions twice, through the payment of subscriptions and the payment of APCs

Define and publish the principles of offset systems


» Offset systems should not be restricted to institutions that subscribe to large collections of journals (the big deal) but should also apply to all institutions that subscribe to individual journals with a hybrid OA offering from a publisher

» Systems should apply, at the level of each subscribing institution, to ensure that the cost incurred by each institution for scholarly publishing is contained. This does not preclude publishers from also applying global reductions in the cost of subscriptions in respect of increasing volumes of open access publications in hybrid journals



» Systems should operate on a “cash basis” and avoid the additional administration and work involved in handling vouchers, particularly if those vouchers have an expiry date. Where an offset system does operate on the basis of vouchers, they must be available to the institution (which processes the transactions) rather than to individual authors




.. And of course negotiate offset agreements with

more publishers this year…

Find out more…

Contact…

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND

Lorraine EstelleJisc

[email protected]

Education

Total cost of ownership: reducing the cost of gold open access - Jisc Digital Festival 2015