Open Access fees are financial burden for universities

The growing interest for Open Access publishing has created a bigger financial burden for universities. The costs for Open Access are additional costs on top of subscription fees, a study in the United Kingdom shows.On the Times Higher Education website, an infographic shows the effects of “douple dipping”. This means that universities pay subscription fees, but also pay to get researchers’ content published on an open access platform. This last type of type of costs is called Article Processing Charges (APC’s). The numbers come from the report Monitoring the Transition to Open Access. For example, the University College London pays £2,940,492 for subscriptions to scientific journals, and an additional £1,565,022 to publish some of its scientific research via an Open Access route.

In The Netherlands, the government wants all publications by Dutch scientists to be available for free in 2024. The universities are trying to put pressure on one of the biggest publishers, Elsevier, to work with them to an Open Access model. To do so, they have started a boycott, and have asked scientists to not publish in Elsevier journals anymore.

_Advertentie.