Cost Benefits Analysis of OA: a study

Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has published an important report by John Houghton, Colin Steele & Peter Sheehan: Research Communication Costs In Australia: Emerging Opportunities And Benefits, September 2006 (also available in RTF).

Some findings:
benefit / cost ratios ranging from 4 to over 51 for Australia's proposed open access via mandated self-archiving policy. That is, from various perspectives, the benefits of this approach exceed the cost by at least 4 times to over 51 times ($51 dollars of benefits for every dollar of cost).

Expressing these impacts as a benefit/cost ratio we find that, over 20 years, a full system of institutional repositories in Australia costing AUD 10 million a year and achieving a 100% self-archiving compliance would show:

* A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research (i.e. the benefits are 51 times greater than the costs);
* A benefit/cost ratio of 30 for the modelled impacts of open access to higher education research; and
* A benefit/cost ratio of 4.1 for the modelled impacts of open access to ARC competitive grants funded research....

From: Peter Suber's Open Access News - more details

Taylor & Francis offers open access option to authors

Taylor & Francis is the latest publishing company to start offering its authors an open access (OA) option. iOpenAccess, as the new service is dubbed, certainly has a name that will attract the iPod generation, but at present remains a pilot.
iOpenAccess is across 175 Taylor & Francis journals in its chemistry, mathematics and physics portfolios, as well as a behavioural science journal from the Psychological Press. Medical and bioscience journals from the Informa Healthcare brand are also included in the scheme.
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