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investment, of perhaps £3-5m. Running costs estimated to be between £26k and £210k for each university (depending on the size of the university and its research community) are already being met. But if institutional repositories are to reach the scale and to develop the services that will attract significantly more users, and more broadly if they are to fulfil the kinds of role we have suggested, it is likely that running costs will have to rise beyond current levels.[1]
Summary
8.44. It will be clear that any estimates of the total costs of increasing access through all three mechanisms as we suggest are subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Our best estimate is that achieving a significant and sustainable increase in access, making best use of all three mechanisms, would require an additional £50-60m a year in expenditure from the HE sector: £38m on publishing in open access journals, £10m on extensions to licences for the HE and health sectors and £3-5m on repositories, plus one-off transition costs of £5m. Those estimates may be set in the context of Government expenditure on research and development (£10.4bn in 2009-10) or of the expenditure on research by the Research Councils and Higher Education Funding Councils (£5.5bn). Indeed, we believe that the costs are modest in order to accelerate the move from a research communications system which is becoming increasingly unsustainable as a result of the economic, technological and social changes which we have highlighted in this report. Moreover, while any estimates of the benefits that will accrue to the UK economy and society are similarly subject to much uncertainty, it is clear that the benefits will be real and substantial. In short, we believe that the investments necessary to improve the current research communications system will yield significant returns in improving the efficiency of research, and in enhancing its impact for the benefit of the UK.
8.45. But we do not believe that it would be reasonable to expect universities and related research institutions to meet all of the additional costs of the fundamental change we recommend without support from the public purse and other sources. Funds to allow for the necessary additional expenditure could be released in a number of ways: through the provision of additional money from the public purse; by moves to reduce the burden on VAT levied on e-journals; by diversion of funds from other features of the research process towards the costs of publication and dissemination; or by bearing down on the costs of publishers and other intermediaries. We believe that there is scope to release funds through all those routes, and we share the Wellcome Trust’s firm contention that publication and dissemination should be regarded as an integral part of the research process itself, and should be funded as such.
8.46. But we also believe that it is important to look at the costs of publication, dissemination and access in the round, taking full account of the costs borne by, and the revenues supplied from and to, all the agents in the system; and that there
- ↑ As we have noted, the annual running costs of UKPMC are around £600k; and that does not include the costs of ingest of articles deposited by publishers.
