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HE sector would be that it would be unable to reduce its expenditure on subscriptions at the same rate as it increased its expenditure on APCs.
7.23. Under more pessimistic assumptions about take-up, with rates of adoption twice as high in the UK as in the rest of the world, the costs to the HE sector would be significant, particularly if the average level of APCs were to be high too. Our modelling suggests that if APCs were on average £2.2k, half of all UK-authored articles were published open access, but only a quarter in the rest of the world, and the UK paid the full APC for all articles with a UK author, the additional cost to the HE sector could be over £70m a year.
7.24. In a middle ground, we have modelled a scenario under which the average level of APCs is c£1.75k, the rates of adoption in the UK are (at least for a transition period) as much as twice those in the rest of the world, and the UK secures contributions from overseas towards the costs of APCs for at least half the articles published with international co-authors. Our estimate is that the additional costs to the HE sector if half of all UK-authored articles were to be published in open access or hybrid journals under this scenario would be of the order of £38m a year, allowing in addition to the figures presented in Annex E for some ‘stickiness’ in costs as universities have to maintain their expenditure on big deals and other licences even as their expenditure on APCs rises.
7.25. The cost implications for individual universities will vary, as we noted earlier, according to the extent to which they can recover the cost of APCs from the Research Councils and other external funders of research; their size and research-intensity; their mix of disciplines; and their current expenditure on the library and its contents.
7.26. The establishment at universities such as Nottingham of funds to meet APCs has led to some attempts to assess the point at which such funds might become financially sustainable for different universities.[1] But the scope for reducing expenditure on subscriptions without compromising levels of access is currently very limited; hence unless universities can recover their expenditure on APCs through the full economic costs they seek from research funders in grants for research projects,[2] their publication funds at present represent a drain on university resources.
7.27. That picture would change dramatically if the Research Councils were to establish, as they have signalled, new and flexible funding arrangements to meet APCs, especially if they were to stimulate other major research funders to act similarly. The essential point here is that the new arrangements should provide a sound basis on which universities could establish publication funds: and if all funders were to meet the full costs of APCs, the net cost to the university would be nil. But it is critically important that universities should be given sufficient scope to establish
