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their own policies and funding arrangements, which will provide incentives for them to shift funds from library budgets to the payment of APCs, and to bear down on the cost of those payments.
7.28. That flexibility is particularly important in allowing universities to deal with publications arising from the large proportion of research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, which is undertaken without any dedicated funding from external sources. In that case the university would still have to meet the costs of APCs from QR block grant and other sources available to it; and for a university where a high proportion of research is in the humanities and social sciences, the cost implications could be significant. An analysis of the impact on a research-intensive university is presented at Annex F.
Extensions to licensing
7.29. Subscriptions for licences for journals are the only route through which users can get access free at the point of use to the articles they publish that are not accessible either through a repository or through an open access or hybrid journal. Institutions from across all sectors in the UK paid in 2010 some £150m for such licences. Licensed access has increased enormously in the past decade, but as we saw in Section 4, it remains patchy across the UK, particularly outside the HE community and some parts of the large corporate and health sectors. The licensing system currently falls far short of providing ‘universal access’ to all citizens and organisations in the UK. However, since UK researchers are responsible for only 6% of the global total of such articles, and an immediate or even rapid global shift to a wholly open access environment seems unlikely, licensing will remain a key route to access at least for the short to medium term. In order to increase access, therefore, it will be important to secure some extensions to current licensing regimes.
7.30. There are three key dimensions to any such extensions to licensed access: the numbers of individuals and organisations within and across different sectors who have access to licensed content; the volumes of content—both journals and articles[1]—to which they have access; and the rights that users have once they gain access to the content. We consider each of those dimensions below.
Higher Education
7.31. No single university purchases licensed access to all the c25k journals and the 1.9m articles published worldwide each year. Staff and students in the largest and most research-intensive universitiesenjoy licensed access to a high proportion of them, especially those covering the subject areas in which they are active. For staff and students of other institutions, however, the amount of content to which they
- ↑ It is important to note that the profile of journal titles and articles is skewed: roughly a third of titles are responsible for 80% of published articles; and 50% of titles for 90% of articles. Steven Hall (2010): A commentary on ‘The economic implications of alternative publishing models’, Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, 28:1, 73-84
