Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)

[John Houghton <John.Houghton@vu.edu.au>]

Dear Sally, et al.
 
In our recent report to the Australian Department of Education, 
Science and Training we attempted to explore the costs of 
scholarly communication in Higher Education in Australia at the 
system level (in the manner of the pioneering work of Don King 
and Carol Tenopir), and then explore the possible impacts of 
enhanced access to research findings - of any sort (e.g. 
publications, data, etc.) and by any mechanism (e.g. lower 
prices, open access, etc.). For the former we developed a cost 
model from an extensive review of the literature and some local 
consultation, and for the latter we tried to develop the standard 
neoclassical growth model, by introducing 'access' and 
'efficiency' as negative variables, as a way to explore the 
impacts of increasing access and efficiency on returns to 
expenditure on R&D.

It's preliminary work, but one has to start somewhere.

The assumptions are discussed at length in the report: 
 
the cost calculations and all assumptions are discussed on pp 
11-29, and are based on the literature review that appears as 
Appendix I on pp 61-89; and the impact model and calculations are 
discussed on pp 31-47, and are based on the literature review 
that appears as Appendix II on pp 90-107. I'm afraid we could not 
make it shorter than that... not least because the issues are not 
simple.

In recognition of the importance and complexity of the issues, a 
number of us got together in New York last March to try to scope 
a research agenda that might progress the debate As a part of 
this work, we are hoping to improve on our first attempts (e.g. 
by tying our access and efficiency variables to measured impacts, 
such as relative citation rates), as well as exploring various 
other ways of "calculating" the potential impacts of enhanced 
access to research findings.

If anyone is interested in this work, please feel free to join 
in... and/or send a donation to the address below ;-)

Regards
John Houghton
Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES)
Victoria University, Melbourne AUSTRALIA
E-mail: John.Houghton@vu.edu.au


Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:

I'm afraid I am puzzled by some of the basic assumptions in 
John's work on calculating the 'upside' of OA. Could he please 
explain them in words of one syllable?

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)

----- Original Message -----
From: John Houghton 
Date: Monday, January 8, 2007 7:39 pm
Subject: Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and
useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)

Sally, The access and download costs are pretty cheap, but to 
maximise economic and social welfare we need the most cost 
effective system, not (necessarily) the cheapest. So the issue is 
whether there are access options that are more cost effective.

Our recent research suggests that OA would probably be more cost 
effective because of its potentially substantial impacts/benefits 
(e.g. increased accessibility leading to higher returns to 
investment in research).

Whether or not it would be cheaper depends on a full 
understanding of what costs to include... To date, we have only 
compared the additional costs of a parallel system of 
institutional repositories with the potential additional benefits 
from enhanced access and efficiency, everything else remaining 
the same (i.e. the green road).

In that limited context and under a number of plausible 
assumptions (including that the OA items are discoverable), for 
higher education research in Australia we estimated that the 
benefits of OA could amount to around 30 times the cost of a 
system of higher education institutional repositories, over 20 
years (ceteris paribus).

There are, of course, many other possible costs and benefits to 
consider in any full account of system-wide costs and benefits, 
and there is also the issue of where the costs fall and benefits 
accrue. To date, we're just scratching the surface... OA may cost 
more, but if the benefit/cost ratio is higher it would enhance 
net welfare.

Regards, John Houghton
Centre  for Strategic Economic Studies
Victoria University,
AUSTRALIA
_________________________


Sally Morris wrote:

This looks to me like fantastically good value.

****