'Total cost of ownership' of scholarly communication: managing subscription and APC payments together

Managing subscription journals and open access charges together has created challenges which may in part be dealt with by offsetting the two revenue streams against each other. In order to do this, it is necessary to have reliable financial data about the extent of the two interacting markets. Jisc Collections has been undertaking data collection regarding universities’ article publication charge (APC) expenditure. This process is difficult without a standardized way of recording data, so Jisc Collections has developed a standard data collection template and is helping institutions to release data openly. If available data become more comprehensive and transparent, then all parties (libraries, publishers, research funders, and intermediaries) will have better knowledge of the APC market and can more accurately predict the effects of offsetting. Introduction Libraries are facing a new challenge as academic publishing transitions from subscription to open access funding models. This article and the work it describes make an assumption that this transition is underway, because the growth rate of open access continues to rise steadily1. For the time being, however, we are dealing with a mixed environment in which subscriptions still play an important role and are responsible for the majority of institutions’ expenditure on scholarly communication. The fact that any funding models for open access need to emerge within this context leads to a certain amount of complexity which publishers, libraries, and research funders are all trying to find a way through. While there are various ways of providing open access, the payment of article publication charges (APCs) for publication in open access journals is one method that many institutions are finding is growing quickly, especially in the UK due to the implementation of policies from research funders such as Research Council UK (RCUK) and the Wellcome Trust. The responsibility for managing APCs is often given to an institution’s library (although this is not always the case and in some institutions the library is working more closely with the research office than it has done before). Libraries therefore now have to manage the payment of APCs alongside their traditional role of managing subscriptions, even though budgets and staffing capacity have not always risen accordingly. Part of the work of Jisc Collections is to negotiate deals with publishers on behalf of the furtherand highereducation library community in the UK. Now that libraries are paying for both subscription and APCs, Jisc Collections has been including both elements in its negotiations. The costs of subscription and APC-funded open access articles are linked because both revenue streams are being paid to the same companies and funded from the same source, i.e. library budgets. Research funder grants © Stuart Lawson 2015 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License