21 November 2014 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
The cost to the HE sector for complying with RCUK’s open-access policy was £9.2million in 2013/14, according to a recent report commissioned by London Higher and SPARC Europe. The report, Counting the Costs of Open Access, written by Research Consulting, also found that a further £11million was spent on processing charges (APCs). See the picture below for how the costs of compliance were distributed.
In addition, the report found that “the directly attributable costs to research organisations of the ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes to open access are £81 and £33 per article respectively”, while “at present, making an article open access through the gold route is more than twice as time-consuming and costly for research organisations as green, even before allowing for the cost of APCs”.
On the extra burden on staff time, “Benchmark figures of 1 additional administrative FTE per 1,500 repository deposits, or 1 FTE per 500 APCs, are suggested for most institutions to use in planning their future resource needs for open access. Larger institutions with multiple staff dedicated to OA administration could expect to process much higher numbers of articles per FTE”.
However the report suggests that there is scope to reduce some of these costs, through “Improvements in knowledge-sharing; Joint development of systems (in collaboration with third party vendors); Greater sharing of policies and procedures; and Automation of compliance reporting processes”.
