Open Access: What are the Economic Benefits? A Comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark

Abstract

Building on previous work, this summary looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scientific and scholarly publishing in three European countries. The work began in Australia in 2006 with a study of Research Communication Costs, Emerging Opportunities and Benefits (Houghton et al. 2006). This was followed by a major study of the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK (Houghton et al. and Oppenheim et al. 2009). We have since applied the same basic approach to exploring the costs and benefits of alternative publishing models in the Netherlands (Houghton et al. 2009) and Denmark (Houghton 2009), giving a sense of the implications of open access scholarly publishing for one of the larger, a mid-sized and a smaller European country.

Keywords: Publishing Economics, Open Access, Costs and Benefits, Returns to R&D

JEL Classification: O32, O38