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

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

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 
E-mail: 

Sally Morris wrote:

This looks to me like fantastically good value.

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