Implementation
Total Costs of Open Access and Publication to Finnish Institutions are monitored as part of the monitoring of open science and research in Finland.
Approach
Currently, the monitoring covers subscriptions, transformative agreements, article and book processing charges (APCs and BPCs), printed materials, membership fees and voluntary contributions paid to OA infrastructure, institutions’ own scholarly OA publishing, costs of Green OA (self-archiving and institutional repositories), costs related to the implementation and management of OA, costs of OA management tools, and fees paid to Finnish scholarly journals.
Some of the above costs are not directly associated with open access but have, however, been included to provide insights into the repurposing of existing resources. Transformative agreements contain both subscription fees and costs for open access publication.
The approach has been devised by a task group working under the leadership of the National Library (FinELib) and consisting of experts from libraries and key stakeholders.
Data
Three types of data have been used: 1) Survey data collected by The Coordination of Open Science and Research (OScaR) in Finland through the monitoring of open science and research in Finland; 2) data obtained from the service unit of the FinELib Consortium; 3) OpenAPC data relating to Finnish institutions.
In interpreting the results, it is important to keep in mind that some of the costs have been provided in euros, while costs associated with the implementation and management of OA as well as those related to green OA have been provided in person work-years. The latter are estimates and the same may apply to costs provided in euros.
Also worth noting is that some of the institutions have not provided answers to all survey questions. Thus, a blank answer may suggest that an institution has not paid any fees in the given category or that the fees paid by it are, for some reason or another, not known.
Similarly, the fact that an institution has declared some costs does not necessarily imply that all costs in the given category have been declared. In particular, this applies to APCs, the monitoring of which still poses significant challenges to institutions.
Finally, the fees paid to Finnish scholarly journals are included in other cost types (subscriptions, APCs, membership fees etc.) but can be studied separately. A more detailed description of the approach used when collecting the data can be found in the survey manuals.
All data from the monitoring has been made openly available through Fairdata.fi.
