As open‐access ( OA ) publishing funded by article‐processing charges ( APCs ) becomes more widely accepted, academic institutions need to be aware of the “total cost of publication” (TCP), comprising subscription costs plus APCs and additional administration costs. This study analyzes data from 23 UK institutions covering the period 2007–2014 modeling the TCP . It shows a clear rise in centrally managed APC payments from 2012 onward, with payments projected to increase further. As well as evidencing the growing availability and acceptance of OA publishing, these trends reflect particular UK policy developments and funding arrangements intended to accelerate the move toward OA publishing (“ G old” OA ). Although the mean value of APCs has been relatively stable, there was considerable variation in APC prices paid by institutions since 2007. In particular, “hybrid” subscription/ OA journals were consistently more expensive than fully OA journals. Most APCs were paid to large “traditional” commercial publishers who also received considerable subscription income. New administrative costs reported by institutions varied considerably. The total cost of publication modeling shows that APCs are now a significant part of the TCP for academic institutions, in 2013 already constituting an average of 10% of the TCP (excluding administrative costs).

Excerpta Medica abstracting journals: a case study of costs to medical school libraries. A cost comparison study was made of Excerpta Medica's abstracting journals, based upon actual costs to a library. Unit costs were determined for six sections of EM as compared with six corresponding abstract journals. On average, EM sections were found to be 138% more costly than corresponding abstract journals. The effects of splitting of EM journal titles were also analyzed. This practice increases the price of a total subscription to EM and makes comprehensive information retrieval more difficult. A survey of medical school librarians as users of EM points to dissatisfaction with its increasing price, particularly when it results from title splitting. Published in Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (1977)

not seem to have measurably affected the market for subscriptions to the plaintiff's journals. Chief Judge Arnold Wilson Cowen, joined by Robert Lowe Kunzig American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60 F.3d 913, was a 1995 U.S. copyright case holding that a private, for-profit corporate library could not rely on fair use in systematically making copies of articles in academic journals for its employees. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a ruling by Judge Pierre Leval of the U.S. District Court for the South The parties stipulated that the fair-use question would be contested on eight pieces—four articles, two notes, and two letters to the editor—from the Journal of Catalysis, published at the time by Academic Press (now part of Elsevier). The research center library received three subscriptions to it, at a cost of almost $2,500 ($6,000 in current dollars) annually. They were kept in the file of one Texaco researcher, Donald Chickering, a PhD in chemical engineering who studied catalysis, the process by which small amounts of an additional chemical can speed up a reaction. His job consisted of designing and conducting experiments in the labs. simply… The copyright law celebrates the profit motive, recognizing that the incentive to profit from the exploitation of copyrights will redound to the public benefit by resulting in the proliferation of knowledge ... The profit motive is the engine that ensures the progress of science. The principle is admirably demonstrated by the facts of this case. Through its ability to profit from its exclusive rights over the works assigned to it, Academic Press has expanded its range so that it publishes 105 scientific, medical and technical journals. The result is the progress of science; the means is the profit… At trial Leval found that Texaco's fair use defense failed on three of the four factors used to determine fair use. The copies were used for the same informational purpose as the original articles, and Leval did not find that the ability they gave the scientists to bring them into the lab or home was sufficiently transformative. The articles were copied in their entirety and adversely affected commercial opportunities for the publishers in the form of the lost revenue they otherwise would have made from licensing the photocopying and/or the sale of additional subscriptions to their journals. He looked instead to fair use, noting that the practice of photocopying in some way in libraries was at least half a century old, that the NIH and NLM limited the amount of copies a user could request per month, that they were not commercial entities but government agencies working towards the public good, and that the photocopying did not seem to have measurably affected the market for subscriptions to the plaintiff's journals. Chief Judge Arnold Wilson Cowen, joined by Robert Lowe Kunzig and Philip Nichols Jr., dissented, arguing the majority had placed too much emphasis on facts favoring the defense. The Act of 1976 did not include any specific provisions aimed at the bulk-photocopying issue that had been at the heart of Williams & Wilkins. So, in response to a recommendation from Congress when it had been considering and developing the legislation, academic journal publishers had formed the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in 1977 to administer a licensing and royalty system. Its Transactional Reporting System, established the following year, required that all subscribing institutions provide a report listing all the copies they made, which some found cumbersome. Leval was assigned to hear the case. Although the plaintiffs at the time of filing did not offer any evidence of infringement, he allowed the case to proceed on the grounds it was likely that it had, an unusual decision. The evidentiary record reached 31 bound volumes. In 1992 Leval rejected Texaco's claim of fair use and held that it was infringing the journal's copyrights. === District court === The parties stipulated that "Texaco's argument, although ingenious, simply does not fit the facts of the case." Lastly, Texaco had likened its photocopying to that upheld as fair use in Williams & Wilkins, arguing that its scientists, too, were using the previously published research as building blocks for their own progress in advancing science. The company encouraged its scientists to publish their research in journals like those it photocopied from—pointing to 130 papers from them in the five years since the suit had been filed—and attend conferences; it also funded research at universities. The publishers might indeed have lost a few journal subscriptions, but as neither side had offered much in evidence either way, Newman did not see this area as offering much to help either side. Newman found stronger ground when considering the question in terms of the loss of photocopying licensing revenue. Leval had held this to favor the publishers, which Texaco said was error because it assumed that the publishers were entitled to that revenue, the question before the court. Jacobs reviewed the equitable-factors analysis again with an eye towards the ultimate goal of copyright: public good. For him it mattered that the authors of the journal articles had surrendered their copyrights, and with them any claim to royalties, to the publishers in order to assure maximum distribution and dissemination of their ideas. Cásarez called it "apples and oranges" to suggest that the hundreds of copies made by Texaco constituted greater potential infringement than the many home copies of previously broadcast programs; it was, to her, the other way around as millions of VCR users making one copy amounted to far more copies (which neither party resold). She also noted that the viewers taping programs had gotten them for free while Texaco had already paid for its subscriptions. To Cásarez, the case called for Congress to supplement fair use with a personal-use exemption.

Recent research has tried to calculate the “total cost of publication” in the British academic sector, bringing together the costs of journal subscriptions, the article processing charges (APCs) paid to publish open-access content, and the indirect costs of handling open-access mandates. This study adds an estimate for the other publication charges (predominantly page and colour charges) currently paid by research institutions, a significant element which has been neglected by recent studies. When these charges are included in the calculation, the total cost to institutions as of 2013/14 is around 18.5% over and above the cost of journal subscriptions—11% from APCs, 5.5% from indirect costs, and 2% from other publication charges. For the British academic sector as a whole, this represents a total cost of publication around £213 million against a conservatively estimated journal spend of £180 million, with non-APC publication charges representing around £3.6 million. A case study is presented to show that these costs may be unexpectedly high for individual institutions, depending on disciplinary focus. The feasibility of collecting this data on a widespread basis is discussed, along with the possibility of using it to inform future subscription negotiations with publishers.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. Abstract Open-access journals, which provide access to their scholarly articles freely and without limitations, are at a systematic disadvantage relative to traditional closed-access journal publishing and its subscription-based business model. A simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity could put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system. I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn't perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing—the open-access compact. The “consumers” of scholarly articles (the readers, typically faculty, students, and researchers at universities and other research institutions) are insulated from the cost of reading, that is, from the subscription fees paid by the institutions' research libraries. The expected result—inelasticity of demand and hyperinflation—can be amply seen in the statistics of serials costs paid by research libraries [1] . As subscription fees hyperinflate, libraries with budgets that at best merely match inflation must inevitably drop subscriptions, reducing access to the scholarly literature. The problem has been dramatically exacerbated by the current economic downturn. Such elimination of access is bad for the scholarly enterprise, and the threat of unsustainability of journals is especially worrisome given the invaluable services that they provide to scholars: logistical management of the peer review process, production services such as copyediting and typesetting, distribution and preservation, and filtering and imprimatur based on a journal's “brand.” But unlike access to medical care, where technological advances have dramatically increased the cost of access to state-of-the-art care (think MRI), The problem is, of course, that the US$1,500 article revenue to the journal that is provided by the processing fee under the processing-fee model is hidden in subscription charges in the subscription-fee model, and these are typically paid not by the authors, even in their role as readers of the journals, but on their behalf by subscribing research institutions, typically university research libraries. The authors don't see these charges; hence, they don't enter their economic calculus. Yet authors are now expected to pay these charges under the open-access processing-fee model. It is no wonder they might be expected to submit preferentially to closed-access journals. To mitigate this problem—to place open-access processing-fee journals on a more equal competitive footing with subscription-fee journals—requires those underwriting the publisher's services for subscription-fee journals to commit to a simple “compact” guaranteeing their willingness to underwrite them for processing-fee journals as well. The crucial underwriters are universities and funding agencies. Universities underwrite closed-access journals through the institutional subscriptions that they purchase. Funding agencies do so through the overhead charges that they provide to grantee institutions, a sizable (and specifically negotiated) fraction of which is applied to support of the libraries and thereby subscription fees again. Since both universities and funding agencies are (directly or indirectly) underwriting journal subscriptions, both should be involved in underwriting article-processing fees for open-access journals as well. The crucial property of the proposed compact is that the funds disbursed must be nonfungible, that is, applicable only to open-access processing fees. In the longer term, as publishers switch journals to an open-access processing-fee model, costs will increase, but these increases will be offset by the compensatory elimination of subscription fees and improvements in efficiency from repairing the market dysfunction that has plagued the subscription-based model, and will be accompanied by a broadening of access to scholarship that is central to the universities' and funding agencies' mission. Similarly, the cost to funding agencies can be managed as well. As costs begin to increase for open-access processing fees paid by a funder, compensatory decreases to grant overhead rates can be made to maintain cost neutrality. Publishers willing to take a risk will be met by universities and funding agencies willing to support their bold move. The new US administration could implement such a system through simple FRPAA-like legislation requiring funding agencies to commit to this open-access compact in a cost-neutral manner. Perhaps reimbursement would be limited to authors at universities and research institutions that themselves commit to a similar compact. As funding agencies and universities take on this commitment, we might transition to an efficient, sustainable journal publishing system in which publishers choose freely among business models on an equal footing, to the benefit of all.