5 September 2023
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD $299,454 from the National Science Foundation to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data.
The Nelson Memo from the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy incentivizes national adoption of open science practices and aims to ensure all Americans benefit from ready, immediate, and free access to federally funded research. Even when those digital research outputs are free for users, there are significant costs involved with their creation, publication and management. How much are these costs? And who should pay for them?
In a publishing market notorious for extractive practices and perpetuation of inequities in knowledge production and dissemination, public access to research could come at a steep and uneven price to researchers and research institutions. Without clear guardrails, these costs are likely to be passed on to taxpayers by including publishing fees in research project budgets as “allowable expenses”.
This new NSF-sponsored research project from IOI seeks to gather the information needed about publishing costs in order to provide a foundation to address these concerns. Over the course of the next two years, they will seek to deepen our understanding of the true cost of “public access” publishing today for prevalent science publication formats (including articles and data), how much research institutions are spending in anticipation of compliance with public access mandates, and how similar or different the approaches and choices are for research institutions of different tiers and demographics.
To conduct this research, IOI will work with with existing open data sources (e.g., Crossref, OpenAlex, Unpaywall, DataCite) and directly with key stakeholders, including research institutions (of various tiers and demographics), scholarly societies, publishers, libraries, and data repositories. According to Dr. Martin Halbert, NSF Science Advisor for Knowledge Management and Public Access, “We believe this project will shed light on the issue of equitable public access to taxpayer funded research outputs, such as data and articles. It is very important to ensure that the cost of public access is assessed comprehensively, examining the tooling and service options in addition to different business models that are utilized.”
“We are thrilled to have the support of the National Science Foundation to help us deepen our understanding of the costs associated with public access mandates,” said Katherine Skinner, Research Lead at IOI. “This is a timely project and we see this work as vital to understanding the impact of such policies across the sector.”