Open access - costs and benefits

The April edition of CILIP Update reports on a new JISC report by Key Perspectives on scholarly communications – and finds that open access is likely to cost research-intensive HEIs more. However, the report also lists the benefits of open access to the HE sector: better accessibility of research information, savings from less duplication of research, reduction in plagiarism, facilitation of inter-disciplinary research. The last three of these are dependent on usage of open access publications and reaching a critical mass. The report also talks through scenarios of how open access might develop.