Cost monitoring Open Access
As part of a preliminary study, the Digital Sustainability Lab investigated the possibility of a cost survey for open access publications for the Swiss Library Service Platform.
Factsheet
- Schools involved Business School
- Institute(s) Institute for Public Sector Transformation
- Research unit(s) Digital Sustainability Lab
- Duration 01.06.2024 - 31.12.2024
- Head of project Prof. Dr. Marcel Gygli
- Project staff Prof. Dr. Marcel Gygli
- Keywords Open Science, Open Access
Situation
Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP) already operates the Swiss Open Access Monitor (https://oam.oamonitor.ch/). This tracks the number of publications that are published Open Access in scientific journals. Currently, the additional costs associated with this are not recorded. This is the starting point for this preliminary study. The aim is to investigate whether and how a publication can be assigned the most accurate price possible based on open data. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Course of action
In a first step, we evaluated various platforms that provide open data on publications. In this context, we looked in particular at OpenAlex (https://openalex.org) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/). Both of these platforms provide so-called Article Processing Charges (APC) for publications. These APCs do not always correspond to the actual costs paid, as transformative agreements may apply. However, they provide an upper limit of how much costs may have been incurred. This data can be obtained via an Application Programming Interface (API). Based on this, a prototype was implemented that can collect the costs for some of the publications recorded in the Open Access Monitor.
Result
The prototype implementation has shown that such an allocation of costs would be possible in principle. This is taking into account the fact that the calculated costs contain a certain degree of imprecision. These results were made available to SLSP, which wrote a final report based on them for the attention of Swiss Universities.
