Combining different data monitors for more intentional policymaking: the case of Open Access at Utrecht University

Abstract

Over the past two decades, scholarly publishing has made a large shift towards Open Access, where research publications are made freely available to all rather than put behind paywalls to be bought back by university libraries. Large funding bodies such as NWO and ERC now require all output of funded research projects to be OA, and many universities in the Netherlands and Europe have formulated similarly ambitious goals. For researchers, this has led to new and additional considerations when it comes to deciding where to submit their research: traditional impact-based measures of journal quality now have to be weighed against the availability (and affordability) of OA options. For libraries and faculties, it means navigating the many ways of financing OA, which differ between journals and publishers. This requires balancing questions of academic values such as scientific quality and equity with an understandable desire for maximal financial efficiency. Of course, researcher choices and library (financial) policies feed into each other. One factor complicating this feedback loop is that neither side is completely transparent to the other. On the one hand, many OA-related costs are invisible to the researcher (for instance, the money spent by library consortia on discount deals with publishers). On the other, publication data such as obtained from a CRIS does not include any details on how these publications were financed, making it hard to see to which extent financial considerations influenced the...