TA achievements
5. TAs manage costs
“There are only certain parameters that are going to work for our members at Lyrasis and cost containment is absolutely top of the list.
Our institutions are not in a position to put a lot more money on the table than they have ever spent before to further the cause of open access. They’re very clear that the transition has to be done within the budgets that they already have to spend.”
Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis
TAs provide institutions with a practical way to transition from subscriptions towards OA. By enabling a comprehensive view on OA publishing and centralising costs from across member institutions, TAs help constrain the costs of OA while also providing greater transparency. The challenge of “APCs in the wild”—uncoordinated and unpredictable article processing charges—has been significant in the past18. TAs address this by providing a more transparent and predictable framework for OA publishing.
“We looked at our colleague’s analysis of the publications in the previous three years. Based on that, we calculated the shares within the consortium: who is publishing how much? And based on that, we had these two criteria: the input of money and the publications and then we calculated the formula.”
Tatjana Intihar, Head of Acquisitions and Interlibrary Loan, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
TAs are not just about cost management; they are also driving cost avoidance. TAs offer member institutions a route to provide their researchers with funds for OA while maintaining subscription access at a predictable and scalable cost. Although for some larger member institutions, there may be overall cost increases, TAs offer stability and flexibility based on their budgets. Other institutions have benefited from significant savings compared to the costs they would previously have incurred for subscriptions and separate OA payments.
“The savings are quite massive, we are saving millions of Rand. In the previous quarter, it was more than half a million that we have saved just from January to May.”
Luyolo Matabeni, Senior Librarian, Nelson Mandela University
To learn more about how TAs are enabling a global shift towards OA, click on each achievement below.
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