The Cost of Open Access Publishing: Wellcome Trust Publishes Progress Report

From The Wellcome Trust Blog:

The Wellcome Trust recently published details of how much it spent on open access publishing in the year 2012-2013 in an attempt to make the debate around the costs of open access publishing more evidence-based. The data we released fuelled much discussion online and Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services at the Wellcome Library, gives an update…
As well as enriching the data, crowdsourcing has highlighted examples where publishers have not, for whatever reason, made articles freely available, and where biases in the publishing system are leading to very high open access charges. These are both issues that we want to address head on.
At the Wellcome Trust we are keen proponents of openness and transparency so we published details of our spending on open access publishing, (as reported by UK institutions and the Trust’s Major Overseas Programmes who are in receipt of an open access block grant) for 2012-13. Within a few hours of releasing this data we were pleased that the web community were working to enhance and normalise it. The version now available through Google Docs is far richer than the original dataset, and includes additional data elements such as DOI’s, licence terms and impact factor.
As well as enriching the data, crowdsourcing has highlighted examples where publishers have not, for whatever reason, made articles freely available, and where biases in the publishing system are leading to very high open access charges. These are both issues that we want to address head on.
As well as enriching the data, crowdsourcing has highlighted examples where publishers have not, for whatever reason, made articles freely available, and where biases in the publishing system are leading to very high open access charges. These are both issues that we want to address head on.

Read the Complete Progress Report including “Elsevier: A Case Study”
See Also: Wellcome Trust Open Access Spending Data 2012-2013 (via Figshare)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Elsevier, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing