The Scholarly Communications Team estimates that staff at the University of Edinburgh write, edit or contribute to over 500 books annually and the Library aspires to hold two copies of each of these books (one for general loan, one for preservation).  In light of this aspiration, Edinburgh University Library has developed a policy relating to the acquisition of institutionally authored books, which encourages staff to donate two copies to the library, wherever this is possible.

Today we received our first donations under this policy, Performing Civility by Dr Lisa McCormick.  Lisa generously sent two copies to the Scholarly Communications Team, which has checked that there is a record of the research output on PURE.  The print copies have now been sent for cataloguing and should be available very shortly.

Congratulations to Lisa, firstly on her publication and secondly for being the first to donate copies of books under this new policy!

Dominic Tate, Scholarly Communications Manager. 

Thanks to a major digitisation project being undertaken by Library & University Collections we are proud to announce our 10,000th open access item has recently been deposited in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA).

ERA is a digital repository of original research produced at The University of Edinburgh. The archive contains documents written by academic authors, based or affiliated with Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by any other organisations (for example commercial publishers). Holdings include full-text digital doctoral theses [6150], masters dissertations [950], project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials. Current research produced by the University is available from the research portal, which has 101,860 records, of which 28,220 have open access documents attached.

Since 2005 the majority of PhD theses issued by the University have been submitted in a digital format, and around 20 recently completed PhD theses are added each week. Our digitisation activities seek to make accessible older unique content which is only available onsite in the Special Collections reading rooms. The oldest University of Edinburgh thesis archived in ERA was originally published in 1819.

Photo courtesy of Images_of_Money

Over the last few weeks I’ve been preparing and reviewing various compliance and financial reports for funding agencies on their annual open access block grants awarded to our institution. One of the benefits of having sets of large data in front of you is that you start seeing trends and think of mildly* interesting things to do with it.

(* I say mildly because “The best thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else“, which is one of the many reasons it is important to make your data open.)

Sequentially issued invoices

One of the things I’ve noticed is that one of the larger publishers (Elsevier) issues sequential invoices of the form W1234567 and 12345CV0. If we had enough invoices spread over a reasonable period of time we could estimate what their hybrid open access revenue is during that time period, and potentially extrapolate further. Just to be clear I’ve only picked Elsevier because they are the publisher that we have gathered the most information about open access expenditure due to their large market share.

Invoices issued from the European office

I looked through our admin records and noted invoice # W1274177 was issued on 30 April 2015 whilst invoice # W1300445 was issued on 22 October 2015. During this 175 day period there appears to be 26,268 invoices issued by the publishers European Corporate Office, which works out at about 150 APCs per day for their portfolio of hybrid journals.

Our average APC in 2014/15 (n=65) for this publisher is £2066.81 so their revenue for this period was in the region of £54,290,965, or an APC daily revenue of £310,234.

Invoices issued from the North American office

The publishers also issues invoices of the form 12345CV0 from their North American Corporate Office. Noting that invoice 11795CV1 was issued on 19th May 2015 and invoice 12306CV0 was issued on 15th October 2015 this suggests that 511 APCs were charged over the 149 day period, or around 3 APCs per day.

Using the same average APC (£2066.81) as before this gives us an estimate revenue of £1,056,140 during the time period, or £7,088 per day.

Note that the invoices issued from the regional offices do not reflect the revenue generated in that geographical area.

Global APC revenue

The combined daily APC revenue from the European and North American offices is in the region of £317,322. If we upscale this to a full year we can infer an annual APC revenue in the region of £115,822,530. This sounds like a hell of a lot of money, but put into perspective against the company’s total 2014 revenue of £5,773M (figure from the RELX Group annual report) this represents only 2% of their business income.

Assumptions

These are rough and ready calculations and should be taken with a pinch of salt because I make a number of assumptions including:

1. The invoices really are sequentially issued
2. No other types of transactions (e.g. journal subscriptions) are included in the invoicing sequence
3. We have large enough data set to infer an annual revenue
4. Daily APC rate is a good enough estimate

UPDATE

Stuart Lawson pointed out on Twitter that this estimate is likely to be on the high side:

The JISC-funded Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland (ERIS) was left with some money underspent. University of Edinburgh’s proposal on how use the remaining money to the best possible effect for Scottish HEIs was the Open Access Toolkit for Scotland (OATS). The main objective was to produce a video which included interviews with well-regarded, pro-open access academics from a range of universities in Scotland.

Over several weeks in February, March and April – myself, the filmmaker Marie Liden and her cameraman Nick – met and interviewed Open Access enthusiast academics from Strathclyde University, St Andrews University, Stirling University and the Scottish Agricultural College. In total we interviewed 11 academics and librarians and recorded over 240 minutes of footage out of which, after editing and post-production, only 17 were used for the final video (which is still a wee bit too long). The film was presented at the Repository Fringe Conference (30 & 31 July @ Informatics Forum) and the feedback was very encouraging.

“Producing” a (short) film for the first time was quite a steep learning curve and I started to enjoy it only towards the end. Undoubtedly, we had our fair share of ‘strange’ moments like when we were interviewing one researcher in this beautiful, old meeting room, but where it was impossible to move at all since even shifting your body weight from one leg to the other would make the floor squeak and ruin the shoot!

See the video at Open Access in Scottish Universities

Eugen Stoica – Scholarly Communications Team