---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 12/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:05.253185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Access costs ===
Access to pre-existent research outputs such as publications, datasets or code is a major condition of research. The subscription model used to rely on the assumptions that researchers only need to access a few specialized publications. In practice, research is more unpredictible and frequently rely crossing methods and observations from different fields or even different disciplines. In 2011, a survey of JISC showed that 68% of UK researchers felt they did have a sufficiently wide access to journal and conference papers. Non-academic professional audiences experience difficulties in accessing directly relevant research: "a quarter of those in industry/commerce described their current level of access as fairly/very difficult" as "the main barrier was unwillingness to pay". A survey of business use of research in Denmark highlighted a large range of strategies to avoid the high cost of pay-per-view, especially through collaboration with academics that have institutional access. The impact of open access is amplified by the high degree of internationalization of research: "83% of the economic return on cancer research is drawn from research from non-UK sources" which are less likely to be accessible in a subscription-based model.
Beyond the extended coverage, Open science can enhance the efficiency of bibliographic search: "It can take longer for people to access closed research outputs than when access is open." Access to the full text is also a common bibliographic search strategies, since it will often reference other relevant publications. A case studies on knowledge workers shows that restrictions to access translate in significant costs in work-time: "knowledge-based SME employees spent on average 51 min to access the last research article they had difficulty accessing, and this rose to 63 min for university researchers."
The open science movement has also entailed the diffusion of new resources: open research data and software. In these cases, access was not limited or constrained by high prices but generally non-existent, as they were at most shared across research teams or institutions. Economic estimates of the impact of opening new research output are consequently more difficult, as there is no prior market. Several studies Houghton and Beagrie on the commercial use of major open data portals (Economic and Social Data Service, Archaeology Data Service, British Atmospheric Data Service and the European Bioinformatics Institute) attempted to circumvent the issue by estimating the "willingness to pay", as a proxy for the positive economic impact: how much would the company would agree to pay if the service became only accessible through subscriptions. In all the case, this "consumer surplus" was much higher than the cost needed to run the service (for instance, £21m per year for the Economic and Social Data Service against an operating cost of £3m, or £322m per year for the European Bioinformatics Institute against an operating cost of £47). For large repositories of data or publication, the consumer surplus may be even more significant on a long-term basis, as the value of the infrastructure and the potential benefits it brings becomes more important as the range of hosted outputs continues to expand: "data archives are appreciating rather than depreciating assets. Most of the economic impact is cumulative and it grows in value over time, whereas most infrastructure (such as ships or buildings) has a declining value as it ages. Like libraries, data collections become more valuable as they grow and the longer one invests in them, provided that the data remain accessible, usable, and used."