Building on previous work, this summary looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative open access models for scholarly publishing in the UK, Netherlands and Denmark – giving a sense of the implications for one of the larger, a mid-sized and a smaller European country. Analysis focuses on comparing three alternative models for scholarly publishing, namely: subscription publishing, open access publishing and self-archiving. To ensure that meaningful comparisons could be made, the self-archiving models explore d include the peer review, certification and quality control functions necessary for formal scholarly publishing. We estimate that in an open access world:
• Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles (i.e. ‘Gold OA’) might bring net system savings of around EUR 70 million per annum nationally in Denmark, EUR 133 million in the Netherlands and EUR 480 million in the U K (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity);
• Open access self-archiving without subscription cancellations (i.e. ‘Green OA’) might save around EUR 30 million per annum nationally for Denmark in a worldwide ‘Green OA’ system, EUR 50 million in the Netherlands and EUR 125 million in the UK; and
• The open access self-archiving with overlay services model explored is necessarily more speculative, but a repositories and overlay services model may well produce similar cost savings to open access publishing.
