Delivering timely, open, online access to the results of federally funded research in the US will significantly increase the return on the public's investment in science, according to a new study. Titled 'The Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs', it is authored by John Houghton at the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University, along with Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan. The study was released by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
Public funding of scientific, technical and medical research assumes that economic and social returns to taxpayers will exceed the amount of the research investment. A proposal currently before the US Congress - the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) - seeks to ensure and maximise the public's return by delivering open online access to the results of research funded through 11 federal agencies no later than six months after publication in a journal. The Victoria University study outlines one approach to measuring the potential impact of this policy on returns on public investment in research and development (R&D).
The new study examines the effect of key variables that influence the potential return on investment from this research. These variables concern both access to research - including content embargoes - and the efficiency with which research is applied in practice. The study also defines the additional data and model developments necessary for an accurate estimate of the policy's likely impact.
Depending on the assumed cost of data repositories, the study's preliminary models suggest that FRPAA's enactment could lead to a return on the public's investment of between four and 24 times the costs. Two-thirds of this return would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. In the US, the study suggests that the benefits of public access might total between three and 16 times the cost of the public's investment.
The study examines the model's sensitivity to critical assumptions and concludes that the benefits of public access would exceed the costs over a wide range of values. Its authors note that it is difficult to imagine any plausible values for the input data and model parameters that would lead to a fundamentally different answer.
The report's findings are based on available evidence. To enable others to explore the modeling, an online model is available from http://www.cfses.com/FRPAA. The full study is available on the SPARC website at http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers.
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