In today’s post, which was originally posted on the Penn Libraries Blog, Penn Libraries and Penn Press colleagues take time to consider the many different financial, human, and environmental costs associated with creating and sharing knowledge. This post is written by Jocelyn Dawson (Director of Journals, University of Pennsylvania Press), Matthew Hunter (Head of Digital Scholarship), and Stephen Wolfson (Assistant General Counsel/Copyright Advisor).
International Open Access Week is here once again.
Every year at the end of October (Oct. 19–25 this year), we take a moment to think about the benefits of offering our scholarly and creative works to the world for anyone to use, reuse, and remix without having to worry about barriers like copyright or cost. This year’s theme for Open Access Week, “The Cost of Knowledge,” calls for us to reflect on the many dimensions to the costs of creating and distributing knowledge. Addressing the obstacles to accessing, using, and building on scholarly research is fundamental to the open access (OA) movement, and OA Week this year asks us to consider these barriers, think about who benefits from the ways that knowledge is disseminated, and discuss how we can we make this system more equitable.
In this spirit, the Penn Libraries is taking time to consider the many different financial, human, and environmental costs associated with creating and sharing knowledge. The economic costs of journal subscriptions and the labor and time costs required of authors, editors, and publishers to produce scholarly works may be some of the most obvious, but there are others. As examples, OA Week asks, “What is the cost of excluding much of the world’s population from equitable participation in producing, sharing, and sustaining their knowledge or of failing to recognize Indigenous Data Sovereignty?” and, “Why are researchers’ works being licensed for proprietary AI training without consent or compensation?” Indeed, there are costs involved with not openly sharing scholarly knowledge with the world: we never know when and where the next amazing discovery may come from.
Libraries and the invisible cost of open access publishing
Many of the costs associated with publishing—especially in the digital environment—are related to the production and hosting of the content in question. As previously mentioned, this also includes the labor considerations of editorial and production activity, recognized at the very outset of the OA movement. It has long been the assumption that scholars share their work with no expectation of direct compensation. Likewise, peer reviewers and editors are often uncompensated. But the work of coordinating peer review, copy- and layout editing, and the various administrative tasks necessary to market, disseminate, and promulgate new scholarship to discovery and access points are where the costs of open access are well and truly borne, and are those which OA Week 2026 asks us to interrogate.
In the library publishing context, this labor is sometimes or often provided for freeto publication partners as a regular part of library services. This is the case for the Research Data & Digital Scholarship (RDDS) team, which provides publication hosting services for emerging journals, experimental monographs, and bespoke digital scholarship projects through a suite of tools and services such as scholarly publication platforms, web hosting, and custom-developed websites. We also support the sustainable sharing, preservation, and management of underlying research data through services such as DOI minting, institutional repository hosting, data management plan reviews, and data curation. And while these services are “free” in the sense that authors and publication partners are not charged for our services and that we are proud to provide cost-free access to readers and users (a key point in the development of the open access initiative from its outset), this does not mean they are cost-free to produce. The services provided to our publishing partners cost tens of thousands of dollars per year in software licensing and hosting contracts alone, not to mention staff salary time for management and maintenance. Beyond this, once works are published, they are often sent through a highly complex route of cataloging, indexing, and discovery services that require even more staff hours across various arms of the library to coordinate and enact. Then there are additional infrastructural costs for licensed software, server hosting, IT administration, and more, just to make the content available for use.
Preservation and continued access to these works also incurs continued costs for server space, software maintenance, hosting subscriptions, and staff time to update and maintain things like Penn’s institutional repository ScholarlyCommons or other digital preservation software. These services are part and parcel of the expected business of libraries, and core to the function and duty of our work. However, since these services are often not part of a cost-recovery scheme and are usually thought of as things libraries do anyway, they don’t typically receive special funds that effectively cover the additional costs and labor that are required to expand into publishing services. Thus, they must rely on funds that the library normally receives. By challenging us to consider the entire cost of OA, this year’s Open Access Week theme may hopefully shed light on the true value of the broader landscape of OA publishing services that are offered and supported by libraries, and make clear the massive return on investment this achieves in the sharing and preservation of our institution’s intellectual, cultural, and scholarly record.
The economics of university press open access publishing
At the University of Pennsylvania Press, where we publish around 90 scholarly books and 30 journals each year, OA is a key component of our mission to bring our researchers’ work to a wide global audience. At the same time, we must prioritize economic sustainability for the Press when considering OA business models for our titles. We consider not only how the publication will cover its direct costs (typesetting, copyediting, copyright registration, etc.) but also the overhead that the Press will expend on the title. While we, like many university presses, receive funding from the university, this money does not cover all the costs of doing business. Our overhead includes staff salaries (business department, acquisitions, production, marketing, intellectual property, digital operations, administration); fulfillment services; online hosting; rent; office supplies; and more.
We take a variety of approaches to identifying financially-sound paths to OA. Our books program offers open access options on a book-by-book basis. We also offer a broad range of options to support open access academic journals. We support Green OA by allowing the deposit of the author’s accepted manuscript into institutional or discipline-specific repositories, as well as Gold OA, where the author pays an article processing charge (APC) to make the final, published version of the article available OA.
In the Diamond OA model, content is made available at no cost to readers or authors. The 11 Diamond OA titles on our list are supported via the following methods:
- Several titles receive full funding from a sponsor, often a university-based center or department.
- Five journals participate in Project MUSE’s Subscribe to Open Program, which opens current content without APCs if Project MUSE reaches its revenue goals for the MUSE Premium package.
- Two journals participate in the Open Access Community Investment Program, a library-based crowdsourcing model.
- Three journals participate in the Open Journals Collective, a collective of libraries and university-based publishers committed to Open Access.
When many people think of publishing, they think of editorial work like copyediting and proofreading. However, those of us whose job it is to manage and expand our open access offerings are constantly crunching numbers, creating financial models, and looking for new funding. All of this work is in service of the same goal: making sure that high-quality, vetted scholarship makes its way to as large an audience as possible.
Open Access Week at the Penn Libraries
Ultimately, OA Week this year reminds us not to take our access to scholarly research and knowledge for granted and to think about the costs of creating and publishing those works and of OA broadly. Without openly addressing the types of questions that the theme of this year’s OA Week presents, the movement cannot achieve what its founding ideals promised – more equitable access to information and knowledge for everyone.
It’s with this goal in mind that the Penn Libraries continues to support sustainable open access publishing models. Recently, with the advent of larger publishers’ “Read and Publish” agreements, the Penn Libraries has successfully negotiated allowances with specific publishers that afford authors the ability to publish their work OA without additional fees or hoops to jump through. If you are interested in checking to see if one of our agreements covers your intended place of publication, see the Libraries’ helpful guide.
Likewise, RDDS offers some options for hosting scholarly publications through services such as Manifold (for journals, monographs, or expansive digital publications), Scalar (through our Domain of One’s Own service, and for long-form exploratory and multimedia-friendly works), and more. For more information about the services we offer for free scholarly self-publication, contact RDDS for a publication consultation at LibraryRDDS@pobox.upenn.edu.
Later this month, we are hosting a ton of excellent events that will explore the economics of OA and other issues. This year, our keynote speaker is Christopher Marcum. Marcum is an expert in federal data policy, open science, and scientific integrity and was essential to the creation of the 2022 Memorandum of Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research (often know as the Nelson Memo) that directed federal agencies to make scholarly works that came from federal grants freely available to the public. His talk, Two Truths and a Lie: Public Access Policy, Publishing, and Pilfering, will be at 2:30pm on October 22, 2206. You can find more information about this and our other OA Week events on our website.
