Finnish Data on Costs Paid to Scientific Publishers
The Finnish Open Science and Research Initiative (ATT) collected data on the costs paid to scientific publishers in 2016, and found that:
- Finnish higher education institutes and research institutes paid last year 35 million euros for electronic material from scientific publishers;
- the biggest publisher, Elsevier, received over 10 million euros; and,
- the five biggest publishers received about 80 % of total publisher costs.
35 M€ to academic publishers, 10 M€ to Elsevier – #publishingcosts in Finland updated https://t.co/IvOJoTFdnJ #openscience #nodealnoreview pic.twitter.com/AMd694P8qg
— AvoinTiede (@AvoinTiede) June 19, 2017
The publisher cost data is available as open data licensed under CC BY 4.0 license, including academic publisher costs for 2010-2015.
The Finnish research community created a website called ‘no deal, no review’, as the Finnish library consortium (FinElib) seems willing to boycott Elsevier and not renew its subscriptions to Elsevier journals, unless Elsevier presents a fair deal. The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture outlined that the subscriptions contracts that are to be signed must significantly increase the opportunity for Finnish researchers to publish openly. A recent update on the negotiations with Elsevier show that the situation is not going in the right direction.
