Two Years After: Cost Monitoring in Finland

For about ten years, the National Library of Finland and the FinELib consortium office (part of the National Library) have been monitoring Finland’s institutional expenditure to guide FinELib’s negotiations with publishers and to enable the administration of our existing agreements. Most major Finnish HEI’s now share their APC cost data with OpenAPC, while all Finnish HEI’s provide data for our national cost survey, conducted every second year since 2022 and designed to provide an up-to-date picture of the total costs of OA and publication to Finnish institutions. This presentation will provide an overview of the Finnish approach to cost monitoring, while offering some reflections onthe first two years of this exercise: what have we learned and what kind of changes have we made (or should make) to our approach? In addition, it will discuss the metrics used by FinELib to evaluate the value of transformative agreements, before concluding with some remarks on the principles of cost monitoring.