The University of Groningen (UG) Library conducted a financial investigation into its OA costs outside of the institutional R&P deals in 2022. This investigation showed that at least 1M€ per year is spent on Article Processing Charges outside of the deals. This is in addition to the 4M€ spent on R&P deals. The data was obtained via the financial system by downloading all invoices labeled as ‘publication costs’. This figure is a rough estimate, as the financial system is not set up in a way that allows these costs to be monitored accurately and without manual processing.As a follow-up to this exercise, the open access team looked at expenditure at the faculty level. Beside invoices retrieved via the financial system, an alternative data source (DataHub) and method was used. The results obtained via the two methods vary greatly. We expect the method based on invoices to be an underestimation of the expenditure, while the DataHub method is most likely an overestimation.This talk will outline the two methods used, the results obtained, as well as discuss the difficulties the UG encounters in monitoring these costs efficiently and accurately.Lastly, the presentation will outline our efforts to support open access books via a dedicated fund that partially covers BPCs. Here too, we are looking for ways to get a grip on what we spend our scarce resources on.
Leij et al. (Mon,) studied this question.