Costs and Benefits of Alternative Publishing Models: Denmark

John Houghton (1)

1 Victoria University [Melbourne]

A knowledge economy has been defined as one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activities (DTI 1998). Scholarly publishing plays a key role as it is central to the efficiency of research and to the dissemination of research findings and diffusion of scientific and technical knowledge. But advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional publishing models, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control and publish information. One key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that might better serve researchers and more effectively communicate and disseminate research findings (OECD 2005, p14). Building on previous work, this study looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scientific and scholarly publishing. The work began in Australia in 2006 with a study of Research Communication Costs, Emerging Opportunities and Benefits (Houghton et al. 2006). This was followed by a major study of the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK (Houghton et al. and Oppenheim et al. 2009). The aim of this study is to apply the same basic approach to exploring the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scholarly publishing in Denmark.

Keywords: Publishing models; Library; report

Domains: Library and information sciences

John Houghton. Costs and Benefits of Alternative Publishing Models: Denmark. 2009. ⟨hprints-00429478⟩