Economic benefits of opening up federally funded research in the US

[From the SPARC press release]

Delivering timely, open, online access to the results 
of federally funded research in the United States will significantly 
increase the return on the public’s investment in science, according 
to a new study by John Houghton at the Centre for Strategic Economic 
Studies at Victoria University. The study, “The Economic and Social 
Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research 
Outputs,” co-authored by Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan, was 
released today by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic 
Resources Coalition).

Public funding of scientific, technical, and medical research assumes 
that economic and social returns to taxpayers will exceed the amount 
of the research investment. A proposal currently before the U.S. 
Congress – the Federal Research Public Access Act, H.R. 5037 and S. 
1373 (FRPAA) – seeks to ensure and maximize the public’s return by 
delivering open online access to the results of research funded 
through 11 federal agencies no later than six months after publication 
in a journal. The Victoria University study outlines one approach to 
measuring the potential impact of this policy on returns on public 
investment in research and development (R&D).

The new study examines the effect of key variables that influence the 
potential return on investment from this research.  These variables 
concern both access to research – including content embargoes – and 
the efficiency with which research is applied in practice.  The study 
also defines the additional data and model developments necessary for 
an accurate estimate of the policy’s likely impact.

Depending on the assumed cost of data repositories, the study’s 
preliminary models suggest that FRPAA’s enactment could lead to a 
return on the public’s investment of between four and 24 times the 
costs. Two thirds of this return would accrue within the United 
States, with the remainder spilling over to other countries.  In the 
U.S., the study suggests that the benefits of public access might 
total between three and 16 times the cost of the public’s investment.

The study closely examines the model’s sensitivity to critical 
assumptions and concludes that the benefits of public access would 
exceed the costs over a wide range of values.  As the study’s authors 
note, “[I]t is difficult to imagine any plausible values for the input 
data and model parameters that would lead to a fundamentally different 
answer.”

“It's important that discussions about the risks and benefits of 
public access to government-funded research focus on empirical 
evidence and rational argument,” added Raym Crow, SPARC Senior 
Consultant. “The model Houghton and his colleagues have developed 
facilitates such a logical approach and provides a framework for 
assessing objectively the economic effect of various scenarios.”

The report's findings are based on available evidence. To enable 
others to explore the modeling, an online model is available from http://www.cfses.com/FRPAA
. The full study, “The Economic and Social Returns on Investment in 
Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs,” is available on the 
SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/vuFRPAA/index.shtml