Towards Sustainable and Coordinated Methods for Estimating Open Access Costs at Canadian Higher Education Institutions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Higher education institutions in Canada aim to provide access to knowledge through subscriptions and investments in OA publishing.. As subscription and OA publication costs continue to increase, some institutions have established funds to support authors’ payment of publication fees. Others have adopted models such as read-and-publish deals or “transformative agreements”, where institutions pay publishers a lump sum for subscriptions and publishing fees for authors. As institutions continue to subscribe to journals, support authors with OA publishing, and negotiate agreements, accurately estimating institutional OA spending is imperative to determining the cost effectiveness of deals and necessary funding support for authors. Methods to estimate OA costs have largely developed in silos across the country. This commentary presents observations derived from work performed across Canada on the challenges accompanying OA estimation and calls for a more coordinated approach to establish standardized, sustainable methods. Calibrating efforts across institutions can support the development of reliable methodologies and streamline resources helpful for the more efficient performance of the often onerous task of estimating costs.
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Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchBibliometricsOpen science Domain: Incentives · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: yes · About a Canadian topic: yes | Not applicable | high |
| gpt | Scholarly communicationOpen science Domain: not available · Genre: Methods About the Canadian research system: yes · About a Canadian topic: yes | Theoretical or conceptual | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.041 | 0.056 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it