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Total cost of publishing and subscriptions at KTH 2020

Published Feb 09, 2022

Scientific publishing is a cost that has increased every year for a long time. However, there is an ongoing shift in how scientific articles are being published. Instead of paying for reading articles, we are paying for publishing articles. This shift will most likely lead to lower costs for the universities and more open access articles.

Every year, the National Library of Sweden compiles Swedish higher education institutions' expenditure on scientific literature and the publication of openly available research articles. A few weeks ago came the latest compilation (for 2020), where the total cost of all publication at KTH amounted to just over SEK 44 million.

Total cost is available at the National Library of Sweden
Total costs, from the largest universities (all are not included here).

Of these SEK 44 million that KTH spent on publishing, just under 28 million are costs for what are called transformative agreements, i.e. agreements including cost of both subscription and article publishing, and which apply to publishers intending to transition to full open access in the near future. About SEK 4,5 million are spent on local agreements with open access publishers and small publishers. The remaining amount has gone to subscription costs etc.

As a comparison with similar universities, Chalmers University of Technology has expenses of SEK 23 million (transformative agreements) and Lund University has expenses of SEK 41.5 million for transformative agreements.

Read more about transformative agreements

Read more about publishing open access

The goal of the transformative agreements is an increased proportion of openly available publications, which is in line with the government's and KTH's goals.

KTH's publishing policy

Expenses for scientific publishing 2020  (in Swedish)

Total costs for all Swedish universities  (in Swedish)