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Analysis of Open Access Costs at the CAS

The Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) is currently conducting a data collection exercise for an analysis of the costs associated with Open Access (OA) publishing. The survey is being carried out as a part of the Science4Policy (cze) project and aims to provide an overview of the financial costs related to Open Access publishing across CAS. The results will serve as a basis for further analyses and strategic decision-making in the area of Open Access.

In mid-April, Vice-President of CAS Mgr. Ondřej Beránek, Ph.D., acting on behalf of the President of CAS, contacted the directors of all CAS institutes with a request for support and participation in the collection of data related to OA publishing costs.

Data collection at CAS institutes is expected to be completed by mid-June. Each institute designated one or more responsible persons who received access credentials to a secure application developed for data entry.

The data collection builds on previous surveys conducted by CzechELib focusing on APC charges. To minimize the administrative burden on institutions, the collection methodology has been designed to make use of existing overviews and previously processed data wherever possible.

The data submitted by CAS institutes may subsequently also be used for this year’s regular national CzechELib data collection, which maps costs recorded in accounting systems in relation to specific scholarly articles published in OA mode.

The survey collects not only data on direct APC costs for Gold and Hybrid OA (cze) journals, but also – where available – information on other forms of OA publishing for which no direct accounting cost was recorded by the institute.

In cases where no costs associated with an OA article are recorded in accounting systems, this may include:

  • publication in a Diamond OA journal,
  • Open Access achieved via the so-called Green OA route,
  • costs covered by a collaborating institution,
  • waiver of the publication fee by the publisher (e.g. credits),
  • or situations where the information can no longer be retrospectively identified.

The list of monitored OA scholarly articles is based on data recorded in the ASEP system and includes scholarly articles published between 2021 and 2025.

The records have already been partially pre-filled, for example with:

Users are therefore primarily presented only with records that have not yet been completed, for example records without a specified APC amount, without information on token use, or without an identified OA type.

Given the previous absence of systematic records on OA types and the difficulty of retrospectively identifying such information, the identification of OA type is requested primarily for articles published in 2025.

To facilitate the process, the application also supports bulk data import via CSV or XLSX files. Records can also be edited in bulk, which may be useful, for example, when identifying articles published in diamond OA journals.

Last updated on May 25, 2026