By the end of 2016 SU’s Director of Administration gave SUB a directive to follow up on the OA publishing costs. The costs were to be reported in Swedish kronor (SEK), on the total level as well as broken down by publishers and by funding sources, including all OA publishing costs paid during 2016. In addition, SUB was instructed to inform faculty of the importance of using two newly introduced accounting codes, one for APCs and one for additional charges (like page and colour charges), when registering this kind of payment. From the start, the method of choice has been to track all APC invoices and additional costs within the local accounting system. This to make sure that it is the articles and the amounts in SEK actually paid by SU that are reported. A prerequisite is a transparent system, where all payments are accessible for all authorized users of the system, which is the case at SU. Cost estimations based on bibliometric analysis determining OA articles with SU corresponding authors matched with APC list prices are used as supplementary data only. The reasons for this are the following:

Workflow

Although an increasing number of OA publishing costs are centrally managed by SUB, there are still a number of APCs and additional costs managed by local financial staff in the 60 or so departments at SU. Two members of staff, SUB’s controller and a licensing and e-resources librarian are assigned to the task of tracking the costs. The work is ongoing during the year, but with greater intensity during the first months of the year, when the previous year’s accounts have been closed and the final overview is completed.

Every month the controller pulls two cost reports from the local accounting system, one with all costs booked on the main APC account and a similar report for the additional charges account. Combined, these two reports cover all of SU’s payments registered as OA costs during the previous month. The format of the report is an Excel spreadsheet with all invoices for the month listed. It includes the invoice number, the date of the invoice, the amount in SEK, the name of the supplier (not necessarily the same as publisher), which SU institution is paying, the funding source and the research project number. The cost report data is imported into a shared master Excel file. A template of this file, with a sample set of records, is available from Stockholm University’s Figshare installation.8

About 50 new records are added per month. Using the invoice number to search the accounting system, the controller looks up each invoice and performs an initial check of all payments. The original amount and currency are registered for each invoice on the spreadsheet and invoices assumed not to be APC invoices are highlighted and any other comments noted.

The librarian then reviews all invoices again and complements the spreadsheet with data that cannot be retrieved from the local accounting system: DOI, journal title, hybrid or full OA journal for each invoiced article. This step may be more or less time-consuming, mainly because of insufficient metadata on the publishers’ invoices (recognized as an area for improvement in the ESAC set of recommendations).9, 10 Usually, the journal title and author (sometimes only as a contact in the address) are specified on the invoice. Information like the article title, manuscript number, ‘OA charge’ or similar, DOI/part of DOI and type of CC licence might be added as well, but no publisher provides all these pieces of information. Quite a few invoices have rather sparse specifications and, consequently, are more time-consuming to match with a DOI. In addition, all invoices within the accounting system are scanned images converted to PDFs. This means that the text on the PDFs is not searchable and cannot be copied and pasted. In order to be able to reuse the information specified on the invoice for web searches for the article, text lines must be rewritten in Notepad. DOIs are verified through the short DOI® Service11 and the SHERPA/RoMEO database12 is used for checking the OA status (fully OA or hybrid) of the journal. Invoices incorrectly logged as OA costs are removed from the spreadsheet – mostly additional charges for articles that are not OA.

Although there are dedicated accounting codes to be used and the compliance has improved since the codes were first implemented, there are still OA publishing costs registered to other accounting codes (like ‘journal subscriptions’ or ‘other consulting services’). Because of this, supplementary searches per known publisher are done to track OA publishing costs not captured through the monthly reports by account level. Invoice numbers are matched with the invoices listed in the master Excel file, and those not already in the file are added and checked accordingly.

This additional work is done at the beginning of the year when the previous year’s OA publishing costs are to be reported. Before completing the final overview, the DOIs are also matched with a bibliometric report (Web of Science) of OA articles with SU researchers as corresponding authors. DOIs not in the master file are checked and a few additional invoices can then usually be tracked in the accounting system. Finally, a small number of DOIs might be added to the master file based on corresponding author data (single author or corresponding author affiliated with SU only), the publishing date of the specific article (as payment of APCs are usually connected to this date) and the APC list price. The assumption is that these are all paid with personal credit cards. Credit card payments are refunded to authors within the University’s payroll system, to which access is restricted to individual institutional administrators only. The refunded amounts are registered in the accounting system using the dedicated accounting codes. SUB’s controller has the authority to pull a report of the total refunded amount in SEK, but since the specifics per payment are unknown, the costs cannot be verified and individual APCs cannot be matched with DOIs etc. by the usual method.