Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs

Public funding of scientific, technical and medical (STM) research is undertaken with the
expectation that the economic and social returns to taxpayers will exceed the amount of the
research investment. Because discovery is a cumulative process, with new knowledge building
on earlier findings, the dissemination of research findings is crucial to ensuring that the returns
on the investment are realized.
Traditionally, journals have been one of the primary channels for research diss…