| Stakeholder groups that benefit | Researchers, but also other italian institutions. The University of Milan was the first Italian institution to contribute to OpenAPC. Thanks to its pioneering role, the initiative has expanded and now includes nine participating institutions, among them the National Research Council (CNR) and two of Italy’s largest universities, demonstrating a growing commitment to transparency in scholarly publishing costs and open research information |
| Story | The University of Milan has progressively abandoned the use of proprietary information sources for the development and monitoring of its internal research policies policies (at national level Italy still relies heavily on proprietary data sources and commercial bibliometric databases). Among the many examples of how Open Research Information has informed institutional policy interventions, this case study focuses on one specific area: the monitoring of Article Processing Charges (APCs) at both central and departmental level.
Since 2016, APC expenditure data have been systematically collected through the University's institutional repository (DSpace), processed and shared every six months with the OpenAPC initiative. The same data are also provided to departments, enabling them to gain a clear understanding of their spending on APC-based publishing.
The central APC fund was established in 2021 (€150,000) with the primary aim of fostering awareness and adoption of Open Access publishing across the research community. The fund was subsequently increased, reaching €300,000 in 2023. Continuous monitoring and analysis of expenditure data demonstrated that, by that stage, the benefits and culture of Open Access had become widely established within the institution. As a result, the fund was progressively reduced and currently stands at €200,000 (2025 onwards). The resources made available through this reduction were redirected towards strengthening the Diamond University Press, Milano University Press, and supporting a range of community-led open initiatives such as Peer Community In, OpenAIRE, PhilPapers and SciPost ecc.
At the same time, monitoring activities revealed that for several years MDPI had been the publisher receiving the largest share of APC expenditure from University researchers. To better understand this phenomenon, APC spending data were combined with publication metadata and contextual information about the journals involved. In 2022, the University conducted a survey that gathered responses from approximately 800 researchers. The survey sought not only to investigate the reasons behind the choice of this publisher, but also to raise awareness of issues such as peer-review duration, the proliferation of special issues, editorial practices and rejection rates.
The findings were consolidated into a series of public reports and presented across departments to stimulate discussion within the research community. Since 2022, expenditure on MDPI publications has fallen to approximately one third of its previous level.
More broadly, the systematic monitoring of APC expenditure since 2016 has stimulated a wider institutional reflection on the economics of scholarly communication and on possible alternatives to the APC-based publishing model. As in the MDPI case, the results of these analyses are shared transparently with the academic community with the aim of increasing awareness and supporting informed decision-making. Ultimately, however, researchers retain the freedom to choose the publishing models they consider most appropriate for disseminating their work.
Over time, data collection workflows have been progressively refined, leading to greater automation, improved data quality, and a substantial reduction in manual processing efforts. |