input: Text: Open Access: Economics Many publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access. They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it. The first major study of the economic impact of OA policies was conducted by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan in 2006. Using conservative estimates that a nation’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) brings social returns of 50 percent, and that OA increases access and efficiency by 5 percent, Houghton and Sheehan calculated that a transition to OA would not only pay for itself, but add $1.7 billion/year to the UK economy and $16 billion/year to the U.S. economy. A later study focusing on Australia used the more conservative estimate that GERD brings social returns of only 25 percent, but still found that the bottom-line economic benefits of OA for publicly funded research were 51 times greater than the costs. Independent confirmation of Houghton’s results came in a major study released in April 2011, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishing Research Consortium, Research Information Network, Research Libraries UK, and the Wellcome Trust. After studying five scenarios for improving research access, it concluded that green and gold OA “offer the greatest potential to policy-makers in promoting access. Both have positive, and potentially high, BCRs [benefit-cost ratios]....” The same study noted that “the infrastructure for Green [OA] has largely already been built” and therefore that “increasing access by this route is especially cost-effective....” I can add that repositories scale up more easily than journals to capture unmet demand, and that depositing in a repository costs the depositor nothing. For all these reasons, I’ll focus in this chapter on how to pay for gold OA (journals), not how to pay for green OA (repositories).
  Question: Overall researchers seem to believe
  
   (A) OA is going to be a detriment to them.
   (B) OA will have no effect on them at all.
   (C) feel that there will be long-reaching benefits for their field because of OA.
   (D) don't care about OA one way or the other.
  Answer:
output: feel that there will be long-reaching benefits for their field because of OA.