In ?The economic implications of alternative publishing models?, Houghton and
Oppenheim summarise a much longer and more detailed report (Houghton et al.,
2009) published by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in January 2009.
This original report piled assumption on assumption, estimate on estimate, to arrive at
a series of conclusions about the potential economic benefits of open access publishing
which have been widely quoted by proponents of open access, but which are
deeply flawed. This commentary reviews these assumptions and estimates to show
that the conclusions drawn from them about the savings and benefits to be gained from
open access publishing over traditional publishing models are wrong. As the devil is
in the detail, the commentary refers frequently to the original report.