CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research finance

  • Research costing and full economic costing: calculating the true cost of research

    Ask what a research project costs and most people will think of the obvious things: the salaries of the researchers, the equipment, the consumables, the travel. These are real costs, but far from the whole story. Behind every project stands an apparatus that makes it possible — the buildings, the heat and light, the libraries and computing, the finance, HR and research-management staff, the depreciation of shared facilities, the cost of the institution’s very existence. These are no less real for being less visible, and if they are not accounted for the institution is quietly subsidising the research from elsewhere. Working out what research genuinely costs, and how much of it a funder will pay, is the unglamorous but essential discipline of research costing. This article explains how the true cost of research is calculated and recovered, drawing on the funding and finance domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Direct and indirect costs

    The foundational distinction in research costing is between direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are those that can be attributed specifically to a project: the salaries of the people working on it, the equipment bought for it, its consumables and its travel. Indirect costs — often called overheads — are the costs of shared infrastructure and services the project relies on but that cannot be tied to it alone: estates, central administration, IT, libraries, finance and HR, and the general running of the institution. The crucial point is that indirect costs are real costs of doing the research, even though they are shared. A project conducted as if only its direct costs mattered would appear far cheaper than it truly is, and the gap would be made up invisibly by the host institution.

    Full economic costing

    The principle that the entire cost of research — direct and indirect — should be identified is captured in the idea of full economic costing (FEC). Its aim is to reveal what research actually costs to undertake, including a fair share of the institution’s overheads and infrastructure, so that decisions about pricing, funding and sustainability rest on an honest basis. Without it, institutions cannot know whether their research is financially sustainable, and may unknowingly run at a loss on activity that appears, on a narrow view, to be funded. Full economic costing does not by itself determine who pays; it establishes the true figure against which questions of payment can be sensibly considered. It is, in effect, the costing equivalent of telling the truth about the bill.

    TRAC: the UK approach

    In the United Kingdom, the method used to arrive at the full economic cost is TRAC — the Transparent Approach to Costing. TRAC is the standard by which UK universities cost their activities, including research, attributing the relevant share of indirect and estates costs to reach a full economic cost figure, from which the rates used in pricing proposals derive. TRAC matters because it provides a consistent, accepted basis for understanding institutional costs, which underpins negotiations with funders about what they will pay. Its existence means the full cost of UK research is not guesswork or special pleading but the output of an agreed methodology — giving institutions and funders a common, defensible starting point.

    Funders rarely pay the full cost

    Here lies the central tension of research costing: knowing the full economic cost does not mean a funder will pay it. Funder cost policies vary widely in how much of the full cost they cover, and many fund research at less than its full economic cost. The shortfall — between what the research costs and what the funder pays — must be met by the institution from its other income. This has profound consequences: institutions must think carefully about the portfolio of research they undertake and how it is sustained; winning a grant is not the same as the research being fully funded; and the apparently arcane details of funder cost policies bear directly on institutional viability. The recovery of indirect costs in particular is a perennial point of negotiation, because indirect costs are precisely what funders are most often reluctant to pay in full.

    International approaches to indirect costs

    Different systems handle indirect costs in characteristically different ways, and the contrasts are illuminating:

    • In the United States, federal research grants typically apply a negotiated indirect cost rate — facilities and administrative (F&A) costs — agreed between an institution and the government and applied to direct costs.
    • In the European Union’s research framework programmes, indirect costs have commonly been handled through a flat-rate approach, reimbursing overheads as a fixed percentage of eligible direct costs rather than calculating them project by project.
    • In the United Kingdom, the TRAC methodology produces full economic cost figures, with funders such as the research councils contributing a defined proportion of that cost.

    Each model attempts to solve the same problem — how to recognise and recover the genuine but shared costs of research — and each strikes a different balance between accuracy, simplicity and the funder’s willingness to pay. The differences matter for institutions working across multiple funders and jurisdictions, where the same project may be costed and reimbursed quite differently depending on whose rules apply.

    Costing as part of research management

    Research costing is one of the less visible but more consequential parts of research administration. Getting it right protects the financial health of institutions and ensures that difficult conversations about funding rest on accurate figures rather than wishful thinking. For costs to be compared, reported and managed across institutions, funders and systems, the categories involved — direct, indirect, estates, full economic cost, recovery rate — must mean the same thing everywhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that financial information about research is understood identically wherever it is recorded. And because the work behind every funded project is what the costing supports, the contributions involved can be described within the same framework as any other — the CRediT taxonomy and its contribution roles. Research is never free, and someone always pays for the infrastructure that makes it possible; full economic costing is the discipline of being honest about that fact.

  • Paying for open access: APCs, transformative agreements and funder block grants

    Open access has a simple, compelling promise: research that anyone can read, free of paywalls, wherever they are. But removing the charge to readers does not remove the cost of publishing. Editorial management, peer-review coordination, production, hosting and preservation all cost money, and that money has to come from somewhere. The question of who pays, and how for open access has become one of the most consequential and contested issues in scholarly communication — consequential because it determines who gets to publish, and contested because the wrong model can simply move the barrier from readers to authors. This article surveys the main ways open-access publishing is paid for, drawing on the funding and finance domain of the CASRAI Dictionary. For the underlying concepts, our explainer on what open access is sets the scene.

    Article processing charges

    The most familiar mechanism is the article processing charge, or APC: a fee paid, usually by the author or their institution or funder, when an article is accepted, in exchange for making it openly available. The APC model neatly inverts the subscription model — instead of readers paying to read, the publishing side pays to publish, and the work is then free to all. Its appeal is that it provides a clear revenue stream while keeping the literature open. But the APC model carries a serious equity risk that has shaped the entire debate: if the ability to publish depends on the ability to pay a fee, then researchers without funding to cover APCs — early-career researchers, those at less wealthy institutions, those in lower-income countries, those in disciplines with little grant money — can find themselves shut out. Open to read can quietly become closed to publish. Much of the policy and financial machinery around open access exists precisely to manage this risk.

    Transformative agreements

    One major response is the transformative agreement, often structured as a read-and-publish (or publish-and-read) deal. These are agreements, typically negotiated between publishers and library consortia or national bodies, that bundle together the cost of reading a publisher’s content and the cost of publishing open access in it under a single contract. The idea is to repurpose the money institutions already spend on subscriptions, shifting it towards open-access publishing and away from paywalls — transforming the financial relationship rather than simply adding APC costs on top of existing subscriptions. For an author at a covered institution, the practical effect is that they can publish open access without facing an individual APC, because the cost has been handled centrally. The word transformative signals the intent: these agreements are meant to be a transition, moving the system towards open access rather than a permanent destination. Whether they deliver on that promise — or entrench incumbent publishers at high cost — is exactly what makes them contested.

    Funder block grants

    A third mechanism addresses the funding gap more directly: the block grant. Rather than expecting each grant to absorb publication costs unpredictably, some funders provide institutions with a dedicated pool of money — a block grant — specifically to cover open-access costs such as APCs. The institution then administers the fund, paying charges on behalf of its researchers. The advantage is that researchers are not left to find publication money from project budgets that may not stretch to it, and the institution gains a degree of oversight over how open-access spending is managed. Block grants are an acknowledgement that if funders require open access, they bear some responsibility for making it affordable — that a mandate without a means is an unfunded burden.

    Plan S and the policy backdrop

    These financial mechanisms did not arise in a vacuum; they were shaped by funder policy, and above all by Plan S, the initiative through which a coalition of research funders required that research they fund be made openly available. Plan S sharpened the question of payment because it made open access a condition of funding rather than an option, which meant the costs had to be met somehow. It also engaged directly with the equity problem: it has been concerned with caps and transparency on charges, with the terms of transformative agreements, and with ensuring that the drive to open access does not simply create a pay-to-publish system. The policy and the financial mechanisms are inseparable — the policy creates the requirement, and APCs, transformative agreements and block grants are the means by which that requirement is met in practice.

    The equity question runs through everything

    The thread connecting all of these mechanisms is equity. Each model is, in part, an attempt to answer the same worry: how to make research open to read without making it closed to publish for anyone who lacks money. APCs raise the worry most directly; transformative agreements try to manage it by handling costs centrally; block grants try to ensure the money exists; and Plan S tries to set rules that keep the system fair. The persistence of the worry across every model is a reminder that the goal of open access is not merely free reading but a genuinely more open and equitable scholarly system — and that financial design is where that aspiration is won or lost. Routes such as diamond open access, which charges neither readers nor authors, sit alongside these as part of the wider landscape.

    Tracking the money consistently

    Managing open-access funding well requires being able to track it: which charges were paid, from which fund, under which agreement, for which output, attached to which grant. For that tracking to work across institutions, funders and publishers, the financial and funding information involved must be described consistently. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the funding sources, charges, agreements and acknowledgements flowing through the open-access economy mean the same thing wherever they are recorded. And because publishing is the culmination of contribution, the work behind each output can be described in the same shared framework — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. Open access changed who can read research; getting the financial models right determines who can take part in producing it.

  • Reporting research outcomes to funders: from outputs to impact

    When a research grant ends, the relationship between the funder and the work it paid for does not. Funders — whether public agencies, charities or research councils — are accountable for the money they distribute, and they increasingly want to understand not merely that a project happened but what it produced and, ultimately, what difference it made. This is the territory of outcome reporting: the structured account a researcher gives, often over several years, of the publications, datasets, software, collaborations, further funding, policy influence and wider effects that flow from a grant. Done badly, outcome reporting is a dreaded administrative chore; done well, it is how the research system demonstrates its value and learns what works. This article examines how outcome reporting is evolving, drawing on the funding and finance domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    From outputs to outcomes to impact

    It helps to distinguish three things that reporting tries to capture. Outputs are the direct products of the research — the papers, datasets, software and patents it generates. Outcomes are what those outputs lead to — the further research they enable, the collaborations and follow-on funding they spark, the uptake of findings by others. Impact is the eventual effect on the wider world — on policy, practice, health, the economy and society. The progression matters because it reflects a genuine shift in what funders ask. It is no longer enough to list publications; funders want to trace the path from output to outcome to impact, even though that path is often long, indirect and hard to attribute. Much of the recent innovation in reporting comes from trying to capture outcomes and impact, which unfold years after a grant closes and resist tidy measurement.

    Outcome-reporting systems

    To manage reporting at scale, funders have adopted dedicated systems. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, Researchfish is a widely used platform through which researchers record the outcomes arising from their funding over time, with funders drawing on the accumulated information to understand and demonstrate the results of their investment. In the United States, federal awards are reported through the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR), a standardised format for progress reporting across agencies that covers accomplishments, products, participants and impact. These systems share a common purpose: to collect outcome information in a structured, comparable way rather than as scattered free-text, so that it can be aggregated, analysed and reported onward. They also share a common challenge — the burden they place on researchers — which has driven much of the effort to make reporting smarter.

    Reducing burden through persistent identifiers

    The single most important development in lightening the reporting load is the use of persistent identifiers to link information automatically rather than re-entering it by hand. The principle behind this is the well-known maxim “enter once, reuse often”. If a researcher’s outputs carry persistent identifiers — a DOI for a publication or dataset, an ORCID identifier for the researcher, a ROR identifier for their organisation, a grant identifier for the award — then the links between them can be discovered and assembled by systems rather than typed in repeatedly. A publication that records its funding grant can be connected to that grant automatically; outputs registered against a researcher’s ORCID can flow into a report without manual transcription. This turns reporting from an exercise in re-keying information that already exists into one of confirming and contextualising links the infrastructure has already drawn. The persistent-identifier ecosystem — explored across our persistent identifiers domain — is what makes low-burden, accurate outcome reporting possible.

    Narrative and the limits of metrics

    Not everything that matters can be captured as a structured field. The deepest effects of research — how it changed a field’s direction, shaped a policy, improved a practice, built a capability — often need to be explained, not merely counted. This is why narrative has become central to impact reporting. A short, evidenced account of what a piece of research led to can convey forms of value that no list of outputs can. The move towards narrative reflects a broader unease with reducing research to metrics. Several practices help impact reporting work:

    • Evidence-backed narratives. Pairing a clear account of impact with concrete evidence and links to the underlying outputs.
    • Realistic timeframes. Recognising that impact often emerges years after a grant ends, so reporting must continue beyond the grant period.
    • Honest attribution. Acknowledging that impact usually results from many contributions, not a single grant in isolation.
    • Structured links plus narrative. Combining machine-readable links to outputs with human-readable explanation, so reports are both aggregable and meaningful.

    Closing the loop with the grant lifecycle

    Outcome reporting is the final stage of a continuous process that begins when a call is published and an award is made. When information is captured as structured data throughout that lifecycle — the grant, its outputs, the people and organisations involved — reporting at the end becomes a matter of drawing together links already established rather than reconstructing a history from scratch. This is the logic of treating the whole grant lifecycle, from call to closeout, as connected structured information, a theme developed in our resources on research administration. Reporting is not a bolt-on at the end; it is the harvest of good data discipline maintained throughout.

    A consistent vocabulary for reporting

    For outcome information to flow between researchers, institutions and funders — and for the same output reported to two funders to be recognised as one thing — the elements involved must be described consistently, or reports become incomparable and links break. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the information flowing into funder reports is understood identically wherever it originates. And because every reported output rests on real contribution, the work behind it can be described in the same shared framework — the CRediT taxonomy. Funders are right to ask what their money achieved; good infrastructure and shared vocabulary are what let researchers answer honestly without drowning in administration.