About ten years ago we were negotiating the terms and conditions for the renewal of a large contract involving publicly funded research outputs. We were trying to reach fair price essentially, somewhere on a continuum between £0 and £several million per annum. Difficult. At one point we wrote to the publisher asking two questions:
- How were they going to take account of the financial contribution from the public sector into the production of the research, which we estimated conservatively at £20M? and
- Could they identify and quantify the value that they added as a publisher?
I remember the whole episode quite clearly because of the nature of their reply. The value they added was set out in terms of a few rather obvious and generic services ('marketing', 'innovation') and not costed in any way despite our request. Not helpful. But the more telling part for me was that they seemed genuinely baffled with the concept that the public sector had largely paid for the production of the resource. It seemed as if no one had ever suggested this to them before.
I worry when I read about the Research Works Act because it is regressive, because if passed it may create a threat to open access to Pubmed, and because once again it shows Elsevier to be on the wrong side of the argument. I wonder as well if any publisher has answers to the questions that went unanswered ten years ago?
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