RE: Matt Cockerill's comments [Wellcome Trust and OA fees thread]

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

With the current Wellcome trust approach, you will not see a true 
reflection of costs, you will see a true representation of how 
much the publisher thinks you will be willing to pay-- assuming 
that you fund for publication additional to what the the research 
grant would otherwise be.

As in some other cases it is clear that the money must be taken 
from the basic grant, then those researchers, though not the 
agency, will presumably exercise some cost sensitivity.

A policy of paying whatever publication fee is asked will have 
the same result as the long-ago library policy of paying whatever 
subscription price was asked.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kiley ,Robert" <r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk>
Date: Thursday, March 29, 2007 7:46 pm
Subject: RE: Matt Cockerill's comments [Wellcome Trust and OA fees thread]
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> I would like to quickly comment on Paul Peters remarks that:
>
> "...by having a set amount (say $3,000) that they are willing to
> pay for the publication of an article (which is more or less the
> policy of the Wellcome Trust)," and "Unfortunately, neither the
> policy of the Wellcome Trust nor that of CERN's SCOAP3 have a
> mechanism for increasing the competition between publishers, so
> one cannot expect that they will lead to greater efficiency in
> the publishing market"
>
> ***
>
> The Wellcome Trust has never set a figure on how much it is
> prepared to pay for an open access article.  The Trust recognises
> that publishing incurs a cost, and that this is a legitimate
> research costs which it is prepared to meet.
>
> The specific costs are set by the publishers - and though it is
> true that the OA costs are coalescing around $3000, some
> publishers have gone lower (e.g. ASBMB charge $1500) and some
> have gone higher (e.g. Cell Press charge $5000).  We will not
> know whether this is a true reflection of costs until the market
> itself demonstrates it.
>
> Robert Kiley
> Head of e-Strategy
> Wellcome Library.
> mailto:r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk
> Library Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk