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

[Paul Peters <paul.peters@hindawi.com>]

Robert,

Thank you for correcting my misstatement, since this is an 
important issue that I would like to fully understand. If you 
have not set an upper limit for what the Wellcome Trust is 
willing to pay a publisher, then how is this amount determined? 
As far as I know, you have not yet told a publisher that their 
hybrid open access option is too expensive for Wellcome to pay, 
is this correct? What sort of metrics do you use to decide 
whether the price that you have been asked to pay is reasonable? 
If the "funder pays" model takes off, what mechanism do you 
envision for ensuring healthy competition in the publishing 
market?

I want to make it very clear that I have the highest regards for 
the leadership taken by the Wellcome Trust within the open access 
movement, and I believe that Wellcome has been one of the 
greatest catalysts for change. However, I want to make sure that 
with this change comes not only increased access to scholarly 
literature, but also a more functional publishing market.

Because of the leadership taken by the Wellcome Trust, I imagine 
that a number of funding agencies may base their open access 
policies on your model. So, I think it is very important to 
properly understand the impact that this policy will have on the 
publishing market.

The inefficiencies within the subscription market are largely 
responsible for the rise of the "serials crisis." In turn, the 
"serials crisis" served as one of the main motivations behind the 
open access publishing model. So, when looking at the details of 
how we would like open access publishing to work, we must be very 
careful not to create a whole new set of inefficiencies.

-Paul
-------------------------------
Paul Peters
Head of Business Development
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com
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> 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