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

["Kiley ,Robert" <r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk>]

Paul:  You are correct when you say that the Wellcome has not set 
an upper limit. However, if a publisher set a price that was 
significantly higher than the norm, then we would want to know 
why.  Obviously the Trust has to right to decide that a fee is 
too high and will not meet these costs.

The Trust did consider adding an OA element to its existing 
grants, but decided that whilst we are in this interim phase - 
with many publishers now beginning to offer a hybrid OA option - 
it was easier (for our grantees) to simply say that these costs 
would be covered by the Trust.

Keeping things easy for the researcher is important - if we lose 
the support of the researcher, then OA will not happen. 
Currently the Trust is putting a lot of effort into making our 
researchers aware of their grant obligations (namely to make 
their research outputs freely available), and the benefits of OA. 
Consequently, at this stage we felt that expecting them to make a 
value-for-money decision with regard to which journal they should 
publish in would be additional, unwelcome burden.

This situation of providing black grants to universities to cover 
OA costs (see: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX036803.html) will 
be kept under review, and if we feel that this is not working 
effectively, then we will look to find another way of meeting 
these OA costs.

The obvious alternative would be to require grantees to add an OA 
cost to their grant applications.  This has its own problems - 
grants expiring before papers are published, unknown costs, money 
tied up that many not be used etc - but it may be an option we 
have to consider.

Best regards
Robert

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Paul Peters
Sent: 02 April 2007 23:22
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Matt Cockerill's comments [Wellcome Trust and OA fees
thread]

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