Re: Wiley-Blackwell 2009 Subscription and Licensing Options

[FrederickFriend <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

It may be that our esteemed Moderator will not allow this 
discussion to proceed for much longer, but it has produced some 
interesting information from publishers. The discussion centered 
around a key issue: what are customers paying for when they 
purchase a journal or journals?

In her post of 1 October Emily Gillingham wrote that 
Wiley-Blackwell's position is that "we are selling content not 
packaging". The raw content is in fact supplied to publishers by 
authors for free, so what publishers are really selling is not 
content but value added to the content through editing and other 
content-related services. This has been the case put by 
publishers in response to use of repository content, that users 
may get access to the raw content through a repository but that 
publishers deserve to be paid for the use of the value-added copy 
on the publisher's web-site. (I am not commenting on the rights 
or wrongs of this argument, only that it is made.)

It is also clear from the various responses that, as well as 
paying for the value added to content, customers are also paying 
partially or fully for the cost of both forms of delivery of 
content, i.e. print and online. Nothing in the responses 
convinced me that publishers are separating out the full cost of 
print delivery and not charging that cost to online-only 
customers. Maybe they cannot, maybe they do not want to, but I do 
not see a clear demarcation between print and online in what 
customers are paying for when they purchase a journal or 
journals.

The discussion has also revealed that publishers view the cost of 
providing online delivery as being of the same order of magnitude 
as the cost of print delivery. I am not qualified to comment on 
the accuracy of this view. From my own experience I do find it 
difficult to accept Ian Russell's view (post of 2 October) that 
"when publishers first put content online they generally added 
this for free.... (thus reducing the "bottom-line" and decreasing 
profitability)". The reason I find this hard to believe is that 
it was a time of both above-inflation price rises and high 
profits, so the price rises and not profit-levels were paying for 
the investment in online delivery. It is now very difficult for 
the customer to know how much the customer (ultimately the 
taxpayer) is paying for online delivery, or indeed for any of the 
value-added services publishers provide. Work is underway - by 
John Houghton and others - to help us understand the costs and 
the value of benefits from different ways to disseminate 
publicly-funded research, and maybe we also need an 
accountability element in the structure, such as that to be 
required from financial institutions receiving a large injection 
of taxpayer dollars.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL