There is some publicity coming out about what NZ university libraries are spending on journal packages with major publishers Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis and Wiley.  This information was requested by an Auckland academic Dr Mark Wilson who is championing the move to open access and argued that this information should be in the public domain.

The universities and publishers involved initially resisted providing this information (CONZUL/CAUL have signed confidentiality agreements with the publishers involved) and so UC’s initial position, along with others, was that we were unable to disclose this information.  However Dr Wilson took his case to the Chief Ombudsman that this expenditure information should be disclosed under the Official Information Act.

The Ombudsman ruled that the universities were not entitled to rely on the provisions to withhold information relating to the names of, and a description of, the standard packages they purchased from those publishers and recommended the universities release those details.

Accordingly UC along with the other NZ universities have now released this information and this is now filtering through into the public space.  This will certainly add to the worldwide debate about publishing costs, open access and the difficulty in negotiations when there are monopolies.

In this particular article it is noted that the University of Canterbury is getting a much worse deal than other universities, 35% above the mean.  Just to comment on some background to this.  The models with these publishers are largely based on historical print spend which goes back to the days when UC was well-resourced financially and had more money to spend on print journals.  Then there were a few earthquakes and our EFTS dropped. We have been arguing for a number of years now that a model based on historical print spend is outmoded, unfair and needs to change.  However, these models are beginning to change to calculations based on EFTS and research output and this is now an agreed principle within CAUL/CONZUL when it comes to negotiating new agreements with publishers.  This is good news for Canterbury as over time our costs should reduce.  We have already started to see this with the Taylor and Francis package and discussions with others such as Elsevier continue about transitioning to a different model.