Academic journal costs

The request was partially successful.

Dear University College Birmingham,

For the years 2017, 2018, and 2019, please publish the total amount paid to each of the following publishers for academic journals:

Wiley
Springer*
Elsevier
Taylor & Francis
Sage
Oxford University Press
Cambridge University Press
Nature Publishing Group*
Royal Society of Chemistry
Institute of Physics Publishing

I understand that your expenditure records may be held in academic financial years rather than calendar years. If so, I am happy for the response to be provided in the same format, with figures for 2016/17, 2017/18, and 2018/19. (Although 2019 has not ended yet, my understanding is that payments for access to journals for 2019 are likely to have all been made by now.)

The figures should include payments made directly to the publishers as well as any payments made to subscription agents or intermediaries for the purchase of, and/or access to, the publishers' academic journals. They should also include payment for journal packages such as Jisc Collections agreements, as well as for individual journals. Please include VAT where possible, and indicate whether or not figures include VAT.

* Although Springer Nature is the parent company for these two publishers, my understanding is that Springer journals and Nature journals are still paid for separately, so I think it makes sense to regard these as two different publishers with different expenditure amounts.

Yours faithfully,

Stuart Lawson

Joseph Young, University College Birmingham

1 Attachment

Dear Stuart,

Please see attached for the information you have requested (the figures include VAT). It should be noted that these figures do not include any payments made to subscription agents or intermediaries, as I am informed by colleagues that to do so would mean that responding would exceed the amount of cost and staff time allowed for requests by the Act. That element of your request is therefore refused under Section 12 of the Act.

Regards,

Joseph

Joseph Young
University Secretary and Registrar
University College Birmingham

Tel: +44 121 604 1000 ext 2234/2329
Email: [University College Birmingham request email]
Website: www.ucb.ac.uk

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Dear Joseph,

Thank you very much for providing this data. For your information, the collated data from all institutions is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3659970

If you were able to clarify whether any of the publishers that you did not provide figures for have zero expenditure (i.e. you do not subscribe to any journals from them), that would be useful.

Yours sincerely,

Stuart Lawson