IOP agrees antipodean consortium model

IOP Publishing and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) have announced an agreement covering 31 universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Whereas the previous agreement was based on historical spend on print version of journals, the new model is based on an institution’s science-category full time equivalent students, and weighted against levels of study and research.

The three year agreement between IOP Publishing, a leading society publisher and CAUL – the leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia – will provide unlimited access to all 76 IOP Publishing and IOP partner journals until 2019.

Dr Olaf Ernst, IOP Publishing’s commercial director, said: 'We’re very pleased to announce this new agreement. The model for it is completely new and much fairer, in that it has moved away from historical spend and is based on actual research needs of the institutions. CAUL put a massive amount of effort into helping us reach this agreement with their members and this would not have happened without their engagement. A huge thank you for that.

Philip Kent, chair of CAUL’s Electronic Information Resources Consortium, added: 'CAUL aims to facilitate access to quality content for research and teaching at a fair and sustainable price. IOP’s premium journals portfolio was an obvious target for CAUL’s preferred approach of pricing the package according to the size, weight and nature of its member institutions, rather than the historical expenditure on print journals.  

'It enables even the smallest institutions to access the full range of content from high quality society publishers such as IOP, and allows for the potential to reduce price in line with a shrinking cohort or to apply the usual increases which reflect an expansion in the university target group.  It has been a pleasure working with IOP’s professional team to secure this agreement.'