From price to principles - Research Information

"One of the clearest messages from the conversation was that the definition of value is shifting. For institutions facing intense financial pressure, price remains critical. But libraries and consortia are increasingly expected to justify not only how much they spend, but what their spending enables. As Anna Vernon noted, this includes whether agreements genuinely lower barriers to publishing, avoid reinforcing volume-driven behaviour, and support participation across institutions with very different capacities.

At the same time, the discussion grounded these ambitions in reality. As Petra Labriga emphasised, researchers still operate within career systems driven by journal prestige, impact factors, and rankings, particularly in medicine and the life sciences, where academic freedom to publish where one chooses remains deeply embedded. This creates a persistent tension: libraries may negotiate with systemic change in mind, but researchers publish within incentive structures they did not design and cannot easily escape.

What emerged is a growing recognition that access plus APC coverage is no longer enough. Open access agreements sit uncomfortably in the middle, expected to transform the system while constrained by forces far upstream, and value is increasingly tied to outcomes that are harder to quantify, and harder to negotiate."