Aidan Karley has supplied the following pricing in a comment on the Ingenta issue (I have had to reformat and hope I have caught the drift):
PMR: I’d welcome comment on the whole issue, including:
- what is being sold?
- what are its licence terms?
- who is shown as having the copyright?
- has the document been altered (the abstract was)
- who gets the article fee? OUP? Ingenta? Split between them? (Certainly not the authors)
The tax is standard UK VAT (17.5%).
Surely someone must have done battle in this arena already? So what can I find out about Ingenta? From their site:
Services overview
Ingenta maximizes the value of content on- and offline for thousands of publishing organizations and libraries worldwide.
Our technology and services manipulate the printed publication to create new revenue streams and services for over 250 publishers, while simplifying the access and acquisition of that same content by 25,000 libraries and research institutions.
We are the provider of technology and services to the publishing and information industries
PMR: and…
Information commerce systems
All publishers or owners of data resources have information assets: turning those assets into revenues is what Ingenta’s Information Commerce system is all about.
Even mature e-publishing operations are likely to have untapped revenue streams, just waiting to be discovered. Through the provision of both licensed software and ASP solutions, Ingenta can help you derive maximum value from your information asset
PMR: Now it becomes clearer. My article is an untapped revenue stream… Indeed. I just thought I was the controller of that stream. And…
Academic publishers
Ingenta specializes in working with academic publishers to fulfill your online requirements.
Our experience in this sector is extremely diverse and we offer a complete spectrum of online publishing services, as well as sales and marketing support from our dedicated division, Publishers Communication Group (PCG) and coursepack services from HERON.
We help you to:
- Distribute your content online from the secure IngentaConnect platform to over 19 million users and 25,000 registered libraries per month.
- Disseminate your content to the largest network of partners, including abstract and indexing services, subscription agent websites and full-text publishers such as CrossRef, JSTOR and OCLC.
- Create new member and customer services such as websites for society partners seamlessly linked to full text journals. View some examples.
We help you to:
- Replace or build new information commerce systems to sit behind your existing websites, driving new revenues and creating new opportunities for content licensing, repackaging and bundling.
- Create unique, custom-built websites: We are uniquely skilled in creating bespoke projects for academic publishers such as Oxford University Press.
- Effectively review and restructure your online presence with Information Architecture consultancy and training.
- Comprehensively brand your content online.
- Benefit from robust, open source and non-proprietary technology which is future-proof.
PMR: “unique, custom-built websites”. “such as Oxford University Press”.
I did manage to view one of my articles through the Ingenta portal… for the other Ingenta’s robust future-proof technology reported:
Unable To Deliver Document
Sorry. We are currently unable to deliver your document
We were unable to relay document from publisher’s server
Additionally the following error was returned from the remote document server:
404 Not Found
Please contact the Help Desk, quoting order number 39316854, for help in obtaining your document.
PMR: From the publisher’s server? So Ingenta are providing a link to OUP? And they can’t find it there? At least the paper is on the OUP site, and with the copyright:
(C) 2006 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PMR and also:
Academic libraries
Ingenta has traditionally served academic libraries since its inception in 1998, providing free use of the most comprehensive collection of academic and professional publications at www.ingentaconnect.com.
PMR: so they give the content free to libraries? Now I am confused…
September 5th, 2007 at 12:58 pm eConcerning the Ingenta re-selling, their pricing is actually more complex than appears at first, and in some respects, more shocking :
……….article fee: £13.00
……….delivery: £5.11
……….tax: £3.17
GRAND TOTAL: £21.28
~~~~~~~~~~ end snipped text ~~~~~~~~~
So, for electronic delivery of a PDF pulled from another company’s website they’re charging £5.11 … that’s deeply suspicious.
Grounds for complaint, certainly.