Freedom of Information requests uncover the lack of transparency in journal subscription costs.

Stuart Lawson and Ben Meghreblian have been compiling a useful dataset via Freedom of Information requests on how much academic publishers are charging higher education institutions for journal subscriptions. Their goal is to highlight the scale of the academic publishing market in the UK and for this to inform policy discussions. Some of the barriers they came across in obtaining data on expenditures were the infamous non-disclosure agreements by Elsevier and also subscription agents, which handle the costs on behalf of libraries.