Professor Brian Norton:

There is a logic to the Deputy's argument although the structure of the publishing business is complex. The people who are making the money are the publishers. The people who supply the service to higher education institutions aggregate and work as a middle man between the publishers and the institutions. As materials became more available online the margins for the publishers decreased and they gave less commission to the middle men. It was determined that there would be a national procurement or an aggregate supplier of journals to all institutions. We are encouraged to draw from a national procurement exercise. It is the intermediaries rather than the publishers who went broke. Like the Deputy, I find it difficult to understand why they went broke but they did and they had no assets to recover.