I blogged last Wednesday about an email on SERIALST regarding Nature's license terms containing a pricing confidentiality clause. (Section 8.5 of the Terms) The librarian who first emailed SERIALST about this later on announced to the listserv saying his Nature sales rep told him the negotiated version of his license will no longer include language about price confidentiality. Furthermore, Nature will be posting its prices publicly as of September 1, 2006.

Apparently Nature's pricing and confidentiality clause is also being discussed on liblicense-l. Sally Morris's comment that "making the price actually negotiated would be most unfair to the vendor, wouldn't it?" led to T. Scott writing about the issue of fairness and confidential pricing on his blog. He sums it up saying "I don't expect publishers who rely on negotiated pricing to bend much on confidentiality as long as they believe it is in their best interest. But it's a business decision. It's got nothing to do with fairness."

Interesting.