Concession for Printing and Marketing of the British Pharmacopoeia

The British Pharmacopoeia (BP) is the official collection of standards for UK medicinal products and pharmaceutical substances. It is produced by the British Pharmacopoeia Commission Secretariat of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, in accordance with Regulation 317(1) of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 and makes an important contribution to public health by setting publicly available standards for the quality of medicines.

Since 1864, the BP has been providing authoritative standards for medicinal products and pharmaceutical substances and it continues to play an important role in the standard-setting process worldwide. Now used in over 100 countries, the BP remains an essential reference for all individuals and organisations working within pharmaceutical research and development, manufacture and testing around the globe. All monographs and requirements of the European Pharmacopoeia (Ph. Eur.) are also reproduced in the BP.

The BP is published annually with three in-year updates, currently in both hardcopy and electronic formats; the latter is available as a download product as well as accessed via a single-user licence or a multi-user license arrangement. In addition, there is the requirement for the publication of the British Approved Names (BAN) which provides the official, non-proprietary, or generic names given to pharmaceutical substances, published annually.

The Agency requires the appointment of a concessionaire to be responsible for the printing, publishing, distribution, marketing and selling of the BP and BAN publications. A core part of the requirement is the provision and maintenance of a website, which operates as a portal to access the electronic formats of the BP, as well as acting as a source of added value material and a sales platform for the BP chemical reference standards, orders for which are fulfilled by the Agency. The link to the current website is www.pharmacopoeia.com ↗, and this web address is owned by the Agency. The legacy publication content is available as an XML dataset with a DTD and shall be provided to the service provider.

The concessionaire would have responsibility for business development and marketing of the product, with the strategic approval of the Agency, and also shall be expected to invest in the services to deliver continuous improvement and innovation throughout the life of the contract. The concessionaire will also need to carefully manage sales and distribution of BP publications to our global user base which is currently conducted through established reseller networks.

The Agency wishes to award one concession contract to one contracting party; collaborations with other organisations to bring together the range of expertise (via sub-contracting/consortium arrangements) would be acceptable, with the concessionaire ensuring effective and seamless delivery. The appointed concessionaire shall retain the revenue from the service/sales as its fees minus the payment of agreed royalty fees to the Agency. The concessionaire shall have exclusivity on the sales of the BP and BAN. Pricing strategies shall be reviewed and agreed by both parties. This contracting approach is the same as the current set-up. We expect to award and agree a contract September 2021 to facilitate sufficient lead time for implementation and the publication of the BP 2023 in August 2022.