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Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)
Université de Provence
Université d’Avignon
Freemium as a sustainable economic model for OA publications in
humanities and social sciences
Pierre MounierCenter for open electronic publishing (Cléo)
Who are we ?
A short presentation
A team supported by 4 major french research institutions
What we do
Revues.org : an international platform with more than 300 open access and books collections in humanities
and social sciences in HTML, PDF and Epub
What we doCalenda : a platform with 16000
conference announcementsHypotheses.org : a platform with
240 blogs
An ecosystem : OpenEdition
About OA economic models
Green and Gold roads
And their economic models
• Green road : support from institutions, libraries, governements
• Gold road ? How to build a robust economic model for Open Access journals and books ?
Gold road : 2 models
100% grant/subsidies model Author-pay model
Golden : 2 problems
100% grant/subsidies model
Dependancy on institutions, institution-centric model, weak economic model (monoculture)
Access to publication biased by financial capacity, universities pay twice to commercial publishers
Author-pay model
Gold roadWhere are the
libraries ?
Proportion of Revues.org pages viewed through library system
referrers
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in Research libraries. Revues.org case study - 2009
Comparison by age and occupation
between Revues.org and Cairn.info
readers
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in Research libraries. Revues.org case study - 2009
Pierre Mounier
Some statements from librarians
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in Research libraries. A case study on Revues.org - 2009
“Because we have shrinking budgets and paid resources are more and more expensive, we must justify the money we spend, so we are driven to focus more and more on what we pay.”
“Open access resources, right now are not very up-to-date in our tool (MetaLib). We concentrated our forces on paid resources because we have to justify the money (we spend)”
“We have stats on that (OA), but we don’t use them. We have to deal with paid databases at first ! It’s a huge work for us to answer to enquiries. The logic is return on investment because theses resources are extremely expensive. We have to justify subscriptions to the university, the scientific committee and the government.”
“ I don’t understand at all Revues.org. Our main problem with this platform is that we can’t subscribe to it. Therefore, it is not interesting at all for us…..can we subscribe ? ”
The effect of author-pay model on libraries
“ The business model of Open Access isn’t a subscription model. The question is now if a university wants to pay to allow its scholars to publish in those OA journals. But the two models depend on different services : the subscription model depends on libraries, the other one on research departments. We librarians must be very careful, because one could decide to transfer the money from one service to another, saying that libraries doesn’t have to pay subscriptions anymore. […]We must be careful because money is part of the power. For the moment, we have an important budget because resources are expensive to buy. If there is a shift in the economic model, our role will be different. ”
A triple disaster
• For OA publishers : they can’t be fully supported by libraries
• For readers : they are left alone to find open access resources (desintermediation scenario)
• For libraries : they can’t participate fully the new open access ecosystem
A proposal :OpenEdition
freemiumHow to develop a sound economic model for
OA journals and book publishers ?How to integrate libraries giving them the
possibility to « pay for free content » ?
Freemium = Free+Premium
Pierre Mounier
Freemium : an economic model coming from the web
« It is a numbers game, so bust out your Excel spreadsheet. It’s all about finding things in
the margins — lots of little things rather than one key thing. »
D. Houston, Dropbox in « Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote,
Automattic and MailChimp », Gigaom, march 2010
An hybrid model
OpenEdition freemium is :
Free access to contentPremium services to generate income
Free access in HTML
Premium servicesPremium services
For library usersFor library users
No DRMNo quota
Copy & pastePrint, Save
Access to premium formats
Unlimited alerts on search engine
Calenda events in ical format
For librariansFor librarians
Counter statistics
Integration with libraries information systems
• Marc 21• Unimarc• Z39.50 server• ISO 2709 files
Training sessions for library trainers
Free documentation
Libraries correspondent
Participation to governance
through User committee
For publishersFor publishers
66% of income from libraries go to publishers.
33% to the platform to help develop new services.
Electronic Bookstore
Print on demand
Since march 2011
78 journals so far
80 journals so far
1000 books in 2012
78 journals so far
More than 20 university press for books
78 journals so far
38 research libraries testing or subscribing
Conclusion
OpenEdition freemium is a pragmatic AND a political proposition to academic
community…
… in order to build an alliance between scholars, publishers and
librairies to support open access & knowledge dissemination
Thank you [email protected]
