With the growing costs to authors, funders and institutions during the transition to 100% open access for scholarly research, there are some who believe this is creating an unfair, two-tier system of scholarly exchange. OECD is proposing a new model that they term "freemium open access", that they believe will provide a fairer means of open dissemination for research for a greater proportion of authors.
http://www.slideshare.net/tobygreen/learning-to-let-go-ssp-bostonfinal
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| From a recent South Park episode - genius |
Green models advocate the use by authors of institutional and subject repositories. However, due to copyright restrictions this often means the experience of accessing a research output by an end user is not always the best. This is important when you consider the impact this may have on the end user's assessment of the quality of a publication. It's difficult to accurately quantify the true costs of repositories. In most cases this is met by the institution where, depending on the size, it may be a significant challenge to sustain funding for such initiatives.
Gold models advocate immediate, high quality access and dissemination of research; however the costs are so substantial that it currently excludes a large majority of scholars. Neither they nor their institutions are in a position to subsidise (particularly hybrid) publishing models alongside other financial demands, for example library subscriptions.
OECD argues that both models offer major drawbacks. The current state of the publishing ecosystem during this transitional period means that, in the short term, neither is built to grow sustainably. Green offers no way to offset the cost to the institution and Gold is out of reach of most authors with no financial backing.
Freemium offers publishers the opportunity to identity different kinds of users within their business model and therefore the opportunity to offer different levels of service at different rates.
A scholarly publishing model must begin on the premise that all users are able to access content for free at the point of access. The next level of the model must offer enough benefits to encourage visitors to become “registered users”. At this point users are identifiable and can be offered services and content tailored to their profile type. After a certain period of usage a certain percentage of registered users will move to a “registered paid” model, and this is how operational and distribution costs are met. Once they are identified, the publisher now has the opportunity to offer different rates to certain user profiles - for example free access for students.
All content must be built toward a freemium audience who expect all content to be free at the point of access, thanks to the success of this model in other sectors - i.e. the entertainment industry. It should be pointed out that the next generation of researchers will have been exposed to this kind of model for a majority of their academic life.
In some ways the idea of freemium content holds greater weight when measured against the growing appetite for open access amongst scholarly communities. It is, after all, a form of open access that conforms to the Budapest definition of 2001. OECD propose that the ability to read different versions for different devices is a model that charges for ‘convenience’ and could be adopted to help meet the cost of dissemination. The use of advertising within content is also a familiar model to users that could be adapted within this model. The term is ‘monetize’!
There are no gold coins to buy, but freemium may help to keep the scholarly community in the driving seat in promoting their research and represents good value for money in the dissemination chain. It offers taxpayers and funders another choice.
I close with more images from "Freemium Isn’t Free" - the sixth episode of the eighteenth season of the animated television series South Park.
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