Open Access News

Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths, and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources, a report from the Strategic Content Alliance and Ithaka, May 2008.  Excerpt:

...We define ‘sustainability’ as having a mechanism in place for generating, or gaining access to, the economic resources necessary to keep the intellectual property or the service available on an ongoing basis. This does not...presuppose any particular method for revenue generation: an Open Access resource, for example, will have a different set of revenue options available to it than a project that is willing to charge a subscription fee, but both should be expected to develop a sustainable economic model....

It does not matter if a resource is subscription-based, Open Access, or supported by budgets of a host institution. For any site, users have a choice in what they pay for, where they spend their time online, or whether to volunteer their time to help support a project. Each project must build sources of advantage that make it valuable and attractive to users, and find ways to sustain these advantages over time....

Disadvantages/risks [of the subscription model]

• A powerful values-driven preference for Open Access in many parts of the academy has resulted in challenges to the subscription model
• In the print world there was little controversy about the need to charge for journals, monographs, or other research outputs. Each customer incurred measurable (if small) incremental costs for printing and distribution, and there was a clear logic for charging fees (plus a margin to cover up-front publication costs) to users. Online, however, the marginal costs of each user are close to zero, so the linkage between variable costs and revenues is broken
• The variability of subscription fee structures can be complex for customers to understand and difficult to compare
• The wealth of competing sources of information available on the web can also call into question the ‘value’ of a particular resource....If a free competitor provides information in a fashion deemed ‘good enough’ by its users, then a subscription service may find it difficult to maintain its subscriber base, even if it can claim to have superior content or features
• Subscriptions by definition restrict usage of a resource to those who subscribe to it. This is a disadvantage from a mission perspective for not-for-profit projects with a commitment to provide as wide access to its resource as possible. It can make it harder to build a case for generating other kinds of revenue, such as advertising or grants. It can also be a disadvantage to users in developing countries, who sometimes lack both the financial resources and means (eg credit cards, bank accounts) to conduct transactions....

Disadvantages [of the pay-per-use model]

• Some would argue that putting any price on content limits its usefulness.
• Prices must be set carefully – low enough to stimulate demand, but high enough so that potential subscribers do not migrate to the pay-per-use option....
• For aggregators such as JSTOR, this may require the negotiation of different kinds of rights with content providers....

Disadvantages [of the contributor-pays model]

• The ability to use the demand-side marketplace to judge the impact of the resource, measure its success, and gain the feedback of users is absent....
• A study conducted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education in 2006 found resistance among faculty to the author pays model because of associations with vanity publishing, concerns about academic integrity, and concerns that this system might discriminate against scholars without access to publishing budgets
• The upside is essentially eliminated if the publication only accepts author fees for those works it chooses to publish: no matter how many users the content attracts, the publishers' revenues will stay the same....
• In fact, as a publication grows more prestigious, more articles will be submitted, driving up the costs of processing articles that are declined and thus publication charges for those that do get published, and as usage grows the associated access costs will increase without a commensurate increase in revenue. This can be countered by imposing fees on all works submitted for review, not just on those accepted for publication
• The author pays model provides no recurring revenue to maintain an author’s work. Long-term preservation must either be paid by charging an author a higher price at the moment of contribution that would be used either to build an endowment to fund future preservation costs, or by charging current authors a higher price to cover migration and other investments made in older content (social security model)....

Disadvantages [of the Host institutional funds / in-kind contributions model]

• Priorities of institutions can change – new academic focus areas – leaving the project without a home or support
• It can be hard to make the case for how programs other than teaching and research are at the centre of university priorities. In this sense, projects may always feel vulnerable and need to fight for support and attention, leaving them in a position of being undercapitalised. This is the situation that many university presses feel that they find themselves in....

Disadvantages/risks [of advertising]

• Securing and retaining advertisers requires skilled personnel and time
• Some site users may dislike the feel of hosting ads on the site
• Setting ad prices can be tricky when measurement criteria are so fluid
• Ad revenue is not ‘guaranteed’ and takes time to build up; it is unlikely to replace other revenue streams right away
• If a site becomes overly dependent on advertising it can undermine the editorial integrity of the project. Many people feel this is happening in the newspaper industry....