OLH, obviously, has a business model for its open-access publishing. We operate due to a membership model in which approximately 300 libraries pay an annual fee so that we can exist and publish all our work openly. It works pretty well and is able to sustain our activities – so long as the pandemic doesn’t truly scupper us. Please do join! But the overheads of running that business model are not trivial.
Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said to be near to 1 (exponential infection rate). The UK has among the worst mortality rates in the world. But it’s being portrayed as the right time to ease the lockdown.
The world is being rapidly reshaped by pandemic conditions beyond our control. This prompted me to do some radical rethinking of my own. What if I could totally reshape copyright law? Copyright does not serve science or research well at the moment. It has pushed almost all current research exclusively into the hands of Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor &
Some choice excerpts and comments on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/incomemodels_v1.pdf. I am thinking about this in relation to the list of business models for OA books that we are building, even though it was written for journals over a decade ago.
This week for our COPIM reading group we are reading Hartley, John, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and Cameron Neylon, ‘Do We Need to Move from Communication Technology to User Community?
This week for our COPIM reading group we are turning to Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, and Tim Clark, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). Part of what we are doing is thinking through the different business models that can support open publication of monographs and figuring out how to implement these on the ground.
Transformative agreements for OA are all the rage at the moment. Plan S compliance beckons and early movers can make it sound as though they are really doing what’s needed. Yet we’re at a very difficult time with the global pandemic of COVID-19. Library budgets are likely to contract as institutions come under financial strain.
This week for COPIM we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation’, in Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS ’12 (Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012), pp. 288–297 <https://doi.org/10.1145/2317956.2318001>. This paper is on the
This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, Journal of Library Administration , 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.
One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution. What if this isn’t true, though, that the level of funding will remain the same?
