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4 Publication Business Models and Revenue
Pages 27-45

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From page 27...
... This session, therefore, is devoted to a discussion of sources and types of revenue, ways of raising revenue, and different business models, particularly in a world where digital publishing is becoming much more the norm. The defining question is: How does a publisher organize delivery and rights management across modes of access so as to recover production costs and induce ongoing investment in development?
From page 28...
... Finally, the overriding question for this entire symposium much less this session is: What impact is the digital publishing world going to have on science itself, on the scientific enterprise? For instance, how are the different business models, the different ways that access is provided and structured, going to affect the quality and productivity of science, collaboration at a distance, access for developing countries, the professional review and career process, peer review, and other aspects of scientific research?
From page 29...
... Wiley now uses basic and enhanced access licenses. Basic means title-by-title access, with some concurrent user restrictions.
From page 30...
... The enhanced access license tends more to be multisite, multinational, and suitable for large consortia, with unlimited concurrent users. There is access to all subscribed current content as well as back content, and privileges such as Article Select, roaming access, and monthly usage reports.
From page 31...
... That kind of selectively filtered information is that productivity multiplier. Wiley, therefore, has very much supported a customer-pays model for the business because the company believes it ultimately enhances the value of scientific information for those who should value it most.
From page 32...
... Bundling will have the effect of greatly increasing the number of Reed Elsevier publications available through particular libraries, at the expense of having less well positioned publishers lose those customers entirely. Downstream Value Migration We also should expect commercial publishers to seek so-called downstream value migration and to target competitors that for various reasons are thought to be vulnerable.
From page 33...
... Looking out 5 to 10 years from now in the world of scholarly communications, we are likely to see an ample number of open-access publications coexisting with proprietary ones, and we will witness ingenious publishing strategies designed to extract economic gain even in the absence of copyright. The toll collector may have switched positions, but he still has his hand out.
From page 34...
... The libraries are beginning to push for much more finely tuned licensing models whereby they can select the content that they want not only at the title level, but in terms of other kind of bundling, much like the tokens that Brian Crawford described. Moreover, in the big deals, the libraries have encountered pricing that is very hard to defend to their user community.
From page 35...
... They found that the relatively modest number of requests to retrieve the print versions from storage was by and large because the electronic versions failed to have some attribute or content that was solely in the print versions, or where the fidelity of some of the representation was not as strong. This result was similar to the data collected in the PEAK study at the University of Michigan (in the late 1990s)
From page 36...
... This is the operating premise. Reconceptualizing file STM Publishing Business Model on the Internet Before the Internet, the hard reality was that there was no choice but to charge the readers and users of scientific publications, because the most efficient way of distributing this information was by printing it on paper and delivering it in boats and trucks.
From page 37...
... It means that everything PLoS publishes can be downloaded in its entirety, manipulated, copied, redistributed, integrated with other data, and even resold by commercial publishers. The point is that the content is not the publisher's property.
From page 38...
... This ideal of scientific publication being managed as a public good, as an open public resource, is now within our reach. If we, as scientific publishers, can work together, and work with the universities and the institutional sponsors of research, we can make the transition from the anachronistic, restricted-access business model that we have now to a system that is economically sustainable, much better for science and society, and that provides free and open access to everyone.
From page 39...
... Pat Brown added that in his view, that second filter exists already, and there is no added cost for it. The factor that serves to maintain the quality of the work that authors submit for publication is not that they do not think they can ever get a paper published.
From page 40...
... Color page charges might be acceptable, because they are a direct cost, but author page support for articles in non-society publications cannot be a viable part of current business models for nonsociety publishers. Brian Crawford commented that he considered the points made by Mr.
From page 41...
... The Effect of Different Publishing Business Models on the Long-Term Presentation of Digital Journals Wendy Lougee raised the question of how publishers see the incorporation of the long-term preservation requirements in the context of the user-pays economic model, given the unknown future costs associated with that. Brian Crawford noted that the focus of publishers in electronic publishing is mainly on the actual production of the work and its dissemination on the Web.
From page 42...
... In addition, Martin Blume's suggestion in the Nature debate was not a bad idea as a transitional approach. In fact, it was something Professor Brown would strongly urge the PNAS to consider, that is, to ask the institutional subscribers that now provide most of the revenues, mostly academic institutions that probably accept the philosophy that journals provide a public service, to continue to pay their subscription fees at the current rate for some interval of years to be specified, during which time the PNAS would make the transition to open access.
From page 43...
... That is the kind of catalyst that is needed, a bit of extra money. Pat Brown noted that it might be best to view this approach as transitional, because ultimately the sensible thing would be for the research sponsors to cover the publication costs as an essential part of their mission of promoting and disseminating research.
From page 44...
... This would be in contrast to the present model, which puts the author payment responsibility into a grant in which the author has discretion whether to spend that money for publication or to spend it for support of another graduate student or some other research cost. Pat Brown answered that despite his best efforts, he is not sure if there is a way to persuade them.
From page 45...
... The point is that an author will not balk at paying extra money after putting a great deal of work into a scientific paper for all the world to see. If we go to a model where the institutions are covering page charges as an essential part of research, it will make it even less of a disincentive to authors.


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