Apologies for the slow response. Firstly, OECD’s outputs are no more data heavy than most scholarly outputs. What does set us apart from most scholarly publishers is that we also publish the original datasets, alongside our books and papers - but all are published on a freemium basis (with a bit of gold thrown in when we get the funding). So, I don’t believe that we are somehow a special case, indeed, Open Editions uses a very similar freemium model to our own and I have little doubt freemium is viable for scholarly research works.

As for the linkage with the open access debate. Well, if you look at Budapest, this is what it says about funding:

Finally, I did note with great pleasure (and not a little surprise) that Wellcome, at COASPA, foresaw freemium as being a step on the road to the future, so maybe the idea is beginning to catch on, but, I grant you, most funders and policymakers are fixated by green and gold - something I hope my article might help to unfix because G&G are plainly not going to get us there anytime soon.

From: Steve Cohn <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 10:55 AM

Ben-

 

I think Toby’s point, and the point of a freemium model, is that who pays does not have to be a binary, either/or proposition.

 

It can rather be a both/and proposition, where hybrids of a variety of sorts can exist, with authors, sponsors of various sorts, and readers or institutional proxies for readers are all contributing some of the funding needed to allow the somewhat expensive work of high-quality scholarly publishing to be done successfully.

 

                              Steve Cohn

____________________________________

 

Steve Cohn | Director

Duke University Press

905 W. Main Street 18-B, Durham, NC 27701

tel 1.919.687.3606 | fax 1.919.688-4574

dukeupress.edu | Twitter: @DUKEpress

 

From: <[log in to unmask]com>

Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2017 13:09:31 +0000

 

Toby,

 

I think the Freemium model as you have implemented it is fascinating and there is lots to learn from it in terms of generating profile and usage for content. The tricky thing for publishers to weigh up is whether it will work in the same way for other content that is less data-heavy than the OECD’s.

 

What I don’t get, is the direct relevance to the OA debate, at least not as it is currently formulated. It’s central to the principle of OA that content be free at the point of use (Freemium deals with that, to an extent), but beyond that the goal is to shift the flow of money from paying for access to paying for content to be published. I don’t see how Freemium changes that, because your assumption is that some users, and above all institutions, will continue to pay for enhanced access.

 

Unless I’m missing something here, that’s an important reason why I suspect Freemium might struggle to find acceptance among funders and policy makers as an alternative to Green or Gold OA as currently defined.  

 

Best wishes

Ben Ashcroft
Vice President, Sales & Marketing

DE GRUYTER

Genthiner Straße 13

10785 Berlin, Germany

 

 

Von: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]CRL.EDU] Im Auftrag von LIBLICENSE
Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. September 2017 08:09
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: Why current approaches to open access are failing

 

From: <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 07:35:36 +0000

Ari,

 

In any freemium business (which is, in essence, what I am proposing) there is a basic service provided for free and a set of premium services for payment. One of the keys to a successful freemium business is a constant shuffling of the line between what is provided for free and what is paid for because a premium service today could become commoditised and become a basic service tomorrow - at the same time, technological advances create opportunities for new premium services which allows the basic-premium line to be re-drawn. 

 

I am proposing a baseline where the basic service is an ability to read the content, online, free of charge. Without this baseline, access is not 'open'. But it is a baseline that could edge forward, provided sufficient income is coming from premium services (which, we have to understand, must cover the cost of providing the free service too).

 

So, to answer your question, with a read-only baseline, premium services could include the ability to cut'n'paste, to print, to save for offline reading. I'd rather not specify the type of format that would provide these services, that is for the publisher to decide and there is no easy answer (it is technically possible, for example, to offer a read-only PDF file). In our case, we create a read-only file using HTML and offer PDF, e-Pub, .csv and excel file formats for our premium editions.

 

As to who would need premium services - well, anyone who needs to do more than simply read content. I would hazard that there is a sizeable audience for doing more than simply reading online: in our case, we've found that 15% of all accesses to our content is to premium versions. This might sound small, but since we launched our free, read-only service in 2012, the total number of accesses to what are now premium versions is larger than the total number of accesses we had before. So we've succeeded in reaching a much, much larger audience and have sufficient demand for premium editions to keep the books balanced.

 

Hope this helps.

Toby

Toby Green

Public Affairs and Communications Directorate

OECD

Winner The Academic and Professional Publisher Award 2017