4: Financial Models
Derive new financially sustainable models of open access Other Information:
There is a tension between commercial publishing and the provision of unfettered access to scholarly information -- Next-generation
Tools Require Unfettered Resource Access -- Currently, a large and active movement of professionals and students, including
data curators, are providing services intended to improve the effectiveness of scholarly communication, and thereby the productivity
of researchers; these entail digging facts out of textual publications and presenting them in machine-readable actionable
form. The need for much of this expensive manual effort would be reduced if authors were to provide the relevant metadata
at the time of publication. These extraction processes are increasingly being performed by automated text mining and classification
software. However, because the source material is usually copyrighted, and these rights are distributed across a large number
of publishers, the service providers are forced to negotiate individual contracts with each publisher, which is extremely
wasteful of time and resources. To reduce this burden, some research funders are increasingly mandating that research results
of all types be made openly available. However, this results in a confusing world where some publications are immediately
and freely available and others on the same topic are not. A related problem is the effect of the web as the medium for scholarly
communication, since it is ending the role of local library collections. Libraries and archives have been forced to switch
from purchasing copies of the research communications of interest to their readers, to leasing web access to the publishers'
copies, with no assurance of long-term accessibility to current content if future subscriptions lapse. Bereft of almost all
their original value to scholars, libraries are being encouraged to both compete in the electronic publishing market and to
take on the task of running ‘institutional repositories', in effect publishing their scholars' data and research communications.
Though both tasks are important, neither has an attractive business model. Re-publishing an open access version of their scholars'
output where research is published in subscription-access journals may seem redundant, but it is essential if the artificial
barriers that intellectual property restrictions have erected to data-mining and other forms of automated processing are to
be overcome [Hargreaves, 2011].
Objective(s):
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