Re: Future of the "subscription model?"

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

You mean that such an entrepreneur might establish an extra 
filtering system to ferret out the best of the best in each 
discipline or subfield or topical area and then arrange to 
license that material from the original publishers and resell it 
to libraries (somewhat in the way that print anthologies were put 
together in the good old days)?

Sandy Thatcher


At 6:40 PM -0400 10/26/11, adam hodgkin wrote:

>I wonder if some publisher/entrepreneur will come up with, has 
>already come up with, an 'unsubscription' model. In a world 
>where most research and scholarship is open access (I am all for 
>it) there will be an increasing value in second order services 
>that provide ways of assessing and measuring relative 
>importance/scope/potential surprise etc.
>
>Lots of things other than mere citations to be measured and 
>measurable.
>
>Since there are good reasons why libraries and their 
>institutions like subscribing to services which define, mould, 
>specialise and improve their access to information, such forms 
>of information exposure and relevance measurement may be good 
>services for them to be subscribing to.
>
>So subscription models may have a role in the definition and 
>modulation of the flow of research and scholarly information 
>even when basic access is uniformly open.
>
>Adam Hodgkin