RE: Future of the "subscription model?"

["Nathaniel M. Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

Saw a talk by Bernie Black yesterday for one of our OA week 
panels, so I have to ask, isn't this exactly the model with SSRN, 
or at least the direction it is going in?  The working papers are 
OA and, as SSRN ventures deeper into 'publication', the finished 
papers will be OA after an embargo, but there will be wrappers of 
content (curated content) available for subscription.  They have 
already pointed the direction with the research series.

I like this model because personally, I think plos one has peer 
review just right, but could offer curation.  After all, we've 
all read the papers about how peer review fails often enough at 
judgments of rigor and value, and shows distinct nationality 
bias, so shouldn't we be interested in narrowing the focus of 
peer review so that it can get at least one thing right?  In any 
case, judgements of value are always ultimately crowdsourced, 
even if the wrapper (say Nature or Science) causes an initial 
bump in eyeballs and consequent citations.  Bernie said he 
thought article processing (presumably to include peer review) 
could be driven down to around $500, but he did not indicate what 
level of peer review he was talking about.

I'm interested to see how many more working papers platforms 
follow the lead of SSRN eventually, since this is a real game 
changer, in my mind, especially, as Bernie pointed out, as 
article level metrics mature enough to challenge journal level 
metrics.

Interestingly though (and as an aside), our panel was pretty well 
united against author-pays -- SSRN makes its money back (or will, 
as the saying goes) in a variety of ways , none of which involve 
author-pays.  I don't like author-pays either and I don't like 
how 'Gold OA' as a bit of jargon which is supposed to mean 
something includes library published journals without author fees 
and journals such as First Monday, as well as author fees 
platforms like plos one and Gilded OA like the recent commercial 
attempts to game the system.

Regards,
Nat


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 6:27 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Future of the "subscription model?"

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