Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv: Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Re: Cornell University Library Engages More Institutions in Supporting
arXiv

Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure 
http://news.library.cornell.edu/news/arxiv

On 22-Jan-10, at 11:10 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:

> This is actually an Open Access sustainable funding model and 
> could very well become THE model (or one of the leading models) 
> for scholarly communications, depending on the enhancements 
> (say, if these included more formal quality control) eventually 
> ... although I expect the old dogs will keep circling around 
> the old models as long as there is anything to bark about.

Voluntary institutional sub-sidy/cription as a sustainable model, 
through all economic times, tough and tender??

Here's an alternative model whose sustainablity is less founded 
on blind faith:

Institutions have many self-interested reasons for wanting to 
host, archive, manage, monitor, measure and showcase their own 
research article outputs. The annual scale of their own local 
article output is also manageable and sustainable at the 
institutional level, within its existing infrastructure:

      Carr, L. The Value that Repositories Add 
http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2008/11/value-that-repositories-add.html

      Swan, A. The Business of Digital Repositories 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14455/

      Harnad, S. Institutional vs. Central Repositories 
http://bit.ly/62M14a

Hence what will happen is that instead of trying to sustain a 
central repository like Arxiv -- most of whose costliness derives 
from the fact that it is a single direct locus of deposit and 
archiving from all institutions, worldwide -- direct deposit and 
hosting will instead be offloaded onto the distributed network of 
institutional repositories, with Arxiv becoming merely another 
central harvester, providing global search services (sustainable 
if it provides functionality that can compete with other OAI 
services or Google Scholar).

But voluntary sub-sidy/cription will no doubt sustain things for a
while. (Things do seem to catch on rather slowly in this domain...)

Stevan Harnad

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Philip Davis
> Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:53 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model
>
> ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model The celebrated
> e-print service will now rely on annual library donations, while
> its long-term business plan is still in the works.
>
> see:  http://j.mp/5dvINB