Freemium (was: Persee in danger)

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Not yet familiar with the term "Freemium," I looked it up online. 
We've heard about many such ventures, including in open 
acess-world, and a number of them have been mentioned off an on, 
on this list.

The short Wikipedia article is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

Cordially, Ann Okerson/Yale Library

________________________________________
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu [owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]
On Behalf Of Annaig Mahe [mahe.annaig@wanadoo.fr]
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 10:30 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Persee in danger. Please support it.

As much as I have understood from the outside, the University of 
Lyon 2 has argued that it is not for a local university to 
support a national program. This situation arises in a new 
context for the French Universities where they now each have to 
plan for their budgets autonomously and locally where before it 
was planned at a national level. Until then, the University 
received a budget dedicated to Persee from the Ministry of Higher 
Education and gave some more support mainly in the form of 
infrastructure. It is now asking for Persee to be wholly 
supported at a national level, which might eventually be done by 
the CNRS (the French national research institution, already in 
charge of the national platform for Open Access, HAL).

The logic seems quite sensible, on a sole economic analysis but, 
according to Persee, the decision has been taken very suddenly 
and without previous discussion, thus putting the whole project 
in danger. The support from the University is supposed to cease 
in May, and no viable solution has been proposed yet. The 
petition might help for the best solution to be found, the main 
risk in the end being for the Persee team to be dismantled and 
thus losing a precious expertise.

This awkward situation has yet one advantage:  to raise awareness 
on the necessity to find sustainable economic models for such 
useful Open Access initiatives, as this has been recently shown 
by the new economic model for ArXiv or by another French 
initiative, OpenEdition/Revues.org which has very recently 
proposed a new economic model for the libraries, Freemium (a 
combination of free access for the users and premium fee services 
for the libraries).

Annaig Mahe
lecturer,
Urfist de Paris