Re: Future of the "subscription model?"

[Adam Hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

My sketchy suggestion was not based on the idea that an 
entrepreneur would sell a subscription that was 'wrapping' stuff 
that was already OA. That metaphor suggests a rather minimal 
level of integration. Much more ambitious levels of curatorial 
investment may be practical using a computational approach. Think 
of what Google has been able to do sending round street view cars 
on the open highway, or what Wolfram Alpha is doing with 
disciplined curation and computational modelling of data found 
and interpreted in common reference sources. If one is ambitious 
about the value of having primary scholarship Open Access one can 
be quite optimistic about the scope of intellectual investment 
that might be built on top of that.

Adam

Sent from my iPhone

On 29 Oct 2011, at 02:29, "Nathaniel M. Gustafson-Sundell" 
<n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu> wrote:

> 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