Maximum Dissemination: A possible model for society journals in the humanities and social sciences to support "Open" while retaining their subscription revenue

Abstract:  It is well recognized that one of the hardest problems in the Open Access arena is how to ‘flip’ the flagship society journals in the humanities and social sciences. Their revenue from a flagship journal is critical to the scholarly society. On the one hand, it is true that the paywall which guards the subscription system from unauthorized access is marginalizing whole categories of scholars and learners. On the other hand, “flipping”to an APC based model simply marginalizes some of the same people and institutions on the authorship side. Various endowment or subsidy models of flipping create the idea of Samaritans and “freeloaders” which bring into question their sustainability. I propose re-thinking the relationship between publisher and author. The publisher should act as the experts in dissemination and should take on the responsibility of maximizing the dissemination of the author’s work by providing the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) to an appropriate repository and taking down the paywall. When requests for an article come to the publisher instead of presenting non-subscribers with a paywall, they instead direct the request to the repository in which the AAM has been archived.