Workflow Lock-in: A Taxonomy - The Scholarly Kitchen
lkfitz's bookmarks 2018-01-03
Summary:
"The Big Deal is a classic case of lock-in. It was a brilliant strategy, so tempting to libraries, which received vastly more content than ever before at what was at first a minor price increment accompanied by predictable pricing. It was also quite clearly, at least to some librarians with strategic foresight, a terrible strategy for managing a collections budget over time. Yet within just a few years, one after another academic library moved to the Big Deal model of bundled content licensing.
The Big Deal was a brilliant strategy for publishers because universities moved to this new model through a choice they typically made of their own volition. Since then, academia’s unhappiness with the predicted effects of the Big Deal has been channeled at commercial publishers who are seen to have exploited their position. Academia finds itself no less locked in than had it been forced into the model kicking and screaming."