What was BePress? – Gavia Libraria
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-08-11
Summary:
"Well, Elsevier has any number of options here. The Loon can’t say which road they’ll take.
- Elsevier could knock a big chunk out of US-based green open access at a stroke. How? Pricing BePress’s current client base out. The quickest, easiest, and most PR-friendly way to do this is to bundle ElseBePress with Pure, Mendeley, and so on… and as we all know, Elsevier surely does love leveraging bundling for high prices.
- Re-enclosure. As it did with SSRN, Elsevier could do copyright sweeps. It could take down the DigitalCommons Network. It could robots.txt away search engines. It could play soft-TPM games. Petty pettifogging, but effective.
- Embrace, extend, extinguish (and goodness, the Loon did not mean that post as prophecy no matter how much it reads as such now!), especially in combination with the bundling/pricing strategy.
- Extending its tentacles into the non-Research-1 library/institutional market. This will only be possible as long as Elsevier can curb its normal pricing rapacity. Can it? The Loon doesn’t know.
- Letting BePress languish undeveloped, with an eye to eventually shrugging and pulling the plug on it."