Catching the Wave - The Tide Turns Toward the Subscription Model | Kent Anderson | The Scholarly Kitchen

"In the late 1990s, there was a tsunami of utopianism as content moved into the browser. Many were swept up by a belief that digital purveyance would be so cheap as to be virtually free; that content could be liberated from containers to become ubiquitous; and that previously hidden knowledge would be unlocked to the benefit of all. The subscription model and its walls of pay were certainly doomed.

The utopia hasn’t materialized, despite major efforts and significant change. The subscription model is still prevalent, and open access (OA) continues to be a relatively minor part of the scholarly publishing economy even 20 years hence. At the recent Researcher-to-Reader (R2R) conference, the difficulty of making OA business models work in isolation was a consistent theme. Gold OA has created conformity rather than disruption, both in the pricing of services via the model but also by further entrenching the largest publishers, who are better positioned to execute on its underlying economies of scale. Author-pays has also enabled a new type of publishing scam, the so-called “predatory publishers.”...

Within this stagnant and corrupted information space, another tsunami is generating a tide that may sweep away the detritus. This tsunami is more serious, less glib, arriving not with thunder and lightning but with steadily increasing winds. This stormfront views quantity skeptically and promotes quality; avoids zero-sum business models and pursues win-win business models; shuns producer-pays economics and promotes recipient-pays economics; and overturns amateur work in preference for professional outputs....

The price we pay later is not always the price we pay at the start. Perhaps as the subscription model returns, we can pay the price up front in the form of money, instead of paying a steeper set of prices years or decades later due to an unforeseen undertow."