Sustainability of OA services

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-03-29

Summary:

"Over the past few years a number of infrastructure services have been developed in support of Open Access (in both repository and journal forms). Many of these start as projects and face some difficulties in becoming services. Infrastructure and content services in the subscription publishing model are funded by payments by publishers (eg, CrossRef, DOI) or libraries (e.g. Web of Knowledge) or both. These form an established ecosystem whose financial sustainability has been guaranteed by a library budget (broadly defined to include consortia and other shared approaches) that is now challenged both by financial constraints and by additional calls on that budget to support a new infrastructure and content services for Open Access. In order to address this situation a programme of work has been designed to improve the extent to which the infrastructure and content services required to support OA can be sustained, and that longevity managed across the community.   This work will be set up in five phases:   Phase 1: Scoping To start with there needs to be an investigation into which free-to-user services would benefit the community? Who would benefit? How does that relate to potential funding sources? These questions define the scope of this area of work, answers which are a prerequisite for further work.    Phase 2: Stakeholder engagement While scoping the work stakeholders will be consulted. This will allow these stakeholders to inform the work specification so that the outputs from the work will be useful to them. Phases 1 and 2 are now complete and have resulted in a report   Phase 3: Review of potential organisational and business models of individual projects and services Many of the projects, services, platforms, etc that were identified in Phase 1 already exist, to a greater or lesser degree and with varying degrees of maturity in their operational and business models. Furthermore, outside OA and scholarly communication there are relevant business models in the internet economy that offer valuable pointers. In this phase such business models will be captured and reviewed offering a set of real-world examples for inspiration to inform both existing services and infrastructure funders. Phase 3 is now complete and has resulted in a report.    Phase 4: Review of the conditions under which individual services and platforms can be sustained While the models used by individual services and platforms need to be robust, a successful OA scholarly communications environment relies on system-wide features that are the product of both the actions of significant (inter)national funders and of the collective actions of many individual teams and individuals. In the absence of these conditions, individual services and platforms will find it very difficult to survive in the longer term, regardless of the robustness of their individual operational and business models. We aim to provide an evidence-based description of the features of a healthy wider service ecology. This can include reference to levels of innovation, the maintenance of skills levels, the IP regime and resources available, the nature and outcomes from competition and collaboration, robustness of service offerings, the degree to which the funding environment supports both sustainability and innovation, and how trust is established and maintained to keep transaction costs low. This work has not yet been started.   Phase five: Production The work above stands on its own. However, it also results in an opportunity to develop practical outputs that can be used by individual services, infrastructure funders and those developing strategy in this area. These will be decided upon on completion of the other phases. This can be in the form of a workshop, a toolkit or a good-practice framework."

Link:

http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=535

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.libraries oa.sustainability oa.librarians oa.infrastructure oa.budgets oa.reports oa.economics_of

Date tagged:

03/29/2013, 19:40

Date published:

03/29/2013, 15:40