Might Freemium Open Access Be Better than Green or Gold? - A Guest Post by Toby Green - Digital Science

"The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) self-publishes its publicly-funded research results in the form of around 250 books, 150 working papers, 350 datasets and a handful of journal articles every year. Since the rise of open access, we have been trying to square the ‘free and impact’ circle without drawing funds away from research. We looked at green and gold open access models, but neither provided us with a financially sustainable model to meet publishing costs and impact-building. So, we looked for inspiration elsewhere and found it in two areas: games and the low-cost airline industry. Many digital games provide free access to the game itself and earn revenue from premium services or upgrades – the key to success is to build a very large audience because only a small percentage will pay for premium features. The low-cost airlines realised they could democratise air travel by unbundling what had been a single, expensive, product with little differentiation into a cheaper, basic, product with chargeable (‘premium’) options. The result is the same; a passenger gets to B from A at a basic price, but the experience is differentiated according to individual need and willingness to pay for extras ... Like the flag-carriers and scholarly publishers, OECD had a single, bundled, product, with little differentiation: either you were a subscriber and got everything, or a non-subscriber and got nothing. So we unbundled our product and, taking a leaf from the gamers book, made the basic service free. The basic service makes all the content available in a read-only version and includes discovery, citation, sharing and embedding tools. We put services like copy-paste, download, local printing into the premium service, so PDF, Excel, ePub editions are accessible for subscribers only. Institutional subscribers also benefit from downloadable MARC records, usage reports, customer support and on-site training. So, the content is free, the services are premium. We call this model Freemium Open Access ... As the gaming industry knows, freemium is only sustainable if a very large audience is attracted to the free service and a large enough percentage choose to upgrade for the premium services. Therefore, unlike green and gold where there is no particular incentive to build a large audience, freemium open access makes audience-building an essential priority; fail to build a large audience and you go out of business. In our case, since we went freemium, we’ve tripled our audience size and impact is measurably larger as a result. Better still, because we sell subscriptions we can give funders detailed reports showing which institutions are accessing the content ..."