Neither our current publishing models nor reliance on the tooth fairy will support academia in the digital world: we must consider logical solutions to fund digital scholarship

... “one of my complaints about the current academic publishing model is that it’s a poor economic one... Now, one can make many arguments about open access... for example around it being a public good... in this post let’s just focus on the money bit... I’m concentrating on the ‘who pays’ question as it is conventionally put in terms of open scholarship...Open access publishing...This is the aspect of the debate that has had the most attention. Let’s assume we want to keep a peer-review journal system... However, the costs under this model are high – somewhere around $5,000 per article if published by a commercial publisher. Whereas a non-profit, open access journal (say one run by a society) has much lower costs, around $750 (see Clarke for lots of numbers)... The cheaper, non-profit versions could be funded through the research councils (either through author pays, or directly as ongoing research distribution sources), through library consortia (as Frances Pinter suggests), or through universities... the online equivalent of a university press might see a central team of one techie, and two admin or librarian staff supporting 5-10 online journals. That is a much more sustainable model... More generally, we can talk of open scholarship, which is just sharing stuff you do. This might be a conference presentation, data from a research project, workshop structure, (as well as the publications above). This is the one area where I really don’t see the ‘who pays’ question. The actual costs involved in doing so aren’t great... Open education... This, I think, is the most difficult to answer the ‘who pays’ question, because teaching money (whether it comes from the state or the student) is what really funds higher education. There has been lots of work on the sustainability (or otherwise) of the OER movement. David Wiley has probably the best review, and suggest three models: The MIT, USU and Rice models... So if you want to try an experimental subject or approach but can’t get it approved, then setting up a MOOC is relatively low cost. They are action research if you like – something we couldn’t do before, but can now... Perhaps more relevant are the boundary-less open courses. For example... courses which have a traditional, campus, fee paying student body, but which is open to anyone else to take part in, for as long as they like. These can be a win-win situation – students get access to a wider range of expertise and participants, and the open participants get to experience part of study... I think making the case as to why the university should do this is a tougher sell, but in terms of the costs, it needn’t undermine existing models... A recent, interesting example, combines open education potentially with open publishing. The Stanford AI course has gained incredible student numbers... I don’t suggest that it is easy to tackle the ‘who pays’ question for all forms of openness but I would argue that none of them are based just wishful thinking or naiveté...”