Guest Post – Making Sense of Open Access Business Models - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Puzzled by Shift+OPEN, Community Action, Opening the Future, and all the rest — or are you stuck in the days of Gold for Gold and APC Prepay? As some parts of our community call for new business models (now with extra equity!) and others mourn the (greatly exaggerated) demise of subscriptions, many of us are looking at the plethora of open access business models and trying to make sense of the ever-increasing list of options.

As part of my work to help not-for-profit publishers with their open access (OA) transitions, I have developed a classification system for OA business models. Considering the different models as broad groups with shared attributes enables us to have more effective discussions about what types of model are the best fit for each publisher, taking into consideration the discipline in which they publish, the geographic diversity of their authors, existing institutional and funder relationships and mandates, and of course the types of content they publish. After all, what works for a chemistry journal publisher serving mostly European authors may be entirely unsuitable for a publisher releasing arts monographs in Asia!..."