Quel modèle économique et quels modèles de revenus pour l’édition de monographies en Open Access aux Editions de L’Université de Lorraine ? | Factuel | le site d'actu de l'Université de Lorraine

Cyril Czernielewski, student curator of the libraries of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Sciences de l’Information et des Bibliothèques, looked into the issue of business models of book publishing during a 4-week internship within the research support mission of the Directorate of Documentation and Publishing of the University of Lorraine.

Based on a literature review and a series of interviews, the following models have been identified:

• The print hybrid model, where the publisher funds open access to books from the income from the sales of printed monographs.
• The freemium hybrid model, where Open Access operations are funded by selling royalties. Usually, access to the text of the book in the HTML format is offered free of charge, whereas access is paid for other formats (PDF, ePub).
• The OA embargo model, where the publisher funds OA by requiring paid access for all formats on the distributor's platform for a fixed period of time; after the expiration of this period, books are made available in as freemium or  OA.
• The cross-subsidy model, where the publisher funds OA by selling content in other media rather than print.
• The institutional subsidy model, where the publisher benefits from publication aid from an institution, other bodies, or reliance on public resources.
• The consortium model of infrastructure sharing, where the publisher benefits from the sharing of technical and commercial infrastructures.

The business model to be used in the restructuring of the Editions de l'Université de Lorraine (Edul) is innovative in the French context:

The Edul project seeks to ensure the distribution of monographs in OA, without an embargo, relying on Métopes in the production stage, OpenEdition for distribution, and its own distribution platform for monographs that are not not distributed by OpenEdition. In the initial stage, the project could benefit from the call for projects of the National Open Science Fund 2021. Ultimately, it will be based on the most frequent business models used by French public publishers, except embargoed OA and cross-subsidies.