In the Scholarly Kitchen post, New Open Access Business Models – What’s Needed to Make them Work?, David Crotty provides his takeaways from “Making the Future of Open Research Work” at the third CHORUS Forum. Panelists were from Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), PLoS, Annual Reviews and MIT Libraries and a recording of the session is linked from this post. Crotty’s points:
- Incomplete author data creates a huge hurdle for publishers and libraries when libraries have contracts to provide funding for works produced by researchers from their organizations. Persistent identifier adoption, including ORCiD IDs and ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs, are keys to solving this challenge to library-funded open access.
- Usage data has been used as a metric for demonstrating value for subscribe-to-open funding models. Usage data for open access materials cannot be connected to institutions unless user affiliation data is collected. This violates user privacy which has been fiercely protected by libraries historically.
- To move to different funding models, organizations need to have an understanding of their finances. Currently publisher and library accounting systems lack the granularity of detail and the flexibility to support analysis and tracking of different and multiple financial models.
- There’s been a call for publisher financial transparency by Plan S, funders, libraries and others, seemingly in response to what are viewed as excessive profit making by some publishers. Crotty notes that publicly-traded businesses do disclose their financials and he questions why this is demanded of publishers and not other service providers.
Crotty gives a nod to libraries and universities underwriting or subsidizing publishing because it aligns with principles of open scholarly communication, but mostly he’s focused on models consistent with research-as-commodity and demonstrated value in market economy terms.
