Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
disastrous ones - during this period, and in many cases the bulk of those
cuts was absorbed by materials budgets. What has always been a
fundamentally unsustainable situation has come to a head more quickly
than many anticipated.
It is a situation that has resulted in much apocalyptic commentary,
many calls for reform and little real change. There have been calls for
sustainable business models and even for 'transformative' ones
(University of California Office of Scholarly Communication, 2009), but
so far relatively few models have proved to be both. The business
models can basically be boiled down into three general categories:
reader pays, author pays and the taxation model.
Reader pays
The most common model, and the one that is most clearly rational, is
the one that requires readers to pay. What makes this model more
rational than others is the simple fact that those who want access to a
document are required pay for it, while those who do not want access
are not charged. What makes the model objectionable, of course, is the
fact that so many who do want access cannot afford it.
This leads to a major complicating factor in the discussion: the
degree to which value-laden beliefs and empirically based quantitative
factors become intertwined. Is the traditional, reader-pays subscription
model itself broken and unsustainable, or is the model itself sound but
the pricing patterns impossible to sustain? Which is fairer and better for
society at large: for all to pay a small amount for access regardless of
whether they want it, or for a few to pay a larger (and in some cases
truly huge) amount for what they want and nothing for what they do
not? And if the latter arrangement is deemed acceptable, how much
should the customer have to pay?
Author pays
Under this model, costs that were borne by subscribers are shifted to
the authors of research articles and access is then made freely available
to the public. There is a certain undeniable logic to this approach: the
scholarly information marketplace is largely supply-driven rather than
demand-driven (new books on Welsh literature in the Elizabethan
