Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
suggested advertising as the saviour for scholarly publishing.
Unfortunately advertising cannot be the business model that funds
everything on the web - there are never going to be enough advertising
dollars to go around. Scholarly material is characterized by high-value
content, but with relatively few eyeballs looking at it, and is thus
unattractive to potential advertisers. Indeed, if the web has taught us
anything, it is that you need to be at a node of quite enormous traffic
in order to make advertising a viable business model on a large scale,
and currently that is the preserve of those offering search - and very few
other businesses.
Future scenarios
If some form of OA is to become the dominant model of scholarly
publishing, then there are four possible scenarios.
Scenario 1: subsistence
In this scenario there is widespread manuscript archiving but journals
and online repositories coexist peacefully. The certification function
continues to come from journals and their established brands, even if
registration and dissemination do not, with the cost being met
primarily through subscription income generated from sales to libraries.
Version-control issues regarding manuscripts found in online
repositories would be likely, so tension would build between repositories
wanting to archive the definitive version of the article and the sizeable
number of journals that did not allow the archiving of the Version of
Record, in order to protect their subscription income. As a result, the
full benefits of OA would not be achieved. Costs would be greater than
under the subscription model, as the cost of both purchasing
subscriptions and manuscript archiving (the cost of running and
maintaining online repositories and the time spent by authors self-
archiving) would have to be met. In addition, both journals and
repositories would take on responsibility for the curation and
preservation of the material they stewarded, with obvious duplication of
cost. As mentioned above, it seems unlikely that librarians would
continue to subscribe to a journal if the Version of Record of every
article it published was deposited in online repositories. For this reason
