Flipping Out

= proposed transition strategy from journal subscription model to Open Access model

URL = http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2007/10/22/flipping-out/

Description

"suggested in 2003 by Mark Rowse, who was CEO of Ingenta at the time:

Rowse’s suggestion is simply that a journal “flip” its business model by declaring that, from now on, what have previously been regarded as library subscription fees will now be considered authors’ subsidies and the contents of the journal will be available without barriers on the web. Such a decision would protect the journal’s income in the short run, and it would challenge subscribing libraries to refrain from canceling there payments to the journal, now identified as author’s fees, until a sustainable model to keep the contents available in open access is developed. Such a model would presumably involve incremental steps towards correlating what an institution actually pays with the publishing habits of its faculty in the journal. Some schools would pay less, some would pay more, and some that did not pay the high subscription rate at all would be convinced, one hopes, to pay appropriate fees for publishing their own faculty’s work.

This idea obviously involves a risk on the part of both the publisher and the libraries, but it seems like an excellent way to prod libraries into putting their money where their mouths are in regard to open access. As Rowse says, this technique suggests a way to transition to open access “without fundamentally destroying the existing scholarly publishing business.” (http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2007/10/22/flipping-out/)

More Information

Commentary at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-07.htm#flip