Freemium as a sustainable economic model for open access electronic publishing in humanities and social sciences

  • Authors:

  • Pierre Mounier

  • Affiliations:

  • Centre for Open Electronic Publishing, EHESS, 190-198 avenue de France, 75244 Paris cedex 13, France. E-mail: pierre.mounier@gmail.com

  • Venue:
  • Information Services and Use - 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing --ELPUB 2012 --Social Shaping of Digital Publishing: Exploring the Interplay between Culture and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Between the two paths of open access --green and gold --the later is the harder to develop and has the less support from the research community. The main difficulty is about finding a sound economic model. Open Access journals usually depend on two funding sources: subsidies and/or donations from institutions and publication fees from research units in the authors-pay model. These two ways of funding open access journals and books proved effective in some cases Plos, but are not flawless. The Center for Open Electronic Publishing, a French initiative for open access publishing in humanities and social sciences, has recently developed a new economic model based on “freemium” for its full open access journals and books series, in order to address two issues: improve their economical soundness and give them more visibility in libraries. Freemium, the contraction of “free” and “premium”, preserves open access to information together with the marketing of premium services.