Towards sustainable funding for Open Access

In the quest to make scientific publications free to read and free to publish, the million-dollar question is: how can it be sustainable?

Although the content of scientific articles is usually written and vetted by researchers free of charge to publishers, publishing scientific content unfortunately is not free. Casting aside the “staggering profits” of the publishers, subscriptions still cover other costs — like those of maintaining and developing publishing infrastructure. When we want to make those articles available without subscriptions, we will have to find other ways of sustainably covering those costs.

I took a look at funding models that Open Access initiatives like Flockademic can adopt to remain sustainable in the long term, and evaluate their pros and cons.

Sponsorship

One option is to find an organisation that shares Flockademic’s goals and values, and is willing to fund operations and maintenance. Examples of this model are arXiv, which is maintained by the Cornell University Library, and Wellcome Open Research, which is supported by the Wellcome Trust.

The advantage of such a close collaboration is that it allows both sides to profit from each other’s knowledge and network to further their respective missions. Furthermore, only one organisation needs to concern itself with fundraising in this setup.

However, strongly relying on a single entity also implies a certain amount of risk. If the funding organisation ends up in trouble or shifts priorities, that could be problematic for Flockademic as well. Additionally, the costs might be too large to bear for a single organisation.

Cooperative funding

An option that alleviates some of the concerns of the sponsorship model is to engage in partnerships with multiple organisations with shared goals and values. By having each of those organisations contribute a share of operating costs, those costs are kept low while simultaneously reducing dependence on a single organisation. This model is the one the Open Library of Humanities operates under, which is funded by subsidies from a number of partner university libraries.

This model has several benefits. First, it’s less risky: a single funder withdrawing is not as devastating when there are others still. Furthermore, it’s a smaller burden to individual organisations, as they will only have to cover a small part of expenses. In the case of university libraries, these costs could eventually be covered by budgets currently allocated to journal subscriptions. And finally, another advantage is that having many funders also makes corporate sponsorship options more feasible without compromising on values, thus requiring less public funds.

Of course, this model comes with some disadvantages of its own. Maintaining relationships with many different parties results in more overhead, i.e. more time spent fundraising, less time spent stimulating Open Access. And since each partner is one of many, there’s less positive exposure and thus less incentive to be one, so finding partners might be a challenge.

Providing additional services

The costs of publishing can also be covered indirectly. For example, Elsevier has been making a series of acquisitions to help turn it into an analytics company rather than a publisher. Academics, universities and others might be willing to pay for more insight into their academic output, and by publishing their research, Elsevier be able to provide that insight.

This option has the advantage that it is less dependant on philanthropy and thus less vulnerable to funding sources drying up.

However, pursuing the mission of turning all research Open Access could end up playing second fiddle to providing the service that keeps the lights on.

What else?

The cooperative model currently appears most preferable to me. With the other two models available to fall back on, I am confident that Flockademic will be able to stay afloat in the long term as well.

That said, this list is not exhaustive. Are there any models I missed, or other arguments in favour or against the above models? I’d love to hear what you think is the most sustainable funding model for Open Access — my email address is Vincent@Flockademic.com.

I’m finding out how best to open up access to scientific articles. Sign up for the mailinglist or follow Flockademic on Twitter to join me on the journey.