Monday 12 March 2012

Value Transactions and The Publishing Business Model

I'm at the SPARC2012 Open Access conference, and all this talk about Open Access is reminding me that the issue of scholarly publishing is actually very straightforward.

Publishing companies have a very simple business model - they take authors' articles, add value and charge for that value.  You can see this process illustrated in the diagram below, with the various stages in publishing an article broken out between the different parties, and each transaction explicitly labelled with its typical financial charges and legal agreements.


A decade on from the original Budapest Open Access Initiative and here we are in Kansas City just about to start discussing more of the nuances and implications of this obvious publishing model.

1 comment:

  1. Not sure what your point is here, but in your role as RepositoryMan perhaps the question to discuss is why repositories have not sought to challenge one aspect of this 'obvious publishing model' shown in your diagram?

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