Re: [GOAL] 1science pricing -- RE: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2016
Kia ora koutou, We had a presentation from 1Science a few weeks back, and as an OA advocate I’m really pleased to see initiatives like this. I have been using Free/Libre Open Source Software for a long time, and the thing that confuses a lot of people is how many people can make a living out of it. I’d recommend Raymond’s* “the Cathedral and the Bazaar” http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ as a good discussion about this. The trick to making money out of free stuff is to offer services. I’ll pay for someone to edit, review, collate, recommend, judge, and curate OA material. Certainly I’ll find value in someone prepared to teach using OERs. The thought of paying a subscription to layer journals, ones that bring the best OA material together for a specific audience is not that weird – and could be quite profitable. I’m paying money to save my precious attention, as that is the resource that diminishes when the effective cost of reproduction nears zero. There is no satisfactory technological solution to ‘finding the good stuff’. Not yet, anyway. Of course I’d say this: I’m a librarian. Unfortunately we can’t afford 1Science’s offering. I wish we could. I wish them the best. Nāku noa nā mihi, Anton Angelo. *Warning: Raymond is a Libertarian Gun Nut, but the liberal perspective on this is still valid, IMHO. -- Anton Angelo MIS, RLIANZA | Research Data Coordinator Puaka - James Hight Building, Level 5, Rm 519 | Phone: +64 3 3693853 Learning Resources | University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | Private Bag 4800 | Christchurch 8140 | New Zealand http://orcid.org/-0002-2265-1299 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Éric Archambault Sent: Saturday, 8 October 2016 5:12 a.m. To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] 1science pricing -- RE: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2016 Richard Yes, indeed I am 1science’s CEO. We are working on a freely accessible version of the system but obviously we need to find a way of not cannibalising the sales of our system as our intention is to keep improving our offering and for this we have to monetize what we are doing as we are a privately-funded organization. We are obviously not charging for the free papers (ours is a System as a Service that acts as a giant information hub strictly comprising papers publishing in peer-reviewed journal – a kind of Open-Access-Direct). The fees we charging are essentially to pay for three things: 1) software development costs; 2) cloud ops fees; 3) data curation and data value added services including identification of papers published in peer-reviewed/referred/editorially-controlled scholarly/scientific journals only. I know there is still a paradigm shift that needs to occur for many users to accept paying for such a service because the material we are valuing is available for free. My analogy is that of the fish we buy at the market: fishermen and fisherwomen catch all these in the ocean and when you buy them at the market, you are paying for the services offered by these people, they risks they took, and the operation cost of their vessels and other equipment. The fish were all freely available in the ocean. The beauty of our solution is that the process of aggregating content does not require us to remove the resource from its environment, and that no animals are killed in the process! Companies such as 1science provide innovative solution to observed problems and a form of cost sharing between users – we have spent millions developing the 1science platform and libraries can acquire the service starting at a few thousand dollars (that is for smaller libraries; and a few ten thousands for libraries that spend millions on journal subscriptions). With this subscription to the SaaS they obtain direct access to 20 million papers (we have 21.2M papers in our current release but we still have to hunt down some duplicates – so net figure is around 20M) and to curated metadata into their discovery systems (we’re working on the finishing touches with EBSCO, ProQuest and OCLC, and so we are a few weeks away from general availability in discovery systems and link resolvers). The problem we are addressing is that libraries are actually not using OA in large part because most of this material is not aggregated in a useful manner, and is often transiently available. That useful manner is to connect OA material in their discovery systems, link resolvers, and for smaller libraries who cannot afford that, in a user-friendly UI and system that concentrates OA material that has high quality, that is, has been published in peer-reviewed journals. If there is a functioning market, costs will be kept reasonable (in theory the selling cost converges towards marginal in a perfect market). Again, the beauty of OA is that the fact 1science offers such a service does in no way
Re: [GOAL] 1science pricing -- RE: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2016
This is a good illustration of the potential for OA to TA that I am trying to warn everyone about. We (authors and funders) give away our work for free as a contribution to OA scholarship, available for downstream re-use through services such as Science1. They are free to charge us for their services. It is good to see that Science1 is not charging for the actual works, however for any work for which downstream commercial rights have been granted they would be well within their rights to do so. OA to TA is not my goal. I argue that we need OA indexes, search services and hosting platforms. To ensure ongoing OA for the public, these must be owned and controlled by the public or organizations that can be accountable to the public (eg public universities, not-for-profit universities eligible for public research funds), not private for-profits, although the latter may have a role in contributing services and development. best, Heather Morrison Original message From: Anton Angelo Date: 2016-10-09 4:24 PM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" Subject: Re: [GOAL] 1science pricing -- RE: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2016 Kia ora koutou, We had a presentation from 1Science a few weeks back, and as an OA advocate I’m really pleased to see initiatives like this. I have been using Free/Libre Open Source Software for a long time, and the thing that confuses a lot of people is how many people can make a living out of it. I’d recommend Raymond’s* “the Cathedral and the Bazaar” http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ as a good discussion about this. The trick to making money out of free stuff is to offer services. I’ll pay for someone to edit, review, collate, recommend, judge, and curate OA material. Certainly I’ll find value in someone prepared to teach using OERs. The thought of paying a subscription to layer journals, ones that bring the best OA material together for a specific audience is not that weird – and could be quite profitable. I’m paying money to save my precious attention, as that is the resource that diminishes when the effective cost of reproduction nears zero. There is no satisfactory technological solution to ‘finding the good stuff’. Not yet, anyway. Of course I’d say this: I’m a librarian. Unfortunately we can’t afford 1Science’s offering. I wish we could. I wish them the best. Nāku noa nā mihi, Anton Angelo. *Warning: Raymond is a Libertarian Gun Nut, but the liberal perspective on this is still valid, IMHO. -- Anton Angelo MIS, RLIANZA | Research Data Coordinator Puaka - James Hight Building, Level 5, Rm 519 | Phone: +64 3 3693853 Learning Resources | University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | Private Bag 4800 | Christchurch 8140 | New Zealand http://orcid.org/-0002-2265-1299 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Éric Archambault Sent: Saturday, 8 October 2016 5:12 a.m. To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] 1science pricing -- RE: Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2016 Richard Yes, indeed I am 1science’s CEO. We are working on a freely accessible version of the system but obviously we need to find a way of not cannibalising the sales of our system as our intention is to keep improving our offering and for this we have to monetize what we are doing as we are a privately-funded organization. We are obviously not charging for the free papers (ours is a System as a Service that acts as a giant information hub strictly comprising papers publishing in peer-reviewed journal – a kind of Open-Access-Direct). The fees we charging are essentially to pay for three things: 1) software development costs; 2) cloud ops fees; 3) data curation and data value added services including identification of papers published in peer-reviewed/referred/editorially-controlled scholarly/scientific journals only. I know there is still a paradigm shift that needs to occur for many users to accept paying for such a service because the material we are valuing is available for free. My analogy is that of the fish we buy at the market: fishermen and fisherwomen catch all these in the ocean and when you buy them at the market, you are paying for the services offered by these people, they risks they took, and the operation cost of their vessels and other equipment. The fish were all freely available in the ocean. The beauty of our solution is that the process of aggregating content does not require us to remove the resource from its environment, and that no animals are killed in the process! Companies such as 1science provide innovative solution to observed problems and a form of cost sharing between users – we have spent millions developing the 1science platform and libraries can acquire the service starting at a few thousand dollars (that is for smaller libraries; and
