1. Freemium as a sustainable economic
model for OA publications in
humanities and social sciences
Pierre Mounier
Center for open electronic publishing (Cléo)
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
École des hautes études en sciences sociales
(EHESS)
Université de Provence
Université d’Avignon

2. Who are we ?
A short presentation

3. A team supported by 4 major french
research institutions

4. What we do
Revues.org : an international platform with more than 350
open access journals in humanities and social sciences in
HTML, PDF and Epub

5. What we do
Calenda : a platform with 18000 Hypotheses.org : a platform with 400
conference announcements blogs

6. An ecosystem : OpenEdition

8. About OA economic
models

9. Green and Gold roads
And their economic models
• Green road : support from
institutions, libraries, governements
• Gold road ? How to build a robust
economic model for Open Access
journals and books ?

10. Gold road : 2 models
100% grant/subsidies model Author-pay model

11. Golden : 2 problems
100% grant/subsidies model Author-pay model
Dependancy on institutions, institution-centric model, weak economic Access to publication biased by financial capacity, universities pay twice
model (monoculture) to commercial publishers

12. Gold road
Where are the libraries
?

14. Proportion of Revues.org pages
viewed through library system
referrers
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in
Research libraries. Revues.org case study - 2009

15. Comparison by age and
occupation between
Revues.org and
Cairn.info readers
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in
Research libraries. Revues.org case study - 2009

16. Pierre Mounier
Some statements from librarians
“Because we have shrinking budgets and paid resources are more and more expensive, we
must justify the money we spend, so we are driven to focus more and more on what we pay.”
“Open access resources, right now are not very up-to-date in our tool (MetaLib). We
concentrated our forces on paid resources because we have to justify the money (we spend)”
“We have stats on that (OA), but we don’t use them. We have to deal with paid databases at
first ! It’s a huge work for us to answer to enquiries. The logic is return on investment because
theses resources are extremely expensive. We have to justify subscriptions to the university,
the scientific committee and the government.”
“ I don’t understand at all Revues.org. Our main problem with this platform is that we can’t
subscribe to it. Therefore, it is not interesting at all for us…..can we subscribe ? ”
Emma Bester study : Usages of open access resources in
Research libraries. A case study on Revues.org - 2009

17. The effect of author-pay model on
libraries
“ The business model of Open Access isn’t a subscription model. The question is now if
a university wants to pay to allow its scholars to publish in those OA journals. But the
two models depend on different services : the subscription model depends on libraries,
the other one on research departments. We librarians must be very careful, because
one could decide to transfer the money from one service to another, saying that
libraries doesn’t have to pay subscriptions anymore. *…+We must be careful because
money is part of the power. For the moment, we have an important budget because
resources are expensive to buy. If there is a shift in the economic model, our role will be
different. ”

18. A triple disaster
• For OA publishers : they can’t be fully
supported by libraries
• For readers : they are left alone to find open
access resources (desintermediation scenario)
• For libraries : they can’t participate fully the
new open access ecosystem

19. A proposal :
OpenEdition freemium
How to develop a sound economic model for OA
journals and book publishers ?
How to integrate libraries giving them the possibility to
« pay for free content » ?

20. Freemium = Free+Premium

21. Pierre Mounier
Freemium : an economic model
coming from the web

22. An hybrid model
« It is a numbers game, so bust out your Excel
spreadsheet. It’s all about finding things in
the margins — lots of little things rather than
one key thing. »
D. Houston, Dropbox in « Case Studies in
Freemium:
Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic
and MailChimp », Gigaom, march 2010

24. OpenEdition freemium is :
Free access to content
Premium services to generate income

25. Free access in HTML

28. Premium services

30. For library users

31. Access to premium formats
Copy & paste No DRM
Print, Save No quota

34. Unlimited alerts on search engine

35. Calenda events in ical format

36. For librarians

37. Counter statistics

38. Integration with libraries
information systems
• Marc 21
• Unimarc
• Z39.50 server
• ISO 2709 files

39. Training sessions for library trainers

40. Free documentation

41. Libraries correspondent

42. Participation to
governance
through User
committee

43. For publishers

44. 66% of income from libraries go to
publishers.
33% to the platform to help develop
new services.

45. Electronic Bookstore

46. Print on demand

48. Since march 2011

49. 87 journals so far

50. 1000 books in 2012

51. OpenEdition books, a new open access international
platform to disseminate 16 000 books online in 2020

52. More than 25 university press for
books

53. 36 research libraries subscribing

54. 1. Aix-Marseille Université
2. Université d'Angers
3. Université des Antilles et de la Guyane
4. Université d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse
5. Bibliothèque Clermont Université
6. Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Lausanne
7. Université Sciences et Technologies - Lille 1
8. Université Sciences Humaines et Sociales - Lille 3
9. Université Paris 1 Université Paris 3
10. Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour
11. Université Rennes II - Haute Bretagne
12. Université de Savoie Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail
13. Université François-Rabelais de Tours
14. Université du Québec à Montréal
15. Institut des sciences et industries du vivant et de l'environnement
16. Agence universitaire de la Francophonie
17. Bibliothèque Denis Diderot
18. Bibliothèque de l'Université de Laval
19. Bibliothèque Publique d'Information
20. Bibliothèque Sainte-Barbe
21. Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
22. Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations E
23. cole nationale des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques
24. Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos
25. Institut des sciences humaines et sociales
26. Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l’environnement et l’agriculture
27. Institut Supérieur d’Informatique et de Gestion
28. Sciences Po Paris
29. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
30. Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris
31. Bibliothèque centrale du SPW
32. Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal
33. Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
34. Université d'Ottawa
35. Université du Québec en Outaouais
36. Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

55. Conclusion

56. OpenEdition freemium is a
pragmatic AND a political
proposition to academic
community…

57. … in order to build an alliance
between scholars, publishers and
librairies to support open access &
knowledge dissemination

58. Thank you !
pierre.mounier@revues.org