Slides for a talk given at Duke University on 7 October 2016. The talk focusses on political economics of scholarly publishing and routes forward to finding equitable and affordable ways to shift to Open Access.

1. Sustainable Futures for
Research Communication
The Political Economics of Scholarly Publishing
@cameronneylon
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/
sustainable-futures-for-research-communication

2. To read the paper search for
site:cameronneylon.net goods scholarly marketplace

3. Most of what we say about
sustainability is nonsense

6. A lot of what we ask people to do
for sustainability will never work

8. He who receives an idea from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me.
Thomas Jefferson

10. Groups make knowledge…

11. …knowledge is a club good

13. How do we sustain public-making?

14. • Collective (Public-Like) Goods are
difficult for large groups to
provision
• Small groups can work together
• Large groups will fail except under
specific circumstances

16. How do we sustain public-making?

17. How do we sustain the club?

18. Institutionalizing the scholar

19. Institutions are the the
prescriptions that humans use to
organize all forms of repetitive and
structured interactions
Ostrom – Governing the Commons

20. Hartley and Potts – Cultural Science
Culture
[and institutions] make groups.
Groups make knowledge.

22. The publishing systems
is a collective good

23. One purpose of universities is to
force professional scholars to publish

24. Institutionalizing the publisher

26. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0026

27. A journal is a club
Potts et al – SSRN

28. Club size is limited by friction
in access to the club good
Potts et al – SSRN

29. Journal
Club Knowledge
Club

30. Journal
Club Knowledge
Club

31. Journal
Club Knowledge
Club

32. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosimoes7/7018543323Pedro
Ribeiro
SimõesCC
BY

33. A brief data interlude…

34. • Collective (Public-Like) Goods are
difficult for large groups to
provision
• Small groups can work together
• Large groups can only succeed by
applying one of three special cases
• Compulsory funding (taxation)
• Non-collective goods as a side
effect
• Oligopoly

35. Crossref phased through all three models
Crossref provides a public good in the form of freely accessible
bibliographic metadata and the infrastructure that supports it.
Three phases
1. Effective oligopoly: 5-7 publishers dominate the space and were
essentially able to act unilaterally to set up and support Crossref
2. Non-collective side benefit: Members join to be able to assign
DOIs and to gain the benefits of traffic through the referrer
3. Compulsory contribution: No (STM) publisher will be taken
seriously unless it is assigning Crossref DOIs. Membership is (close
to) effectively compulsory for a serious publisher.

36. Implementation Models
1. Oligopoly: Generally of funders or publishers, there are too many
institutions. EuropePMC is an example.
2. Non-collective side-product: Needs to be a natural service or non-
collective good generated as part of public good provisioning. Very
few good examples in open data world and this is predictable,
failure often results in a turn to a subscription model eg TAIR
3. Compulsion: Either compulsory membership models (professional
certificationis an example) or top slicing/overheads models

37. What about the library…?

38. What way forward?

39. 1. Control over capital (the
Marxist revolution)

40. 2. Focus on community building

41. 3. Support collective models

42. 4. Define service requirements

43. 5. Build infrastructures

44. No taxation without representation

45. • Broad coverage
• Stakeholder governed
• Non-discriminatory
• Transparent operations
• Cannot lobby
• Living will
• Incentivesto wind down
• Time-limitedfunds only
for time-limiteduses
• Generate a surplus
• Contingency fund
• Revenue from services
• Mission consistent
• Can be “forked”
• Open Source
• Open Data
• Available Data
• Patent non-assertion
Governance Financial sustainability Communityinsurance
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C 2015 Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-­v1,
Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

46. Prestige = Price

47. Build sustainable communities in
an environment where public-making
is good for those communities

48. @cameronneylon
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/
sustainable-futures-for-research-communication