Understanding new business models for publishing

The internet is enabling alternative business models for academic publishing such as Open Access. How these models might work and what their impact might be is vigourously debated.  We conducted two studies for the PRC (a consortium of publishers) to provide some independent evidence of librarians’ and publishing authors’ attitudes and behaviour in this fast changing environment.

One study aimed to understand academics’ attitudes towards the National Institutes of Health’s public access policy. We then presented the findings at the Online 2006 conference. Another study used complex conjoint analysis to measure the potential impact on journal purchasing as more learned material became available in institutional repositories, together with a share of preference model to create predictions for real-life behaviour.