OpenEdition Freemium

Jean-Christophe Peyssard

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Jean-Christophe Peyssard. OpenEdition Freemium: developing a sustainable library-centered economic model for open access. World Library and Information Congress: 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, IFLA, Jun 2016, San Juan, Porto Rico. halshs-01330448

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OpenEdition *Freemium*: developing a sustainable library-centered economic model for open access

Jean-Christophe Peyssard

Partnership director – Centre for Open Electronic Publishing
jean-christophe.peyssard@revues.org

Meeting:

164 — Access and innovation: delivering information to all —
Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section

Abstract:

In February 2011, the Centre for open electronic publishing (Cléo, France) launched the new portal OpenEdition. Focussing mainly on the humanities and social sciences, the portal brings together three open access platforms: Revues.org (300 academic journals and book series), Calenda (15,500 academic event announcements), Hypotheses.org (200 scholarly blogs). OpenEdition provides content to 2 million users per month worldwide. The journal platform alone, Revues.org, founded in 1999, is now an “umbrella” for 143 full open access journal.

OpenEdition aims at developing an innovative economic model for Open Access through a
Freemium program, tailored for libraries and their patrons. OpenEdition Freemium offers a
set of services on top of the open access content delivered on its three platforms. OpenEdition
Freemium is an opportunity for libraries to be involved in the development of a global open
access ecosystem for scholars and students alike. It is designed to offer libraries a central
and active role in supporting open access. Gated content systems slow the dissemination of
knowledge and reduces libraries' role to that of gatekeepers, worsening the digital divide.
After 20 years, neither the green road nor the gold road to open access has succeeded in
developing the model of Open Access publication through libraries. The Centre for open
electronic publishing now offers a third road to open access, the OpenEdition Freemium
program.

openedition

tge

ADONIS

ACCÈS UNIFIÉ AUX DONNÉES
ET DOCUMENTS NUMÉRIQUES
DES SCIENCES HURAINES ET SOCIALES

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L'ECOLE
HAUTES
ETUDES
SCIENCES
SOCALES

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UNIVERSITÉ
D'AVIGNON

Le Centre pour l'édition électronique ouverte (Cléo) est un laboratoire associant le CNRS, l'EHESS, l'Université de Provence et l'Université d'Avignon. Cette unité est installée à Marseille et inscrit son action dans le cadre du Très grand équipement ADONIS, réseau dont elle fait activement partie.
## Introduction

Since the founding of Revues.org by Marin Darcos in 1999, the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing team <http://cleo.cnrs.fr/> (Cléo) has been developing platforms and open-access electronic publishing services for the humanities and social sciences.

Cléo is supported by four French research and higher education establishments: CNRS, EHESS, Université de Provence and Université d'Avignon. It also receives financing from two French cyber-infrastructures: the Très grand équipement Adonis and TGIR BSN (digital academic library). It is based in Marseilles and has offices in Paris and Lisbon (Portugal). Cléo offers a full range of electronic publishing services enabling the research community, lecturers and students in the humanities and social sciences, as well as cybernauts in general, to access a coherent body of electronic resources published mainly in open-access. The OpenEdition platform, inaugurated early 2011, offers a single access point to all these resources which are distributed over three platforms: Revues.org with more than 300 journals and books, a total of over 80,000 documents in open-access; *Calenda* distributing more than 15,500 conference research programs in all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences; and Hypotheses.org home to more than 200 research blogs. The whole package is accessible via openedition.org <http://www.openedition.org>.

After more than 10 years developing online publication services, in partnership with universities, research teams and university publishers, Cléo is now seeking to expand this collaboration to include libraries. The aim is:

* To enable libraries to promote visibility of free-access resources,

* To draw them into a more active role in financing open-access publications.

* The OpenEdition *Freemium* program is Cléo's solution to these two questions.

## OpenEdition

### 3 platforms – a single appropriation model

URL: http://www.openedition.org

Inaugurated early 2011, OpenEdition combines three academic electronic publishing platforms: Revues.org, *Calenda* and Hypotheses.org. These three platforms have been developed on the basis of an original and unique model: appropriation. The appropriation model is based on the principle that the skills necessary for the development of academic electronic publishing are not extra-editorial and that they should be developed within the academic community. The aim is to give people developing editorial or publishing projects the skills and tools necessary to complete them. On the one hand, Cléo provides administration of software solutions and the tools and servers necessary, to relieve editorial bodies of a great element of responsibility. On the other, it trains users, providing support and assistance. This way publishing teams remain in control of the editorial process. The final
part of publication remains the prerogative of the editorial chief of a journal, the advertiser of an academic event or the author of a research blog.

Revues.org

300 journals and book series

URL : http://www.revues.org

Revues.org was born in 1999 at the Université d'Avignon. It was founded by Marin Dacos, then a student in contemporary history, who wanted to provide two journals with an internet site. The problem he faced was how to publish articles on line – a simple site would offer journals visibility but would not offer access to their content, i.e. their articles. It is no chance if Revues.org was born in an outlying university with a smallish library: the inequality in access to documents and academic sources was acutely felt, especially by students. It was this desire to facilitate access to academic literature for all – students, lecturers, researchers and also for non-specialist readers – which was behind the creation of the platform and continues to guide its development.

In 2011, more than 300 journals and book series have already joined Revues.org, after submitting applications for the approval of Cléo's academic committee <http://cleo.cnrs.fr/103>. Composed of researchers, lecturers and specialists in academic electronic publishing, Cléo's Academic Committee assesses the academic quality of the new project seeking admission as well as its viability. To assist them in their decision, the committee systematically seeks the opinion of an expert in the journal or book series' academic field.

Revues.org covers a number of areas of the humanities and social sciences: history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political sciences, geography, economics, law, education sciences, linguistics, psychology, criminology, etc. The journals on the platform are highly diverse and represent 230 different editorial bodies, in 15 languages and 8 publication languages (English, German, Basque, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish – and occasionally Russian and Chinese). The modes of electronic publishing adopted are varied: 75 journals are published in Open Access *Freemium*, 78 in Open Access, 148 with an embargo period, and 37 distribute content covered by their embargo period through a sales agreement with the Cairn platform.

Since 2009, Revues.org has opened up to book series. By 2012, more than a thousand books will be on offer. This innovation hails the beginning of a new phase in the history of the platform. Revues.org enables access to more than 50,000 full-text open-access articles and, in the years to come, aims to offer readers around the world, open access to full-text content of thousands of books in the humanities and social sciences.
## Calenda

15,500 announcements for academic events

URL: http://www.calenda.org

Created in 2000, *Calenda* is an online events calendar for the humanities and social sciences, listing conferences, seminars, study days, calls for papers, and employment possibilities. In accordance with the appropriation model, it is the academic community who provide the content for the site. All journals have to do is fill in an online form. The *Calenda* editorial team then decides if the announcement is viable. All announcements published are listed and archived and remain available at the same address. *Calenda*'s priority is to publish announcements for conferences, seminar programs, conference cycles, employment positions, research grants, calls for papers for conferences, journals, and study days. It is not *Calenda*'s role to announce isolated conferences and publications, events aimed at a broader non-specialist community, commemorative events or political debates. The *Calenda* editorial team is monitored by a committee composed of members of the academic community in the humanities and social sciences who screen the content for any problematic issues. It also lays down the direction of the social sciences calendar. The chair of the committee is Natalie Petiteau, lecturer in contemporary history at the Université d'Avignon.

The number of announcements published on the platform is exponential, with more than 400 events posted each month. Announcements are structured and documented according to the requirements for the communication of academic information: type, discipline, dates of the event, place, etc.

*Calenda* offers a panorama of the humanities and social sciences in France and around the world. In May 2011, *Calenda* archived more than 15,500 academic events which had taken place in the course of the last decade. *Calenda* archives bear witness to the dynamism of research in the humanities and social sciences and form a precious corpus for the history and sociology of these sciences.

Within the framework of the OpenEdition internationalisation policy *Calenda* announcement titles are translated into English. 2011 is also the year the LusOpenEdition started. The project has been developed in collaboration with the CRIA (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia), the Portuguese anthropology laboratory financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The project aims at producing a Portuguese language version of *Calenda*.
Created in 2008, Hypotheses.org is the umbrella platform for research blogs in the humanities and social sciences. Driven by the WordPress blog publication software, Hypotheses.org gives researchers and research teams the possibility to communicate information about their research programs, seminars, archaeological or archival excavation campaigns, publication projects, or tool developments. In May 2010, Hypotheses.org hosted more than 200 research notebooks and over 20,000 posts have been published by more than 500 writers. The blogs encourage the interaction between bloggers and their readers via online comments. To manage their blogs, researchers have access to functions to customize the appearance but also to respond to the specific needs of blogs in the humanities and social sciences: bibliography management, annex notes, and imports from word processing software files, among others. Blogs are accepted by an academic committee who also then select and promote the most remarkable among them. Blogs are presented in the platform catalogue according to the type of file and their thematic category; they are indexed in the Revues.org research engine.

The compilation of this academic form of the blog within a single platform guarantees
academic validity of the blog and confers the legitimacy necessary to this new form of
publication. Research blogs published on Hypotheses.org were included in the Ebsco AtoZ
tool in May 2011, and they will shortly be attributed an ISSN by the Centre ISSN France.
Hypotheses.org has also developed to link up with libraries by hosting blogs from libraries
and documentation centres, who have a mean to promote their holdings, like the
*Interfaces/Livres anciens de l'université de Lyon* <http://bibulyon.hypotheses.org>, or
*Carnets de la phonothèque* <http://phonotheque.hypotheses.org>. The blogs also offer the
possibility for libraries to create a dialogue with their users, like *Le carnet de Rue des facs*
<http://ruedesfacs.hypotheses.org>, the question and answer service provided by 24
information services in the Île-de-France.

**OpenEdition *Freemium*: joining forces with libraries to promote open-access**

One imperative: adopt a sustainable economic model for open-access

Today, publications in the humanities and social sciences are partly financed by acquisitions and subscriptions from university libraries. This is not the case with open-access publications, the financing of which is entirely met by research institutions, universities and laboratories, whether as grants, positions or joint initiatives such as Revues.org. This situation is not sustainable and places a number of open access publications in a situation of dependency in respect of their dwindling and restricted funding:

It poses an obstacle to all possibilities for growth in open-access services without loss of
quality;
It severs open-access journals from their legitimate readers, i.e. students using libraries;

It excludes libraries from participation in the production of these resources and from their
support mechanisms

Open-access publications are in a delicate position. It is vital that libraries play a role in the construction of a sustainable economic model for these publications. They are, effectively, the natural deployment loci for academic publications. This convergence between libraries and open-access publications is in the mutual interests of both. Dissociating the two worlds presents risks for both: on the one hand open-access publications will be undermined, victims of a lack of resources; and on the other, libraries will be undermined as open-access resources will be forced to develop independently.

The economic realities of open-electronic publishing

Cléo has been committed to open-access for academic work for more than ten years. Today it offers libraries, its natural partners, the opportunity to support the development of an open-access information service in the humanities and social sciences, which offers both quantity and quality.

The program aims to answer two types of need

The cost of journal design

Electronic publishing does not eradicate journal publishing costs: editorial secretary, content preparation, and processing of documents all represent the same, irreducible cost for any publication. It is important to make the open-access publishing model as attractive as possible while guaranteeing significant income for the journals, enabling them to cover the cost of academic publishing.

The development of Cléo's services

Emerging developments in electronic publishing have led to ever more possibilities. They concern the new readers (iPhone, iPad, Android, Sony Reader, etc.) as well as norms of interoperability (OPDS, OAI-PMH, RDF, iCal, etc.) and services expected (DOI, Crosslinking, statistics, multimedia embedding, etc.).

To respond to this dual need in the financing of open-access content, Cléo offers university libraries the chance to subscribe to OpenEdition *Freemium*. The program relies on an economic model combining open access to publications (Free) and the sale of value-added services (premium).
**This model applies to both services and content**

***Content***

Journals and books are published on Internet in open-access to all in HTML format, legible on all web browsers. Enriched formats (PDF and ePub) are exclusively available to the users of subscriber libraries. These formats are downloadable onto users' hard discs and can be read on screens, readers and smartphones.

***Services***

Whereas over one hundred services are offered in open-access to all, six are offered exclusively to subscribing libraries. These services also bring huge benefits for the academic establishments served.

Income generated by the OpenEdition *Freemium* program is distributed in the following way: 33 % of income is retained by Cléo to finance its platform's operations, and 66 % is paid to journal publishers or book series, who are members of the Open Access *Freemium* program. The total income generated by OpenEdition *Freemium* is thus reinvested in the development of open-access academic publishing.

***OpenEdition *Freemium* program services***

In 2011, 75 journals and book series have agreed to join the Open Access *Freemium* model. The majority of them were already published in Open Access. Some journals saw the program as a chance to adopt a new economic model and decided to abandon their embargo periods to adopt Open Access: this was the case for *Revue de primatologie* <http://www.openedition.org/5638> and *Communication. Information médias théories pratiques* <http://www.openedition.org/2083>

While 75 journals have joined the OpenEdition *Freemium* program, the full range of services on the OpenEdition program and its 3 platforms are available to libraries and their users. Subscription to the OpenEdition *Freemium* program offers access to a series of premium services.

***Premium access to journals and book series***

Libraries subscribing to OpenEdition *Freemium* offer their users the possibility to download PDF and ePub files of articles and books without quota and without DRM of the 75 journals that have adopted Open Access *Freemium* model. This download is possible from each journal's site but also using the Revues.org Bookserver enabling the simple download of files in ePub format on mobile devices such as readers, tablets and smartphones.
## Back office

Apart from coverage lists, monitoring the state of collections and providing server visiting statistics, subscription to OpenEdition *Freemium* provides campus statistics in conformity with the COUNTER norm (version 3 of “COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases”). These statistics are available in a private online space and are updated daily.

## Data supply and service

### Export of records in MARC formats

The catalogue of journals and books available on Revues.org has been made user-friendly by making its descriptions available in the UNIMARC and MARC21 formats. Libraries subscribing to OpenEdition *Freemium* can automatically integrate these records in their ILMS, by downloading ISO2709 files or by using a Z39.50 server.

### Webservice *Calenda*

Users have access to *Calenda*'s database using simple requests relating to all available fields (dates, places, categories, event partners, etc.). Requests use the Calenda web service, an API which produces data flows in several formats (ATOM, JSON, RSS, iCal). They can be displayed and consulted on all types of website, like institutions' own digital workspaces, documentary platforms, and departmental or laboratory web pages.

It is thus possible to display all events taking place on a specific campus, city, or site. It is also possible to filter events by discipline or type, etc. The library has the right to open up the use of this service to the whole campus or institution to which it belongs, becoming a mediator of this advanced tool for *Calenda*.

## Information

### Alerts and subscriptions

OpenEdition also offers an alert service enabling users to automatically receive alerts based on keywords of your choice by email. The service notifies the user each time a chosen expression appears on Revues.org, *Calenda*, or Hypotheses.org. The service is highly customisable and it is possible to add filters, by requesting information from the *Calenda* platform only, for example. It is also possible to refine your search to specific fields, to request alerts for articles published by a specific author, or limit your search to title and extracts only. Alerts are limited to 3 per user. Subscribers to OpenEdition *Freemium* have unlimited access.

Aside from the alert system, we also offer a tool which enables subscription to specific publications and which then enables you to receive all of a journal's articles by email, along with all the latest announcements on *Calenda* relating to your chosen category, as well as any new relevant posts from scholarly blogs. Subscriptions are unlimited for all.
The service also keeps you informed of any new publication in your field of interest to appear on OpenEdition's three platforms - Revues.org, Hypotheses.org and *Calenda*.

## Assistance and training

### Assistance

Libraries and campuses who sign up to OpenEdition Freemium will have direct access, by email and telephone, to a technical assistant who will answer any questions relating to the platform's functioning and the state of collections.

### Training

Libraries subscribing to OpenEdition *Freemium* also benefit from on-site or online training, in French or English, of library staff, including the presentation of the plarform's resources, tools and new features. Cléo regularly organises training in electronic publishing, how to use the Lodel software, and academic blogging in general. From 12-16 September 2011, Cléo will be staging its second summer university of open electronic publishing, involving 120 participants. The theme this year is "The circulation of knowledge in the digital age: the alliance between authors, publishers, librarians, and readers around the digital book." <http://leo.hypotheses.org/5851>

## Management

Libraries opting for the premium services can participate in the Cléo user committee's activities. The committee is composed of publishers of journals and book series on Revues.org, publishers of scholarly blogs on Hypotheses.org, *Calenda* partner institutions and libraries. The users' committee meets once a year and is constantly engaged in development work through workgroups operating in situ or at a distance on such areas as referencing and bibliometrics, internationalisation, bibliographical tools, the quality of metadata, and the relationship with libraries, among others. The members of the user committee receive Cléo's annual activity report (in French).

## Conclusion

Over ten years, Cléo has invented, experimented and validated an original model of electronic publishing for the humanities and social sciences. It has built three complementary platforms, developed free electronic publishing software, brought together a broad community of users from all research professions around its services and published more than 80,000 open access documents.

In the course of the next ten years, Cléo will invest its energy in three independent directions:

The publication of humanities and social sciences books in partnership with publishers and university presses: 1000 books will be published this year, and 20,000 in the course of the decade to come, all on open-access.
Internationalisation which should enable platforms to distribute their publications around the world, in a large range of languages.

The construction of a sustainable economic model in partnership with libraries for open-access publications. This is precisely the aim of the OpenEdition *Freemium* program we present here.

These three directions are part of a coherent development program which aims to turn Cléo into a key actor in open-access humanities and social sciences research internationally.