Roy Kaufman: Shifting Revenues From Post-Publication To Pre-Publication: The Impact Of Open Access

Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), writes here in a guest post about the shift of revenue to pre-publication and what that means to publishers.

'Open Access (OA) is changing the way scholarly, scientific and academic journal publishers are managing their businesses fiscally. While revenue has traditionally been earned by publishers after publication through subscriptions, site licenses, pay-per-view, permissions, advertising and licensing channels, OA is slowly, but dramatically shifting the model so that revenue is earned pre-publication.

Under the OA model, publisher earnings come from author charges, including open access charges, page and color charges, author reprints, and other services. The sources of revenue are also changing. In the traditional customer-pays-the-distributor model, publishers were compensated by libraries, advertisers and aggregators. But now, publishers receive these revenues pre-publication from funders, institutions and authors. In this new paradigm, publishers must focus on usability and developing convenient services they can offer these new buyers to streamline fee management processes, retain high-value authors, serve new stakeholders, and maintain – or increase – revenues. Put simply, publishers are gaining new customers with a new set of needs to serve.