2.8 Open Access Business Models
You have learned about different dimensions of OA journals and OA repositories. In addition to OA journals and OA repositories, other products of scholarly communications have started opening up their resources online for free and equitable access. Many of these resources are also available with CC licenses ensuring freedom of sharing, reusing, redistribution, and remixing. These have specific formats and cater to specific audiences. Some OA repositories provide access to a mixed kind of resources, whereas some gateways or portals are available for dissemination of specific kind of resources. Open Educational Resources (OER) have special role to supplement lifelong learning, continuous education, vocational education and distance learning. Massive Online Courses (MOOCs), Open Textbooks and Open Courseware are also associated with global deployment of OER. Some publishers now have been publishing OA books and OA monographs utilizing author’s pay model, receiving an APC from authors for publishing such books or monographs. OA books and monographs can be searched from the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). An open source software – the PKP Open Conference Systems (OCS) is available from the Public Knowledge Project, helping organizers of scholarly conferences with a free web publishing tool. This software is widely used by the academic institutions, universities and learned societies to create a complete web presence for their conferences. Papers presented in these conferences are freely available in OA mode. Some commercial publishers are also co-publishing OA conference proceedings, in collaborations with scholarly conference organizers. The theses and dissertations are very useful form of scholarly communications, originated from the doctoral, pre-doctoral and post- doctoral research studies undertaken in universities and research institutions. There are certain format-specific OA repositories, which deal with theses and dissertations, also known as ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) repositories. An international organization - the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) promotes the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. Many of the ETD and OA repositories are indexed in the OAIster database and are searchable from its portal. Figure 2.4 shows format specific business models in OA publishing, based on nature of contents of full-text documents getting globally disseminated to scholarly audiences.