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Thanks for the article. I've wondered why they need to open access to these papers in tranches. I had imagined there is probably work to prepare each paper and

Thanks for the article. I've wondered why they need to open access to these papers in tranches. I had imagined there is probably work to prepare each paper and possibly securing agreements? > “Our goal is to have it open in a few years, but there’s very real costs associated with [the open-access work],” Hanson said. “We have models so that we can pay for it.” This sort of confuses me even more. Is the "paying for it" talking about the work needed to be done to make each paper open-access, or is this talking about funding the ability to host the papers? Just curious about what the costs are that are mentioned and the plan to cover those costs and how the results in needing to open access to papers in tranches. Maybe the model could be adopted by other journals, too?

shortformblog 4y ago
While I don't want to speculate for ACM, I do know a lot about the association space and their business models as I have reported on this space for a decade. I would suggest that in a situation like this, "paying for it" probably refers to: - Accounting for the loss in revenue from changing a service that was once commercial (as this would be an example of a loss of a "nondues revenue," something a lot of organizations are actually trying to increase so as to cut back their reliance on membership dues) - Potential rights considerations (there are magazine articles with photos in that archive, for example, and many of those might have contracts/ownership considerations to work through) - The labor of actually managing the transition (with something like this you wouldn't want to just run a script to open it up, you probably would have to double-check things, and there are simply a lot of things). They have to budget for any employee work used to handle this transition. They emphasized to me in our interview, however, that the issue was not technical; I actually thought it might be given the amount of content there is, but as they're quoted as saying in the piece, the real work centered around the creative decision-making around actually making a call like this.

shortformblog 4y ago

While I don't want to speculate for ACM, I do know a lot about the association space and their business models as I have reported on this space for a decade. I would suggest that in a situation like this, "paying for it" probably refers to: - Accounting for the loss in revenue from changing a service that was once commercial (as this would be an example of a loss of a "nondues revenue," something a lot of organizations are actually trying to increase so as to cut back their reliance on membership dues) - Potential rights considerations (there are magazine articles with photos in that archive, for example, and many of those might have contracts/ownership considerations to work through) - The labor of actually managing the transition (with something like this you wouldn't want to just run a script to open it up, you probably would have to double-check things, and there are simply a lot of things). They have to budget for any employee work used to handle this transition. They emphasized to me in our interview, however, that the issue was not technical; I actually thought it might be given the amount of content there is, but as they're quoted as saying in the piece, the real work centered around the creative decision-making around actually making a call like this.