Current Open Access Income Models from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice - http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/incomemodels_v1.pdf

This is a lengthy document which describes in detail every tactic currently in use by open-access journals for financial support. SPARC compiled this overview to encourage existing journals who are thinking of becoming open-access as well as anybody who is thinking of starting an open-access journal from scratch. SPARC's definition of open-access is: "free and immediate online access to peer-reviewed journal literature".

Aside from wanting to participate in open scholarship, there are a few reasons why a journal might consider an open-access model for business purposes, these are those reasons according to SPARC:

• to increase access to its published research by lowering or eliminating market barriers to the content;
• to maximize market reach and support a new journal launch when the market will not support a traditional subscription model; or
• to implement a supply-side model (discussed below) in response to funder-mandated content deposit policies.

Legitimate advertising and/or sponsorship is one model for income for journals, these streams of revenue vary from Google Adsense (Open Government) to long-term corporate partnership (CERN Courier). I was particularly interested in this revenue source after reading about Elsevier's sheisty "sponsorship" so I looked at the examples that SPARC provides to see where the money is coming from. It turns out that for all of Elsevier's talk about open-access journals not being practical, they do sponsor at least one open-access journal. That journal is the The Journal of Electronic Publishing. JEP is interesting, these are the rest of their sponsors:

LexisNexis| O'Reilly Media| Newsbank Readex| Aptara| Wiley-Blackwell

JEP has a bunch of articles about open-access, one of them is Two Scenarios for How Scholarly Publishers Could Change Their Business Model to Open Access. How do they keep their corporate sponsors?

Corporate funding is probably the most problematic approach to revenue and SPARC provides only one example (Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine). In order for this model to work, the journal has to have an underwriting policy in order to prevent something like the Elsevier/MERCK situation from happening.

10% of open-access journals use the supply-side model of article processing fees for revenue, this is where authors pay the fee to publish in a journal. Most of these fees are subsidized by the author's institution or through a grant, only 5% of the fees are paid for by authors out-of-pocket. Some journals give authors the option to pay the fee to make their article open (BMJ Journals Unlocked).

PLoS is one journal that uses the article processing fee for income, but they do it slightly differently. Their model is based on an institutional membership fee which covers all of the papers submitted through an institution. PLoS even encourages consortial memberships to offset costs.

So far I've focused on some of the supply-side models for income. In terms of demand-side revenue, these are the models currently in place:

Versioning - Either selling an aggregate print copy of all issues at the end of the year or a print copy of each issue with additional non-research content throughout the year, it may also be considered the "special print" model.
Use-trigger Fees - In this model, the income is from institutions who use the journal heavily. There is a threshold of use, so most people will have access but when use is heavy from a single institution the fees are triggered. SPARC provides only one example of a journal who uses this model - Anthropological Index Online.
Convenience-Format License - This is what's currently happening with law journals. While the journals may be open access (Open Access Law Journals), they have an additional license with LexisNexis or WestLaw.
Value-Added Fee-Based Services - This is something I assume we're all familiar with, the web is full of sites like this.
Contextual E-Commerce - When a journal also has an e-commerce site, PLoS does this to a certain extent.