In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky quotes Elinor Ostrom, the economics Nobelist who studies the management of shared resources: When individuals who have high discount rates and little mutual trust act independently, without the capacity to communicate, to enter into binding agreements, and to arrange for monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, they are not likely to choose [...]
Entries Tagged as 'economics'
pseudonymity and the commons
November 26th, 2011 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
Tags:clay shirky·economics·elinor ostrom·pseudonymity·the commons
Hulu, patron-driven article acquisition, academic samizdat; economic speculation
October 14th, 2010 · Comments Off · Uncategorized
I’ve been speculating on what the academic publishing world would look like with a pay-per-article model. I wonder if we’re headed that way; cf. Eric Hellman’s thoughts on patron-driven acquisition; ebrary’s announcement of a patron-driven acquisition model for ebooks. And our remix culture is heading in that direction, anyway. We don’t consume journals or anthologies [...]
Tags:economics·patron-driven acquisition·publishing·scholarly communication
journals + iTunes = ?
June 20th, 2010 · 7 Comments · Uncategorized
Finally got around to reading this tab I’ve had open for ages (sorry, can no longer remember whom to hat tip!) about a pessimistic take on Elsevier’s business model, and was struck by the following: At the APE Conference in Berlin in January 2010 there were several presentations on article-level impact metrics — it is [...]
Tags:business models·economics·iTunes·publishers·scholarly communication·serials crisis
rent v. own: cultural paradigm
February 2nd, 2010 · 11 Comments · Uncategorized
One of the things that I’ve been wondering (e.g. in re my last post on serials subscription economics) is how this rent v. own dichotomy for books is going to play out. Because the fact that e-resources subscriptions are like renting, not like owning, is very salient to librarians, and was not obvious to some [...]
Tags:ebooks·economics·john murphy·john scalzi·paradigms·serials
serials subscription economics: or, monopolies, italics, and cannibalism
January 26th, 2010 · 10 Comments · Uncategorized
So the husband and I were talking yesterday about the new EBSCO monopoly on certain periodicals, after I read Dorothea Salo’s post on the matter (now BoingBoinged). And he was wondering, so really, what’s the issue here? What’s the appeal of these database vendors? And a BoingBoing commenter wonders, “the content providers have decided to [...]
Tags:budgets·dorothea salo·ebsco·economics·electronic resources·monopolies·serials·serials crisis·vendors
Thing-ology on the library ebook market
October 8th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized
Thing-ology has an interesting post on the economics of ebooks in libraries. They argue, essentially, that libraries need site-licensed copies of ebooks rather than ones tied to specific physical devices; this will split the library and direct-to-consumer ebook markets and allow for runaway rental/licensing costs for library ebooks. There’s an apt comparison to runaway journal [...]
Tags:budgets·copyright·digitization·ebooks·economics·serials
