Dear Code4Lib Community, I am hoping to get some feedback from experts in library acquisitions and those who do collection development.
I am working on a project with a client who is interested in providing open access content to libraries and we are discussing potential business models to ensure that they can continue developing their content for the foreseeable future. They are a non-profit (501c3) organization. Understanding that open access content is not really "free", is there a circumstance in which libraries would pay a fee to support this organization? Any fee associated with a "subscription" would be largely directed back at developing the platform and enhancing content for the organization. The content would be area specific to the humanities and arts, directed to a particular segment of a university or college community, but its contents would be freely available to everyone. So questions I have are these: 1) If there was a fee for this content, how much would be acceptable? Would that fee be FTE dependent? 2) Would the online content space need to be enhanced from what is freely available on the internet to be of use to the university to be worth a "subscription"? (e.g. a robust database search with particular metadata or some sort of visualization or knowledge graph) 3) Would a given university or college want to have the option to contribute to this content hub (this is not unlike Science Open, but the content scope is more specialized and with particular arts and humanities content)? Happy to field further questions about this project if you email me! Thanks for your time! I am very excited about this organization I am working with and would love to see this content space a reality for university use. Best, Michelle Urberg -- Michelle Urberg, PhD, MSLIS Independent Consultant Data Solve LLC Find me on LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleurberg/>!
