Freemium as a sustainable economic model for open access electronic publishing in humanities and social sciences

Between the two paths of open access green and gold the later is the harder to develop and has the less support from the research community. The main difficulty is about finding a sound economic model. Open Access journals usually depend on two funding sources: subsidies and/or donations from institutions and publication fees from research units in the authors-pay model. These two ways of funding open access journals and books proved effective in some cases (Plos), but are not flawless. The Center for Open Electronic Publishing, a french initiative for open access publishing in humanities and social sciences, has recently developed a new economic model based on “freemium” for its full open access journals and books series, in order to address two issues: improve their economical soundness and give them more visibility in libraries. Freemium, the contraction of “free” and “premium”, preserves open access to information together with the marketing of premium services.