The likely alternatives for Scientifc journal publishing under the various proposed systems of open access are presented. The prediction is made that the dominance of conventional journals will end between 2007 and 2009.

Federal science agencies publish a large volume of peer-reviewed papers each year but much of it is restricted to subscribers of commercial publications. Since copyrights are much less restrictive with federally-authored works, these agencies should exploit this "comparative advantage" by creating publicly accessible repositories of these electronic reprints.

The number of electronic journals has grown steadily in the 1990s. A large part of this increase has been in scholarly or academic electronic journals. Some academics are very aware of these trends in scholarly communication and participate actively in their production. Other academics remain unaware of these new trends. This study examines two related issues -- 1. What is the growth rate of these scholarly electronic journals? 2. What are the factors which affect acceptance or resistance toward electronic journals among academics? Is it possible to discover a difference between disciplines for these factors of acceptance or resistance? Information or answers to these issues will help academic librarians and researchers anticipate trends in serials collection and subscription, and help in financial planning and budgeting. Two methodologies are used: 1) the collection of numbers, and 2) the use of a survey. The research project will collect information on the number of scholarly electronic journals, newsletters, and other electronic communications, as they have changed over time, in order to show trends and growth rates. A questionnaire will be developed to provide information on the factors of acceptance or resistance among scholars toward electronic journals.

This report investigates Canadian and other initiatives in developing e-content stores or repositories with special interest paid to their business and revenue models for background in determining a suitable sustainable business/revenue model for the OnDisC Alliance. There is significant activity worldwide in the research and development of repositories of Learning Objects (LO) -- modular chunks of content that are combined and reused to form larger aggregations of education content such as lesson, units, and courses. The rationale for developing repositories of LOs is to reduce the significant cost of developing and customizing educational material. There is activity in developing LO repositories in both the public sector and the private sector. MERLOT is a large public and free LO repository co-operative. Some private firms developing LO repositories and the tools to create and use them include NetG, SmartForce, and LearningWay. In addition to LO repositories there are many Learning Resource Gateways (LRG) which offer both free and non-free educational material of many levels of object â granularityâ . Additionally, organizations are emerging which are acting as learning resource brokerages or networks, such as UNIVERSAL in Europe and AUShareNet in Australia. There are insights and possible future business relationships for OnDisC to be realized in all of the above educational content delivery organizations. A universal issue among public LO repositories and LSG is how to acquire funding/revenue to sustain the organization beyond initial project status. Most of them are following a sponsorship model where operating and development funds are received from government and/or other supporting organizations and individual educators provide content free. Their business/revenue model follows from a consideration that they are providing a public good which can/must be supported by third parties. OnDisC may be able to operate under a similar business model for similar public goods markets. Additionally, OnDisC may be able to provide LO content to commercial content developers either directly, or through future online educational material brokerage sites/marketplaces. A valuable tool for helping to formulate business and revenue models is a value chain assessment in which all significant value added processes or functions and determined and assigned to the different players or organizations involved in the value chain. Once value added assessments are made, appropriate revenue streams can be modeled. A relevant and useful value chain assessment to consider for OnDisCâ s situation is that of the traditional publisher-library book/journal distribution system. A significant source of risk for the providers of digital content to a store or repository is the high cost associated with digitizing the material into a format suitable for distribution and use. A possible compromise between risk and service is to provide just-in-time digitization for material that has been chosen as desirable by an end user.

created for OnDisC / The objective of this research project was to perform an environmental scan of pricing models for online content that could help the OnDisC alliance formulate an effective ecommerce model. Towards this end a number of literature searches, interviews and web searches were performed. The research was directed in several areas to ensure that the results provided a broad context: e-business models in general and for electronic content in particular; the developments in the library field towards digitization in general and in the use of ejournals in particular; iscussions with specialists in a number of relevant fields; and a broad survey of content providers on the internet. The e-business literature revealed the breadth of different pricing models available and gave insight into the nature of price and market differentiation, which is an effective strategy for increasing the user base for digital content. An example of price differentiation is to sell the same product to two different kinds of users at different prices thereby maximizing overall revenue. Libraries have been at the forefront of technological changes for many decades, and much research has already been done on the potential for e-journals to greatly improve library service for academic institutions. Electronic journals allow for the dis-aggregation of journals and novel pricing schemes using bundling of articles and metered use (pay as you go). Libraries tend to like the flexibility and cost savings that these novel pricing schemes allow but there are disadvantages such as increased administrative overhead and the potential for metering to inhibit end users. The discussions with industry specialists and subsequent web searches revealed a number of content aggregators â organizations which accumulate digital content from a number of different providers for redistribution â which have moved beyond the stage of subsidized pilot project status towards operational independence. Background papers Environmental Scan of Pricing Models for Online Content and pricing schedules were found for JSTOR, AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium), SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network) and ECO (Early Canadiana Online) which revealed that all of them use price differentiated academic institution subscriptions to generate revenue. Two of the four, JSTOR and ECO charge a one-time up-front fee to help pay for the cost of initial content digitizing. Web searches revealed a number of sites offering cultural and educational content in various formats including streaming video, audio, text, animation, images. Many of these sites generate revenue from banner advertising, affiliate eferrals, product sales, and donations as well as ubscriptions. Many pricing models are possible by ombining or blending the above revenue streams. The wide variety of cultural and educational content available on the web ttests to the effectiveness of these models.

This is a second signal-detection analysis of the accuracy of a robot in detecting open access (OA) articles (by checking by hand how many of the articles the robot tagged OA were really OA, and vice versa). We found that the robot significantly overcodes for OA. In our Biology sample, 40% of identified OA was in fact OA. In our Sociology sample, only 18% of identified OA was in fact OA. Missed OA was lower: 12% in Biology and 14% in Sociology. The sources of the error are impossible to determine from the present data, since the algorithm did not capture URL's for documents identified as OA. In conclusion, the robot is not yet performing at a desirable level, and future work may be needed to determine the causes, and improve the algorithm.

If we cannot get the system to work, the scientists will run it themselves

This paper examines the use of open access journals by academic libraries in the developing world: are open source journals a good choice for universities in the developing world, and to what extent are they currently being used? So far, the developing world has been held back from participating in that flow by three blockages: the costs of purchasing journals to read, the costs of publishing researching in journals, and censorship. I argue that truly open access requires removing all three blocks, for the sake of human development.

Thesis advisor: Mehmet Ekmekci / This dissertation consists of three essays on media, political and learning. More specifically, I investigate the effects of biased media and learning from that biased media on political institutions. In the first essay, titled “Optimal Dynamic Information Supply and Competition”, I provide a model of an information market where the viewers acquire signals each period at an attention cost, solving an optimal stopping problem à la Wald (1947), and the objective of the potentially biased information providers is to maximize the number of viewers who acquire signals from them across periods. I find that, in a monopoly market, the information provider sends unbiased signals that perfectly reveal the state of the world when there is a single period but provides biased signals when there are multiple periods. This is because biased signals elongate the learning process of some viewers, potentially increasing the information provider payoff. I also find that incentives due to competition, modeled as another information provider that is potentially biased in the opposite direction, overtake the intertemporal incentives and the full information equilibrium is recovered, even though it is wasteful in terms of social welfare. Hence, the paper provides a model with rational information providers and viewers that leads to biased signals in equilibrium. In the second essay, titled “Voter Behavior and Information Aggregation in Elections with Supermajority”, I provide a model of elections where there are three possible outcomes, but the voters can directly vote for one of the two options. Theoutcome of the election corresponds to the options if the vote share for one of them is higher than a supermajority threshold. If neither of the options achieves that, then the result is the third outcome that the voters cannot explicitly vote for, which I interpret as compromise. I investigate various properties of elections in this setting. I find that, in line with the popular argument, supermajority rules foster compromise outcomes. But, on the other hand, elections with supermajority rules fail to aggregate information. In the third essay, titled “Protests, Strategic Information Provision and Political Communication”, I consider a model of protests where the protesters learn about the state of the world via a biased information provider whose objective is to either instigate or dissuade the protest. A successful protest removes the incumbent from office, where the success threshold is determined by the incumbent who is biased. My main aim is to uncover whether the incumbent can learn the true state of the world from the protest turnout, even though the information of the citizens is provided by biased media. I pin down the optimal success threshold and signal noise choices by the incumbent and the information provider, respectively. I find that if the information provider is trying to instigate the protest, then political communication is always possible, regardless of the level of the bias of the incumbent. If the information provider is trying to dissuade the protest, then political communication is possible if and only if the incumbent bias is relatively small. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Many online retailers monitor visitor traffic as a measure of their storesâ success. However, summary measures such as the total number of visits per month provide little insight about individual-level shopping behavior. Additionally, behavior may evolve over time, especially in a changing environment like the Internet. Understanding the nature of this evolution provides valuable knowledge that can influence how a retail store is managed and marketed. This paper develops an individual-level model for store visiting behavior based on Internet clickstream data. We capture cross-sectional variation in store-visit behavior as well as changes over time as visitors gain experience with the store. That is, as someone makes more visits to a site, her latent rate of visit may increase, decrease, or remain unchanged as in the case of static, mature markets. So as the composition of the customer population changes (e.g., as customers mature or as large numbers of new and inexperienced Internet shoppers enter the market), the overall degree of visitor heterogeneity that each store faces may shift. We also examine the relationship between visiting frequency and purchasing propensity. Previous studies suggest that customers who shop frequently may be more likely to make a purchase on any given shopping occasion. As a result, frequent shoppers often comprise the preferred target segment. We find evidence supporting the fact that people who visit a store more frequently are more likely to buy. However, we also show that changes (i.e., evolution) in an individualâ s visit frequency over time provides further information regarding which customer segments are more likely to buy. Rather than simply targeting all frequent shoppers, our results suggest that a more refined segmentation approach that incorporates how much an individualâ s behavior is changing could more efficiently identify a profitable target segment.