Re:Sweden ends contract with Elsevier, moving for open acces...
by Vinnl on Friday May 18, 2018 @04:10AM
(#17099529)
There's actually a publisher in the humanities that operates like this! Knowledge Unlatched funds monographs (i.e. books), then academic libraries pay a fee not to access those books, but to have them made available as Open Acess. It's actually been really successful in obtaining funds for open access publishing while circumventing the problem of people not paying for it because others might be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Unlatched
Re:Sweden ends contract with Elsevier, moving for open acces...
by smaddox on Friday May 18, 2018 @07:20AM
(#17100487)
Interesting. So perhaps a non-profit could start a grass-roots crowdaction campaign for all researchers in a field to switch to open-access overnight, and use US contract law to enforce compliance (in the US) if the threshold is reached?
There could be some penalty that researchers agree to pay if they renege on the agreement, and that penalty could be contractual. The non-profit could collect donations for marketing, and enforce the transition through legal action (if needed). Any proceeds could go to funding the next research field's crowdaction.
> An assurance contract, also known as a provision point mechanism, or crowdaction[1], is a game theoretic mechanism and a financial technology that facilitates the voluntary creation of public goods and club goods in the face of collective action problems such as the free rider problem.
...
> Dominant assurance contracts, created by Alex Tabarrok, involve an extra component, an entrepreneur who profits when the quorum is reached and pays the signors extra if it is not. If the quorum is not formed, the signors do not pay their share and indeed actively profit from having participated since they keep the money the entrepreneur paid them.