Cybergeo and the Consumer Society
- Cet article est une traduction de :
- Cybergeo et la société de consommation
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1In the prevailing ‘marketing’ atmosphere, we have grown accustomed to premium offers that make it possible to sell a product at a price well above its mere practical value, thanks to an accompanying ‘sales talk’ that invests it with mythical virtues. The ‘concept’ of the premium effect explains that very often the image value of commercial brands is disconnected from the usefulness of the products.
- 1 This economic model, which dates from the 1980s, was categorized by the felicitous ‘portmanteau’ (c (...)
2The ‘Freemium’1 offer promoted by open access journals is exactly the inverse of this process. It is in some way an August 4th night to counter the privilege of the big editorial groups, which obtain excessive dividends for their shareholders from the voluntary labour of researchers, contributors and assessors. In effect, in the merchant system, the university libraries that buy subscriptions from large editorial groups are not in a position to integrate free products into their accounting formulas! open access journals are not available to students who refer only to the resources of their University.
3It is for this reason that Cybergeo, in February 2011, joined the Openedition Freemium programme, a new model for publishing in open access journals that aims to increase the visibility of the journals and the longevity of the open access model. This moving over to Freemium involves no change for the readers. The HTML format of the articles (the most improved format) remains freely accessible; it can be saved, and printed at will. Only access to the pdf and epub versions requires a subscription, at a very low cost (it is available to the authors without cost, for all the articles of the journal in which they have published.). The Openedition Freemium also offers a series of exclusive services destined for libraries and their users: http://www.openedition.org/services-libraries.
4The rates of the Openedition Freemium are made public: http://cleo.cnrs.fr/936, and bear no comparison to the colossal sums demanded by the large publishers for their florilegia journal anthologies. The rates depend on the number of students, measured according to the PIB per inhabitant of the library’s country of origin.
5Two-thirds of the income generated by the Openedition Freemium programme will be reinvested in the journal, and one-third poured back into revues.org. In effect, open access does not mean that there is no cost; to the contrary, the growing success of Cybergeo is accompanied by a considerable increase in the burden of work in the word processing of the articles, their evaluation, proofreading, formatting and translation. But in no way do we wish to imitate the journals supposedly in open access which ask their authors to pay for being published (between $1,000 and $4,000 per article…)
6CYBERGEO, THE FIRST JOURNAL IN OPEN ACCESS in the Social Sciences, is not abandoning open access; on the contrary, it is committed with Openedition Freemium to make it into an enduring model, equitable, recognized scientifically and internationally.
Notes
1 This economic model, which dates from the 1980s, was categorized by the felicitous ‘portmanteau’ (coat-rack/ ‘umbrella’) term in English in the blog of an investor, Fred Wilson, in 2006.
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Christine Kosmopoulos et Denise Pumain, « Cybergeo and the Consumer Society », Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography [En ligne], Éditoriaux, mis en ligne le 04 novembre 2011, consulté le 31 mars 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/24768
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