The Persee journals open archiving service, for French humanities / social studies / geography journals, has reportedly been abruptly told that its funding is to be withdrawn by its hosting university Lyon 2, within months and without any consultation…

“Sans concertation préalable (personnels et direction de PERSÉE non sollicités, comité de suivi de PERSÉE, ministère de tutelle, organes institutionnels de l’Université (CTP, CS, CA) non avertis), la direction de Lyon 2 a décidé le 7 février 2011 de mettre fin à la convention-cadre soutenant l’existence du programme. Cette décision prend effet le 10 mai 2011.

L’ensemble des personnels du programme PERSÉE ne comprend pas la précipitation de la direction de Lyon 2. Aucune information n’a précédé cette décision. Aucune discussion n’est proposée par la direction de l’université. Aucune solution ne garantit la continuité des activités du programme et la préservation de l’équipe PERSÉE en raison du trop court calendrier imposé par Lyon 2.

Nous ne savons pas ce qu’il adviendra de PERSÉE au-delà du 10 mai 2011.”

The service hosts around 350,000 open journal articles.

Another possibility for funding Open Access: the baby boomers leave a bequest in their will that is sufficient to give open access to the archives of their favourite academic journal.

Readability lost the race for my Kindle, in favour of the superior bundling and magazine-like delivery abilities of Instapaper. But Readability does have an interesting new payment system…

The Readability pages may be very elegant, but unfortunately they don’t explain exactly how the system works until you press the ‘sign up’ button. Many people won’t make it that far. When you do click it, you find out that $5.00 is the minimum ‘pool’ amount that you can disburse to your content providers each month. But that can go higher. Maybe $50, if you’re doing a lot of reading for a profitable business. Then Readability tracks what you read, and sends a proportionate micro-share of your monthly fund to the content provider of each article you read on your device — while keeping 30% itself for transfer fees, admin, rights-tracking, servers, and software development. Readability might even be able to make some money selling aggregated anonymous reader data to publishers, although I haven’t dug into their privacy terms to find out. But, on the whole, such a system seems fair. If it takes off, and Instapaper also adopts it, then it could create a viable content payment ecosystem.

I’d love to see it add a slider on which you could decide how much you want to pay the content publisher, and how much should be paid directly to the author of the article. I think that’s something I’d even like to see ethical newspaper and magazine publishers flagging on the article itself — “for every dollar we get for this article in voluntary microfees, 35 cents is diverted directly to the author”. However, given the senile newspaper industry’s attitude to its creatives, and to ethics in general, that may be unlikely. More likely is that they sue companies such as Readability/Instapaper out of existence, once they start making money from ad-stripping. Then the newspapers will launch their own ‘meta payment’ service for the bundling and delivery of reader-selected ad-stripped content.

Is open access publishing poised to rival pay-walled services? The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics breaks out the statistics for a long article…

“The ‘dare to compare’ section below asks the evocative question of whether the open access sector is, or soon will be, ready for serious comparison with the subscription sector.”