How Open Does "Open" Need to Be, in the Universe of Free?

Michael Jensen (The National Academies)

2:50pm Tuesday, 02/12/2008

Winter Garden

Presentation: How Open Does “Open” Need to Be, in the Universe of Free? Presentation [PPT]

How do different presentational model—page image, HTML, PDF, ASCII—affect the monetization potential of a publisher’s online site? Building for search engine harvesters, blogspace, grazers, researchers, and specialists each require a set of strategic principles for providing appropriate free access. At what point in the customer/publisher value chain are purchases replaced by free access? What formats provide the customer enough for free that they want to pay for the rest/best version?

Michael Jensen

The National Academies

Michael Jensen has been at the interface between digital technologies and scholarly/academic publishing since the late 1980s. From 1998 to 2007, he was Director of Publishing Technologies for the National Academies Press, which makes more than 3700 books (more than 650,000 pages) from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council fully browsable and searchable online for free (http://www.nap.edu). This site receives more than 1.5 million visitors per month, and boasts of some of the most advanced search and discovery tools available on any publisher’s site, most of which were initially developed by Mr. Jensen.