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 associated press, has also been put into operation at Pittsburgh on a two-year embargo model.54

These types of project may implement alternative sources of funding such as a print subsidy scheme, for example. However, this model is not the same as a grant. It is, rather, a long-term ﬁnancial arrangement with a continual ﬂow of cash from institution to press. There have been several projects funded by start-up grant, such as the MediaCommons initiative – a scholar-run setup started by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo – that began with a grant from the US National Endowment of Humanities, but these are not the same as permanent institutional subsidy arrangements.55

Freemium

The next most obvious way of ﬁnding revenue for open-access publications is to create a version of the monograph that has functionality and features above and beyond those provided for free by the open-access edition. A French platform named OpenEdition, with a component called ‘OpenEdition books’, adopts this approach in which the HTML versions (those read online in a web browser) are available freely and openly to read while the PDF version (a paginated typeset edition that corresponds to a print counterpart) is accessible only to those who pay.56 Other features available for a charge through OpenEdition include enhanced technical support for the digital items, more metadata (including machine-readable formats for libraries), statistics on usage and a governance stake for subscribing libraries. Likewise, the open-access Athabasca University Press in Canada sells ePub format versions of its free books.57

This approach does, of course, have the downside that the open-access version must inherently be the poor relation of its purchased counterparts. Conversely, it does offer a breath of fresh air in an otherwise painful transition to supply-side funding mechanisms. There are also some other assumptions upon which this model is predicated. As formulated by Moshe Y. Vardi and Richard Baraniuk at Rice University in 2012, the model requires a cheaper system to make up for lost sales, one in which ‘most authors would prefer to forgo income in order to maximize dissemination’, with the goal being purely to cover the expenses of publishing, rather than