Open Access to Francophone Developing Countries

Michael Jensen | 03/26/2009 | Numérisation

Since 1994, the National Academies Press (who publishes the reports of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering) has made its 180 reports per year “open access” (in the sense of free, read-every-page online access), via the NAP web site.

Further, since 2004, we have been making full-book PDFs of all of our reports freely available (in English) to developing countries.

On the one hand, this seems absurd: why give away PDFs for free? Isn’t that ensuring that there’s no market for our publications?

On the other hand, it is very rational: we are required by our institution to be equally committed to *dissemination* as we are to *financial sustainability*—even though we’re expected to be self-sustaining through sales.

We have made our publications available to developing countries freely because we have control of our systems. We have servers we control (http://www.nap.edu); we have tremendous traffic (~1.5 million visitors per month) that we attend to on a daily basis. Because we control our own servers (as opposed to using a Digital Asset Distributor, or other aggregator), we can control the options available to users.

We use a service called GeoIP (at a nominal expense) to discriminate between developing and non-developing nations. We recognize, via the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the Web browser (and GeoIP’s database that correlates IP address to country), the locale of the requesting browser. If it’s in, say, Senegal, then we adapt our Web pages’ presentation in response to that fact. If the reader’s in Senegal, then we say (in essence) “You may download the full PDF of this publication, if you give us your email info.”  If it’s from France, we say (in essence) “PDF, epub, or Kindle, US $29.95.”

Part of the logic behind this choice is a rational response to that 50% “dissemination” mission we were given. The other is that we know that the developing world is a *really tiny market* for us. The cost of goodwill, in any developing country, is nearly as little as the cost of a space ad in a journal.

The lessons for Canadian Francophone publishers seem to me evident: take advantage of this period (2009 - 2011) to build brand, build goodwill, build a list of email addresses of people who care about your kind of publishing.

The economic drivers are clear: currently, scholars in most developing countries still have to pay for Internet access “by the minute” – either out of their own pocket, or that of the university. Further, the economics of the countries means that most book purchases are made by an individual, not a department or university; they are rarely affordable.

This means that, by hardly threatening our bottom line (since these countries provide 0.1% of our sales), we can, almost risk-free:

a) provide valued content to valued readers;
b) make some friends in terms of brand;
c) develop an email list of those non-US friends;
d) build a market for later e-formats, which some might pay for
e) virally promote our enterprise among those with whom this publication is shared.
f) encourage, if even slightly, purchase of a print book

The key, to my mind, is recognizing that the next two to three years are, in overall terms, *just the beginning* of a worldwide marketplace for ebooks. In that sense, our job as publishers is to nurture that market for the long term.

Canada, after France, is the country with the largest Francophone publishing enterprise in the world.

The overall French-speaking population is greater than 300 million worldwide, with only 60 million in France, and another 8 to 10 million in Canada.

What are the drawbacks to spending the next two to three years *building a market* for less than 0.1% of our potential income, by providing free access (with email) to readers in Francophone developing countries?

I think the drawbacks are small indeed, and the benefits legion. I’d say the same thing is true regarding English publications as well, but that’s a larger market, and might require more daring.

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