Strategic Content Alliance blog

We are pleased to invite you to attend a Peer Review Workshop on the topic of the Case Studies in Sustainability project conducted this year by Ithaka, with the support of JISC and the SCA.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday 25th March from 10am until 4.30pm at the Regent’s College Conference Centre, London.

Last year, Ithaka’s report on Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources outlined a range of economic models in use as well as several important organisational and cultural factors that helped leaders of digital projects to succeed. Feedback from peer review workshops last spring suggested it would be very valuable to have more detail about specific cases. This would allow a deeper exploration into the complexity of models now in place and the web of factors which can encourage their success or lead to their downfall. Given the current economic climate, questions of ongoing financial support for digital projects are more pressing than ever.

With the funding of JISC and the SCA, Ithaka has researched case studies from organisations in the UK, France, Germany, Egypt and the United States and will be presenting them, as well as a paper on the overall findings from the study, at a Peer Review Workshop on March 25, 2009. We hope that you will be able to join us to discuss the cases and the paper in depth, and to learn from your peers who are grappling with similar issues. We believe that the cases represent a wide range of critical issues that we are all dealing with and we hope that you will take time to read through as many as you are able to in advance of the meeting.

In order to assure in-depth discussions of all the cases, the meeting will include breakout sessions in which small groups will review 2-3 cases each, as well as a large group discussion on the overall themes and findings of the study.

When you RSVP, please indicate and rank the three cases you are most interested in reading and discussing for these more in-depth work sessions. To help you make your choice, short descriptions of all the organisations are included in the attached documents below. All cases, as well as the final report, will be made available to all attendees in advance of the meeting.

The case studies are:

* Image licensing in a museum context: V&A Images at the Victoria and Albert Museum
* Centralising projects to achieve benefits of scale: Centre for Computing in the Humanities
* Transitioning from grant-funded to subscription-supported: Electronic Enlightenment
* Experimentation with different access models for library digitisation projects: Southampton
* Commercial licensing to generate revenue and save digitisation costs: The National Archives
* Open access funded by article processing fees: Hindawi (Egypt)
* Making access the priority: open access and content licensing: L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France)
* Institutional subscriptions for a journals database: DigiZeitschriften (Germany)
* Open access funded by library contributions to a project endowment: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (US)
* Subscription, endowment, and institutional funding models for digitised historical content: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (US)
* Fostering an entrepreneurial culture in an academic setting: eBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Department of Information Science (US)

The workshop will take place on Wednesday 25th March from 10am until 4.30pm at the Regent’s College Conference Centre, Regents Park, Inner Circle, London, NW1 4NS

RSVP at http://survey.jisc.ac.uk/ithaka_sca-bmsw

Download case study descriptions

Download case study short descriptions as a Word file
Download case study short descriptions as a PDF