Peak Subscription

At the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, I moderated a session with Jan Velterop (CEO of Academic Concept Knowledge), Toby Green (Head of Publishing at OECD), and Susan Hezlet (Publisher of the London Mathematical Society) on using "freemium" business models as an alternative to the common "author-pays" model for open access publishing. During this session, Jan Velterop used the term "peak subscription" to describe the current market context for STM and scholarly journal publishing. The phrase neatly captures what is arguably the most important trend - a sea change - in STM and scholarly publishing today.