Problems With the Funding Model

Introduction

During the last years, we have seen continuous technological, social and educational change in the ‘information services’ profession arena. Information professional have re-invented themselves and their services. We have all worked to (amongst other things): reconcile business management practices with service delivery within academic cultures; adopt student and researcher centric practices; deploy new kinds of technical search and retrieval tools; and embrace electronic collection development and content digitisation. And we have delivered on this, and all against the backdrop of increasing search engine dominance. With the ever growing dominance of search engines, is there room left for services like the Encyclopedia of Law and other Lawi Projects?. With the search engines dominance, sometimes the outcome is a case of unfiltered content leading to undiscriminated information, not knowledge.

The Encyclopedia of Law would need to find alternative sources of money if it were going to expand, and that would mean exploring alternative business models.

Demonstrating value for money and the search for new business models

To be successful in attracting new and continued grant funding we needed to innovate and provide demonstrable value for money. Not a dilemma but difficult to quantify. Our unique selling point is expensive, and perhaps unfashionable in an environment dominated by social media and free contribution. The cost of human legal research and writing for use in academia, and the associated creation of metadata to enable search and retrieval, may be no longer considered to be value for money.

What is value for money?

Value for money is normally considered in relation to the “thing” or “good” provided. In the case of the Encyclopedia of Law and other Lawi Projects, this is virtually impossible to verify since the service – beyond accuracy, integrity, completeness and timeliness – can only be qualified in subjective and perceptual terms. The term “value for money” is a difficult notion for the service provided by Lawi … There can be no black-and-white answers to the value for money question in relation to its true purpose – education and learning.

Therefore, is it that the market can no longer value the services we provide in comparison to other things?. What wouldn’t have been achieved in terms of data exploration and searching had the Encyclopedia of Law not been around.

Access to Law and Funding

Open access to law is a central mission of many different types of organizations. However, open access must be paid for, and if not by its users, then by whom? Over the years, different open-access providers have discovered different funding models appropriate to different national and institutional settings. Some operate in universities, some in government, and some in the private sector. Some are hybrids or partnerships. All have different sources of revenue, support, and cross subsidy. All operate in different markets and different business environments.

Legal and Professional services publishing business models

Lawi seems to target the high value core of the legal and professional information services sector, a market with high traditional barriers.

In Continental Europe, Francis Levebvre’s ‘memo’ format of annual publications has proven very effective in France, Spain and Italy. Similar to the Tolley’s one-book-per-subject approach, they decided to build their own presence in the United Kingdom market. Starting with tax and accountancy core territory for them, they have recently expanded also to company law and employment law information services. Typically they target the in-company professional in accountancy, tax and company law. Some smaller firm practitioners in law and accountancy will also see the value, and occasionally they will get some traction in the large firms. In early 2012 Editions Le Febvre bought the Indicator Belgian based business

In the Uk, there are well established brands of Croner/CCH, Lexis/Butterworth/Tolley, as well as Jordans and others.

In the United States, West and Lexis Nexis dominate the market.

Avoiding the subscription model

Our reasons for avoiding a subscription-based funding model (or alliance with a traditional publisher) are based on the severe problems that would occur if such a plan were implemented:

The Encyclopedia impact would be reduced

Restricting access to subscribers only would obviously disenfranchise many deserving public and scholarly groups including students and faculty at smaller universities or colleges, independent scholars using an internet service provider at home, students and teachers at institutions, scholars and students in many parts of the world, indeed anyone at institutions too poor to pay the institutional subscription and any individuals too poor to pay personal subscriptions. Clearly, the Encyclopedia would cease to achieve its goal of bringing the best in law to the wider public.

The fact that search engines would be blocked from accessing the Wiki Encyclopedia pages would mean that Lawi would disappear from the results returned by those search engines, dropping it to a level of invisibility and further curtailing the ability of readers to find the SEP. 75% of the SEP’s readership finds it by way of a web search.

Even if there were some way of allowing search engines to index its restricted-access site, the effect of blocking non-subscribers from the SEP would result in a precipitous drop in the number of links to the Encyclopedia pages, and a corresponding drop in search-engine rankings. Google rankings are based, among other things (including social media) upon the number of links from other websites, so the SEP’s high rank is a function of the number of links that point to the Encyclopedia. Google may not remain the premier search engine, but the techniques it uses to identify relevant pages to a search will surely be incorporated and enhanced by any successors.

The above results all combine in pernicious ways, with the result being that a subscription-based funding model would lead the wiki Encyclopedia project towards a situation where it loses it focus and character Not only would the SEP reach a tiny fraction of the audience it once reached, but it might be forced to scramble each year to make ends meet, distracting its central staff from the academic mission of enhancing the encyclopedia’s content and technological underpinnings.