In reply to crusbrid.

So yes, there are lots of clubs interacting. One challenge is to work out when you have a single club with different kinds of members and when you have different clubs interacting in exchange. TBD on how one does that, tho at some level its a question of how you build your models.

Currently we would tend to see a journal as a single club with different kinds of members. Buchannan's work allows for this (and predicts it). The simplest case is when authors are readers (think traditional society journal) and we need to work out what happens as those two groups drift apart. My (not fully worked out) thinking at the moment is that what tends to happens is that coordination costs move from being off-balance sheet (community managed) to on-balance sheet.

In this sense PLOS ONE and Nature both face the same problem. There is a large divergence between author and reader communities so internal (community based, tacit) knowledge that can efficiently do QA has to be professionalised, which happens in both cases.

In my analysis an OA and a subscription journal don't end up so different, but the models for payment mean that this scaling problem plays out differently for each.

Now, all clubs (by definition) leave some groups out. I think the key club for your relative is not the journal but the institution/community one (which takes you back to the library). There are OA journals that function as a community club where your relative would have OA publishing privileges as a member, but in the subscription case, yes the external author is a free rider. Which is probably why we so fiercely police things around institutional affiliations I guess...

Clear as mud?