A Business Model for Providing Digital Information Resources: Case Study of National Electronic Theses and Dissertations Programs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) programs often encounter obstacles of technical, legal, financial and business nature. To develop a multifaceted view of ETD programs, the concept of Business model (BM) can be used. BM helps to grasp a detailed understanding of business feasibility and viability, which entails a broad spectrum of key factors and features the business. The existing BM ontologies and frameworks however are often generic and do not match the specific context of ETDs programs. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap and identify and empirically evaluate a BM ontology that corresponds to the peculiarities of the ETDs context. In this study a multi-method approach is chosen. First, by means of a systematic literature review, different ontologies and frameworks in the literature were reviewed. The findings were used as an input to conduct a series of interviewing with National ETD (NETD) program’s managers around the world. Based on the interviews, ETD-specific BM ontology is proposed, which consists of eight key components, including users, financial aspect, governance, content providers, content, services, technology, and cooperation. Business-driven challenges of ETD programs have not been studies by academic community properly. This research is one the first attempts to study NETD programs through BM perspective and aims to investigate BM of such programs at ontology level. Since NETD programs are collecting, organizing, and making TDs available for their users, their viability is important. Defining of BM's key components of these programs allows their mangers and policy-makers to address business-driven needs and ensure viability and stability of the programs.