You have expressed sentiments similar to those we have received from several others. Believe me when I say that the decision to change the Ethnologue's "business model" was not taken quickly or without a considerable amount of prior research. I'll give some more detailed information on that in the next Ethnoblog post.

First though, to set your mind at ease on a couple of points:

The metering/subscription process is only being applied to users in high income countries as defined by the World Bank. So it is very likely that your former colleagues in Asia are not even aware that anything has changed when they access the Ethnologue. And in countries where the subscription metering is at work, only those who are "power users" of the website are likely to run up against the limit. Since most users have an interest in only one language, they should not have any difficulty in accessing the country and language pages related to their primary area of inquiry. And once they have accessed those pages, they can return to them as many times as they need to, as often as they wish to during the month. In fact, even among our academic contributors, there are only a few who have very broad interests and are likely to consult many different language and country pages during the course of a month.

The other point you make, regarding open access, is indeed one where we also share your concern. The movement towards open access shifts the economic burden from the consumer to the producer. That may be a model that works if the producer has alternative funding sources such as through advertising or sales of related products. Ethnologue does sell products--we always have. Before the website began to offer access to the data "for free" about 15 years ago, the ONLY way one could access the Ethnologue was by purchasing a book. We still sell the books (and country reports, and maps, and a downloadable dataset) and, for some, those may be viable alternatives to paying the subscription fee for online access. In most cases, however, the cost of the subscription represents a considerable savings over what one would spend to get the hard or soft copy products. In spite of that sales component, however, our income does not cover the costs of producing and maintaining the Ethnologue website.

We could have resorted to online fund drives or to selling advertising space on our web pages, but we think that approach departs even more significantly from SIL's values (and would require even more monitoring and supervision) than the approach we are taking. We have been working very actively with those who inquire about institutional and group (e.g. classroom) subscriptions to provide the greatest amount of access as possible at a more than reasonable cost.

We love the idea of open access and SIL has been at the forefront in making our resources available as widely and as freely as possible. We were actively involved in establishing the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) and we have encouraged community participation in the Ethnologue itself through the addition of the Feedback feature on every language and country page. Providing sustainable access to the Ethnologue and its information is our goal. We think that asking the most frequent users in high income countries to pay very minimal fees for that access is the most equitable way to achieve that sustainability.

Sorry this snuck up on you like this. It has been a major change for all of us and we are all adjusting to the new wrinkles that the subscription process has introduced.

One important point that your comment brings up: Not every page on the website is "metered" and that may be part of the reason that you didn't immediately notice the page counter. When it appears it is pretty obvious (bright blue with white text against the white background of the data page). And it is deliberately in the lower right (oops! I mean LEFT) corner of the screen so as not to obscure any of the data that you want to look at. So, for example, the home page and the various "navigation" pages that you need to click on in order to get to a specific country or language, are not counted, so the remaining-free-page counter doesn't appear. You wouldn't have seen it until you actually accessed a data page.

In addition, while the language and country data pages are counted, the Feedback pages aren't. So the remaining-free-page count appears on the language data pages but then disappears when you go to the Feedback tab. Keep in mind that you can go back to any data page you have already accessed during the month without using up a free page access. So if you want to check if a comment you posted (for example) has been responded to, you should be able to get there without using any additional pages from your monthly allotment.

And then just to repeat once more: most users of the Ethnologue are not likely to encounter the access limitation at all. Only users in high income countries are seeing the page counter to begin with, and most users of the Ethnologue tend to focus on a single language and so, generally don't access more than 7 different pages each month though they may access those few pages multiple times.

Hope this helps.

Your concerns about the costs have been noted, Magnus.

I'd suggest you contact Subscriptions@ethnologue.com to get the full scoop on both what it costs us (in time, effort, and money) to maintain and deliver annual updates to the Ethnologue in a variety of formats and the very reasonable options that are available for institutional, classroom and other subscription plans--not to mention that the Ethnologue remains absolutely free to users in World Bank-designated "low income" countries.

Just because something is free doesn't mean it is easy nor without value. In fact, the Ethnologue's research effort over 65 years is without comparison, worth a whole lot more than Netflix, I would hope! You are correct that it is "the best there is" and that's because no one else has been able to marshall the resources (i.e. finances, labor, and expertise) to pull together anything similar.

We always acknowledge the limits of our knowledge and the data we are able to collect and report--an ongoing research project like this will never be able to provide the "final word". Simply put, trying to make that resource sustainable and better as we move into the future doesn't invalidate its current worth.