Tier 2 economics produce the surviving-consortia pattern

A pattern is legible across the documented Tier 2 cases. Proportional fees, easy ingestion, and automated contribution produce consortia that survive — CLOCKSS has operated for 20 years (S-0090), LOCKSS for 27 (S-0091), HathiTrust for 18 (S-0092). Flat fees, difficult ingestion, and voluntary contribution produce consortia that do not — DPN charged $20,000/year flat regardless of size and shut down in 2018 with 27 of ~60 members ever depositing content (E-0054).

The economic risk at Tier 2 lies in the organizational model the fees fund rather than in the fees themselves. The fees are modest for research universities (CLOCKSS at the low end is less than a departmental software license; LOCKSS at the high end is a rounding error on R1 operating budgets). What kills Tier 2 consortia is the mismatch between operating-cost growth, member-recruitment difficulty, and operating-reserve requirements.

The consortia that last are the ones in which the economics make participation rational at the institutional level. The consortia that fail are the ones whose model imposes member friction without delivering proportional value back to participation.

This is the operational extension of C-0012. Even the well-architected Tier 2 systems are structurally bounded by their economic-and-organizational sustainability conditions. The Tier 3 alternative — participation cost effectively zero, infrastructure already operating at idle, no consortium-level economic dependency — does not face this same bounded-by-economics constraint.