The Context of Scientific

Society Publishing

Joseph J. Esposito

February 2015

Processed Media is a

management consultancy working

in the areas of publishing,

software, and education. Clients

include both for-profit and not-for-

profit organizations.

espositoj@processedmedia.com

What Is the Context?

1. Regulatory and compliance matters

2. The Marketplace

3. The Competition

4. Technology and Platforms

5. Organizational Issues

Topics

1. Regulatory: How will the new open access mandates affect professional societies?

2. Marketplace: How will the maturation of the institutional market affect our program?

3. Competition: How do I navigate our organization through a publishing environment dominated by huge commercial concerns?

4. Technology: How should our program adapt to a rapidly evolving mobile computing ecosystem?

5. Governance: Is the management and governance structure of our society equipped to deal with pressing environmental issues?

#1, Regulatory: OA Mandates

• Mandates now imposed by universities, funding organizations, and by some government policies

• Growing amount of literature available—puts pressure on search and discovery

• Likelihood of multiple versions of same material online—making usage harder to assess

• In some fields, migration of papers, even some of the finest, toward Gold OA services

But why not simply create our own Gold OA service and migrate our

business from subscriptions to the author-pays model?

The Structural Problem with OA Economics

• Industry averages revenue of $5,000/article (2mm articles, $10b industry)

• Many Gold OA services charge far less (PLOS ONE is $1,350; new Elsevier service is $1,250)

• How to bridge the gap?

But There are Other Benefits

• Retains authors

• Potentially can be additive to subscription journals

• Can Gold OA fees be combined with membership dues, creating a path to a larger and more engaged membership?

• Creates direct business relationship with authors—potential new sales opportunities

#2, Marketplace: Mature Institutional Markets

• For most STEM fields institutions make up over half of revenue

• Library budgets are not growing at historical levels

• Some portion of library budgets being allocated to Gold OA APCs

• Rhetoric notwithstanding, libraries prefer to acquire large packages from major publishers

Responding to Mature Markets

• Need to diversity revenue streams

• Downward pressure on cost structure

• Seeking growth in developing economies

• Gold OA and hybrid journals: additive market

• Developing new services that reach new audiences (individual researchers, administrators), which puts emphasis on new product development

#3, Competition: The Battle of the Behemoths

• The largest publishers have “won” the battle for the library budget (Elsevier, Wiley, Nature/Springer, Kluwer, Taylor & Francis, Sage)

• More dollars coming from large aggregations of content (the Big Deal) sold to large aggregations of libraries (consortia)

• Smaller publishers are being marginalized

Prospects for Competitive Environment

• Likely to see more consolidations (like Nature and Springer)

• Short of acquisitions, more service agreements (i.e., small publisher creates arrangement with big publisher)

• Intensifying competition for library budgets

• The cycle thus repeats

The real issue for a society publisher today is how to get access to the

library budget, and increasingly the gateway to that income is controlled

by the largest commercial publishers.

A Society’s Typical Path

1. Go it alone—no partner, use own tech

2. Outsource tech, but remain independent

3. Join a consortium

4. Place journals under the umbrella of a university press

5. Place journals under the umbrella of a larger not-for-profit entity

6. Create an arrangement with a behemoth

#4, Technology: Mobile Platforms

• Mobile computing is not just a format but is a full ecosystem

• This ecosystem is just emerging for STEM

• Currently restricted to alerts and promotion

• Unprecedented issue: Gatekeeping by major tech companies (Apple and Google)

• No publisher has a dominant or even leading position here

Addressing Mobile Platforms

• Creative use of mobile properties (ubiquity, location-based, availability of sensors, etc.)

• New information about user base (D2C)

• Gold OA may be harbinger or stepping stone to more D2C services

• Creation of customer/user database

• Must navigate privacy issues

• Will require investment

#5, Governance and Management

• Need to be responsive to environmental changes—and to anticipate them

• Efficient decision-making

• Open channel of communication between the Board and the publishing management

• The narrower missions of for-profit entities may provide an advantage to them (faster reaction time)

HighWire Illustration

• Large group of all HW publishers

• Presentation: How will OA affect your publishing program?

• Multiple requests for slide deck

• Need to inform society management of publishing issues

• Concern that societies were not attentive to business concerns

If governance is a problem, it is likely to become the defining

problem for the entire program.

Practical Steps

1. Empower a special committee to oversee publishing operations; put outsiders on that board/committee

2. Hire “high”—that is, seek publishing managers who are strongly qualified to run operations

3. Exercise bias in favor of personnel with at least some commercial experience

Practical Steps #2

4. Explore aggregating publishing operations with other societies

5. Explore Gold OA programs that tie publishing fees to society membership

6. Annual strategic planning review: place program into context of marketplace

7. To reiterate: Put special emphasis on diversifying revenue streams

Thank you!

Joseph J. Espositoespositoj@processedmedia.com