In the wak of Plan S, many independent and society publishers are investigating partnerships with larger publishing houses. It’s important to understand what it means to join a publisher’s Big Deal program, and so here we revisit Michael Clarke’s post that explains the changing nature of the Big Deal and what it can mean for these partnerships.
Shifts in how publishers market and sell journal packages have significant implications for society journal valuations over the long term. These same shifts may also be setting some societies up for publisher “lock-in” — making it difficult to change publishers in the future.
Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.
A look back at Joe Esposito’s 2008 essay on Open Access — what has come to pass and what has changed since then?
A reprint of an essay from 2008, which attempts to describe the evolution of open access publishing, Written before the astounding success of PLoS ONE, it outlines the link between open access publishing and the still-persistent traditional model.
The disintermediation of publishers and libraries is more difficult than many suppose, as each link in the value chain does in fact add value to the process of scholarly communications.
When you have to walk the talk, you end up self-publishing. Can it succeed for a work of fiction?
A best-selling author turns down a $500,000 advance in order to self-publish, while a self-published author who has earned $2 million takes a book contract. What’s going on here?
The supply chain around trade publishing is “broken,” according to publishers. But are they what has broken?
[Editor’s note: This is the edited text of a presentation that Joe Esposito gave as a keynote at the PSP conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 3, 2016. The slides for the presentation are embedded at the end of the text. […]
The self-publishing adventure that began here two years ago winds down. What worked? What didn’t?
Emma Wilson from the Royal Society of Chemistry discusses their Read and Publish strategies for a transition to open access.
The novel is about novelty. Self-publishing is just the latest option for authors. Some argue that it’s reinventing literature.
Publishers of subscription and open access scholarly content are facing downward pressures on pricing. Angela Cochran explores some of the hidden costs associated with a professional publishing operation and asks whether some of the tasks currently done by publishers should be absorbed elsewhere.
Does the traditional society-publisher partnership contract make sense in an APC-fueled OA market? Angela Cochran reviews the new Wiley Partner Solutions offering and what that might mean for the future of contracts and guarantees.