Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Scholarly Kitchen Chef Ashutosh Ghildiyal and Holly Koppel. Holly is a consultant with AIP Publishing and an active member of the SSP Mental Health Community of Interest (CoIn).
Scholarly societies possess assets that commercial publishers cannot easily replicate: embedded communities, disciplinary legitimacy, and governance structures accountable to scholarly advancement rather than shareholder return. Yet many are losing ground, not to superior competitors, but to strategic drift.
The System Is Rewarding the Wrong Game
Publishing has changed in ways that systematically disadvantage society publishers. Submission growth, impact factors, and revenue per title increasingly define performance. These metrics reward scale, and societies need not compete on scale.
The deeper problem is that these metrics are not neutral. They quietly reshape priorities. Attention shifts from community stewardship to output optimization. Investment flows toward throughput rather than quality, and mission gradually gives way to metrics. By the time this drift is visible, it has already caused damage.
Commercial publishers have structural advantages in this environment: capital, infrastructure, global sales capacity, and portfolio breadth that most societies cannot match. They have invested heavily in technology, author services, and discoverability. They can absorb losses on individual titles, cross-subsidize, and move quickly. Competing with them on their own terms accelerates the erosion of what makes societies worth choosing in the first place.
The result is a familiar paradox. Societies most determined to remain competitive risk becoming indistinguishable from the publishers they are trying not to become.
What Is Actually at Stake
When societies optimize for more submissions rather than the right submissions, they compete on the wrong dimension. The quality signal that makes a society journal worth publishing in begins to blur. Selectivity, one of the most durable assets a society publisher holds, erodes quietly and is difficult to recover.
Another risk is invisibility. Organizations absent from the conversations, debates, and professional development of researchers become easier to overlook.
Beneath these risks lies a structural problem that rarely receives honest attention: most societies understand what differentiation requires, but have not built the internal conditions needed to pursue it. Governance inertia, board turnover, restrictive publishing partner contracts, capability gaps, cultural resistance, and financial dependence on publishing revenue all constrain action.
The long-term relevance of scholarly societies may depend less on competing as publishers and more on functioning as indispensable institutions within their disciplines. Publishing remains important, but may increasingly become one component of a broader stewardship role rather than the primary basis of a society’s value. As scholarly communities become more distributed and information-saturated, the need for trusted organizations that can convene researchers, uphold standards, sustain meaningful engagement, and reinforce disciplinary identity may become even more important than the act of publishing itself.
The Irreplaceable Role Societies Hold
Scholarly research is increasingly distributed and fragmented. Researchers collaborate across institutions and continents while navigating increasingly information-saturated environments. What this landscape demands is coherence: trusted communities through which scholars can collaborate, debate, learn, and collectively advance their field beyond institutional boundaries and national interests.
This is what scholarly societies are uniquely positioned to provide, not simply as publishers, but as the connective tissue of disciplines. Every community requires institutions that create cohesion and sustain shared standards.
Disciplinary depth, longstanding community relationships, and institutional legitimacy took generations to build and cannot be easily replicated. Nor can the trust that comes from sustained stewardship, the authority to convene a field, or the accountability that comes from being governed by the communities the organization exists to serve.
The Economics Reinforce the Argument
Artificial intelligence is already reducing the cost of many operational components of publishing: manuscript preparation, formatting, production, language editing, and elements of workflow coordination are all becoming increasingly automated. As the volume of generated content rises, scarcity shifts elsewhere: toward trust, judgment, curation, legitimacy, and accountability.
Human judgment will remain essential not only for evaluating accuracy and integrity, but for determining what is genuinely meaningful, rigorous, and relevant within a discipline. AI can support these processes, but it cannot substitute for the stewardship responsibilities that scholarly communities ultimately require from trusted institutions.
Scholarly communication is a system for establishing legitimacy, organizing knowledge, reinforcing standards, and sustaining intellectual communities over time.
Societies that understand this are positioning themselves as institutions disciplines will increasingly rely on as the environment becomes noisier and less trustworthy.
Three Areas Where Differentiation Can Take Hold
- Own the community; do not chase the market
Societies are strongest when they deepen engagement within defined scholarly communities rather than pursue broad reach.
The American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) offers an instructive example of what this looks like in practice. Beyond functioning as a news outlet, it operates as a visible platform for thought leadership, community dialogue, and disciplinary identity. It positions the society as an active participant in shaping disciplinary discourse rather than merely disseminating research.
Owning the field also does not mean acting alone. Societies within adjacent or overlapping disciplines can strengthen their position through coordination: shared reviewer databases, editorial standards, and author engagement frameworks reduce duplication and improve efficiency. When societies act in alignment, they can exert influence not as individual publishers, but as stewards of entire disciplines.
- Reaffirm purpose and trust
Societal legitimacy rests on stewardship. Members rely on societies to uphold standards, convene expertise, and represent collective disciplinary interests. Trust becomes a structural asset when it is supported by transparent governance, rigorous standards, and a visible commitment to advancing the field.
Trust is built through signals that accumulate over time. Consistent presence in the community reinforces commitment, while integrity in execution and authenticity in how purpose is expressed become operational proofs.
Societies risk attracting the same criticisms directed at commercial publishers when they cannot clearly demonstrate how their model differs and how their revenues flow back into the community. In a landscape where scrutiny of financial models and publishing practices is intensifying, mission-driven identity must be demonstrated repeatedly, not simply asserted.
IOP Publishing offers a useful illustration. Its peer review training and certification program extends beyond publishing into researcher development, reinforcing its role as a steward of the discipline.
- Shift from volume to value
Commercial publishing rewards scale and throughput. Societies are not obligated to compete on those terms, and doing so works against them.
A more coherent measure of success is how effectively a society strengthens its research community through synthesis, contextualization, career support, and intellectual leadership. Rather than maximizing submissions, societies can focus on attracting and retaining the most relevant, high-quality contributions within their domain, even if that means accepting fewer submissions and being more explicit about scope and selectivity. Retention, not acquisition, is the more meaningful long-run signal.
In practice, this may require redesigning editorial workflows, redefining success metrics, and investing in capabilities that strengthen author and reviewer engagement rather than simply increasing throughput.
What Differentiation Looks Like in Practice
Differentiation is expressed through deliberate design choices. This means integrating publishing with professional development, mentorship, and training so that publishing contributes to a coherent member value ecosystem rather than sitting alongside it in isolation. It means prioritizing curation over volume, helping members navigate emerging themes and debates through structured reviews and thematic collections. It means building structural advantages at the author level: clear decision timelines, structured reviewer feedback, and proactive communication throughout the submission lifecycle.
Offerings such as reviewer training, author workshops, research integrity programs, and editorial skill development are not peripheral services. They are central to strengthening the community while reinforcing the society’s role as a partner in scholarly development. When designed well, these services deepen engagement and improve the quality of contributions.
Editorial experience is itself a differentiator. Faster and more transparent peer review, consistent communication, and thoughtful reviewer engagement shape how authors choose where to submit and, more importantly, where to return.
Important Tensions Worth Acknowledging
The first is that member-centricity may compromise editorial independence. This is a real risk, but it is a governance problem, not an inherent contradiction. Editorial independence depends on clarity about where community voice ends and editorial authority begins, and on the willingness to uphold that distinction when it matters.
The second anxiety is economic: that journals serving niche or emerging areas may prove unsustainable. This concern often underestimates their broader strategic value. Publications that develop early-career researchers, sustain fragile scholarly communities, or legitimize emerging fields may be among the most important things a society produces, even when that value is not immediately visible in revenue or citation metrics. These are precisely the kinds of investments that deepen a society’s long-term relevance and indispensability to its discipline.
The Structural Commitment
Societies lose relevance when their structures, metrics, and operating models drift out of alignment with their mission. Differentiation is not a communications strategy. It is a governance, capability, and institutional alignment challenge, and treating it as anything less is one reason so many well-intentioned efforts stall.
The societies most likely to thrive will make a different kind of commitment: to treat trust as an asset, community as infrastructure, and stewardship as the organizing principle of strategy.
For some, this may lead to an uncomfortable conclusion. Publishing may no longer be the primary vehicle through which societies deliver value to their members or sustain their long-term relevance. The response is not to resist that possibility, but to invest more deeply in forms of value creation that genuinely strengthen the discipline and the community around it.
Smaller publishers face similar structural constraints and the same strategic choice. They do not need to compete on scale, portfolio breadth, or market reach. Deep community engagement, niche authority, superior editorial experience, and a clear sense of purpose offer viable alternatives to scale.
The question is no longer whether societies can compete with commercial publishers on scale. It is whether they are willing to fully embrace the role that only they can credibly occupy: as trusted stewards, conveners, and institutional leaders of scholarly communities.
Disciplines require institutions that create cohesion, uphold standards, and provide continuity over time. Scholarly societies are uniquely positioned to serve that role credibly and durably. The ones that recognize this clearly, and organize themselves around it, will not need to announce their differentiation. It will be evident in how they lead, engage their communities, and sustain the disciplines they were created to serve.
