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.
In this update, the focus shifts to the value journal publishers offer, and who benefits.
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.
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
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.
Rachel Caldwell presents PAPPI, a proposed matrix for determining how well a publisher or vendor aligns with the mission of libraries.
A.J. Boston offers a route for managing closed access e-serials in a way that finds the best value for libraries, the most content for users, keeps publishers solvent, and experiments on behalf of equity.
Open access, scholarly publishing, business models, and sustainability. The past is prologue. The present is complex. @lisalibrarian provides SSP a primer.
Publishers have lost ground in the public debate of the role of publishing in scholarly communications. A new strategy is needed, one that emphasizes preemption, cooptation, and innovation.
Does a Master’s in Publishing make someone a more desirable candidate for a publishing job? Will that degree make them more successful if hired? See what the Chefs and our guest contributors say!
Business models for publishers fall into four broad categories, defined by how revenue is generated. Some classes of content lend themselves to one model over another.
A look back at Joe Esposito’s 2008 essay on Open Access — what has come to pass and what has changed since then?
Do you know what is meant by the term “transformative agreement” or how “Read and Publish” deals are structured? Today we revisit the 2019 primer by @lisalibrarian explaining the basics concepts behind these increasingly important approaches.
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.
Pure publish contracts are possible now. It is not necessary to wait for the subscription publishers to change their business model or to pair a pure publish component with a read and publish component in a transformative agreement. @lisalibrarian