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.
Last week, PubMed Central became the primary and sole publisher of eLife content, putting its competition with publishers, its manipulation of PubMed indexing criteria, its competition with publishing technology companies, and its clear OA bias into stark relief.
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.
Professional societies are facing growing resistance to place their publications in libraries. This results in these societies seeking arrangements with the largest commercial publishers, whose sway with libraries and especially library consortia is significant. Libraries have demonstrated a clear preference to work with the larger publishers over the smaller ones. This leads to increasing concentration and market power in the academic publishing industry.
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!
Open access, scholarly publishing, business models, and sustainability. The past is prologue. The present is complex. @lisalibrarian provides SSP a primer.
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?
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.
Publishers are losing online traffic on their own platforms. What does this mean for the future of the publisher site and the hosted platform companies?