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.
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.
Hoping to woo authors away from commercial publishers, a group of biomedical science societies have launched a new alliance to promote the value of publishing in society journals.
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.
University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly. I have great affection and admiration for university presses, their value — craftsmanship, attention to detail, “getting it right”— and their mission. This is not admiration from afar: I served, in the formative years of my career, at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago), where I learned the tools of the trade and many of the practices and protocols of scholarly publishing still in use today. But after nearly two decades of observing university presses, from within and without, this thesis seems to be inescapable.
A blog post based on a talk purports to convince us that OA is good for not-for-profit societies. However, it accomplishes just the opposite once you get past the misinformation and misinterpretations.
There is a predictable path for society publishers as they explore their options. Their programs may be under pressure today, leading many of them to seek alliances with large commercial firms, though many societies are unhappy to do so.
Plan S implementation guidance has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers
Plan S seems to favor larger, commercial publishers over smaller, independent, not-for-profit publishers. Is this an acceptable sacrifice or are societies, and not-for-profit publishing, worth preserving?
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.
In periods of disruption, commercial publishers have traditionally found opportunities to make capital investments that ultimately strengthen their relative position in the market — opportunities that are not necessarily available to their not-for-profit counterparts. With this in mind, we offer up the beginnings of an analysis of the state of not-for-profit publishing today.
China is making great official strides in developing a system of scholarly communications. Tao Tao interviews two experts for their opinions on how international collaborations and internal developments are happening.
Society publishers resist the sale of their publications to bidders from the commercial world because they view the publications as a central component of the society itself.
When it comes to discussions about access, the silent majority focused on doing science is presented with real choices, not all of which square with the scorched-earth rhetoric that too often dominates.
Society publishing is surrounded by rivalrous groups, which tend to undermine the societies’ activities. It’s time to renew the development of membership through exclusive products.