In this article Robert Harington suggests that some society journal publishers may wish to consider moving their journal program to a Diamond open access (OA) model. Nice idea right, but easier said than done.
Professional societies often seek partnerships for different reasons. This post summarized the categories of partnerships and helps to identify when a partnership is not really a partnership.
For years, we in libraries have been predicting the imminent demise of the manifestly-unsustainable Big Deal — and yet it has persisted. Now that may be changing.
Green OA has not had a significant effect on subscriptions. What does — and doesn’t — that mean for subscriptions in the future?
As growth in content licensing slows, sophisticated content providers are building businesses supporting researcher workflow and university business processes.
Guest post from Adam Hodgkin, looking at the differences between the academic books and journals markets, and how the aggregation strategies for journals may not work in the same manner for books.
A presentation to the 2016 ISMTE US Conference. Something of a “state of our industry” overview, or perhaps, everything I needed to know I learned from the other bloggers at The Scholarly Kitchen.
Revisiting Michael Clarke’s 2014 post on the two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, however, we appear to be nearing, if not a peak, at least a plateau. Institutional library budgets have not kept pace with the growth in global research output. At the same time, institutional market penetration is nearing saturation for many publishers.
So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?
The much-maligned practice of “double-dipping,” in which a publisher received revenue from both subscriptions and APCs, is likely to remain with us for some time, as publishers learn to turn APCs into larger and more varied revenue streams, even as they create the impression that the APCs offset subscription costs.
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 special day was set aside at the recent International STM Association conference in Washington to discuss society publishing. One panel included the head of three society publishing operations, all of which are different and all of them successful. The panelists shared their strategies with the audience. The presentations are linked to from within the post.
Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.
Scale can be achieved by broadly outsourcing the editorial process. Does this lead to a loss in quality control, and is this acceptable?
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2013 post discussing a study on library spending that suggests that the costs of journals have not increased as much as is commonly claimed, and that the increases seen are due to the increased volume being published.
A spate of open access “big deals” marks a shift from global offsetting to local offsetting. But the secretive nature of these deals makes them difficult to interpret.