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.
New research on book publishing shows that ebook usage is growing and that the academic and professional segment is maturing, while still growing at a steady pace.
A presentation to a scientific society on the current environment that STM publishers have to work in. Five issues are identified: regulatory matters, new technology, the structure of the marketplace, competition, and governance.
A report from Simba Information tallies the total value of the open access marketplace, putting OA at 2.3% of the total market for STM journals. It documents as well, without comment, that more and more OA activity is the business of for-profit companies.
The competition among the largest journal publishers to acquire the rights to professional society publications is very keen. The bidding for these publications is likely to result in an alteration of strategy, whereby the bidding publishers seek to bind the societies more closely to them.
Some predictions about the future of scholarly publishing, which acknowledges the continuing central role of the major STM publishers.
A new report from Simba surveys the current scientific and technical publishing markets. These segments are essentially flat. Incumbents are seeking growth elsewhere. Interestingly, open access has not had much of an impact on the revenue of traditional publications.
The debate on Green OA continues, as many people challenge the premise that the existence of Green OA articles will result in the cancellation of subscriptions to those articles.
The college textbook business is being disrupted, but not by outsiders. The publishers themselves are restructuring the industry. One consequence of this may be diminished prerogatives for instructors in their choice of classroom texts.
The university press world is operating under circumstances that are somewhat tighter than they were even a few years ago. While most presses now publish ebooks, ebooks in themselves do not provide a strategic path to growth.
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.
Springer’s acquisition of Papers shifts the publisher into the workflow, and provides a unique opportunity to become a unifying resource.
The orphan works problem is finite. Current practices will chip away at the number of orphans. It is unlikely that more orphans will be created in the future because it is so easy for publishers now to hold onto rights and keep books available in some form.
For scholars to excel in the information age, technology needs to learn to learn. Perhaps highly specialized humans can help.
Maligned though it often is, the Big Deal for journals is likely to get bigger, marginalizing the offerings of smaller publishers.